We were supposed to have gone to Africa in 2020; the trip got postponed to 2021, and then again to this year. We’re hoping that it’ll actually happen this time – so we’ll need flights.

I wanted to book the flights through the cruise line (AmaWaterways), but their best offer required flying through Qatar with very long layovers and flights at inconvenient hours, so I decided to do my own research.

Google Flights had some very attractive Business Class fares, but they were through consolidators with dicey reputations, which did not appeal. I kept playing with the site, and got it to offer flights on KLM – the interesting thing was that it quoted two prices: $16k for the two of us if we booked round-trip tickets, or $13k for exactly the same flights if we booked outbound with KLM and the return with Delta.

That inspired me to look further, and I eventually found an even better choice – outbound on BA through Heathrow (with an 8-hour layover, which should be long enough to make the connection) and returning on KLM (booked on Delta) through Amsterdam. Total price: $11k for refundable tickets.

The flights will still be long, but my wallet will hurt less, and we’re protected if we can’t make the trip. And if prices go down, we can cancel and rebook.

I was Toastmaster of the Day at the Cats this morning; I chose “Wrong!” as the theme of the meeting because it was on this day in 1920 that The New York Times editorialized that Robert Goddard was wasting his time working on rockets because a rocket in space wouldn’t have anything to push against. They eventually published a correction – on July 17, 1969, a day after Apollo 11 lifted off for the first human Moon landing.

People seemed to enjoy the theme, and the Table Topics Master picked questions to probe people about being wrong, so I think it was a good choice.

I’m not immune to being wrong, of course. Last night, I mentioned that I’d started a new Time Machine backup on my Mac mini. It started very very slowly – it took more than an hour to copy 1% of the disk, which would mean the first backup would take several days, and I wrote about that yesterday.

I was wrong – the backup finished just after midnight. I’d forgotten that I’d also started copying some media files to another partition on the disk as soon as I plugged it in, and the two processes were competing for the disk (and probably forcing the arm to seek a lot). Once the system had finished copying the media files, it could devote the full resources of the disk to Time Machine and the process sped up considerably.

People can’t multitask, even though we try – and sometimes, neither can computers.