It’s very exciting here. I am in the beginning stages of planning two trips.
One for next March and April will be to New Zealand and Australia. Carroll and I have been talking about going there for about as long as we’ve known each other … and that’s a very long time. What triggered this trip was our attendance, over the past five weeks, at five funerals. If this doesn’t trigger the “Now” response, nothing ever will. You may recall from the book the lesson relearned about “If you really have a dream …” So we are going to pretend that we can afford it and just go do it.
We will arrive in New Zealand on 25 February 2010, the day before my birthday and the seasonal equivalent of 25 August in the northern hemisphere, late summer/early fall in the southern half of the world. Carroll has been to New Zealand before, and will plan this portion, since she has lots of places she wants to show me. We have enough Aeroplan points to fly business class both ways, so the long, long flights will not be nearly as much of a fatigue problem. From New Zealand we travel to Sydney Australia on 10 March to join a two-week tour of Sydney, Melbourne and surrounding areas. This tour includes a back-stage tour of the Sydney Opera House, which will be fabulous. After that three weeks which I am responsible for planning. At the moment, it’s just a short list of places: Adelaide, Perth, where we have friends and relations, Darwin, Uluru (Ayers Rock), Cairns, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Timings, activities, etc. are still up in the air. Of course I am going to try to set up book events along the way. The only fixed point is to be in Sydney by 2 PM on 14 April to start the long flights home.
As plans get more firm, I will keep you posted. I will tell you about the other very different trip in the next blog entry.
This is rather amazing… I wrote my first blog just this morning on my lap-top, in the bath, and now, attempting to re-find it on my desk-top computer, I stumbled across your blog, and out of curiosity, read the top post. I titled mine “I Had A Dream” and it is totally unrelated to your blog, just as I am to you, though we share the same surname. Just thought you’d be interested to know that. I’m lucky enough to live in Australia permanent-like, just near one of the most popular tourist destinations, Byron Bay. Anyway, hope you enjoy your holiday, New Zealand is awesome, almost as many Kiwis living there as there are in Aus.