Well that was fun. A side-trip to California on the way out SAVED me some money on the tickets.
Guess I should have studied 12 dimensional transcendental aircraft economics calculations in college to figure out how that happened. Paying was a royal pain. For some reason, it kept erroring on PayPal (worked fine the last few times I used to on the airline's site and there's plenty of money in the linked bank account) and then took 5 tries to convince it to accept a credit card (had to warn my ex about the bill heading her way
).
Turns out we're not going through Japan, so that's one less complication. All the international connections are HK-US, but there's a LOT of flights inside the USA.