Off To See The Wizard

If all has gone as planned, we are now jetting our way across the Pacific headed for a once in a lifetime trip to Oz (aka Australia).

We've been planning this trip for years - decades, actually. A long time ago my wife and I decided that we'd take our once in a lifetime trip with the kids the year before the first one graduated from high school. We only missed it by one year.

Our thinking was that once the kids started graduating they'd get busy with their own lives during the summers - jobs, internships, etc. The concept is still sound, but life interfered last year so we postponed it to this year. It actually worked out better, since I am now retired and don't have to worry about job conflicts.

The plan is to spend a few days in Sydney doing all the culture stuff (to me, that means the harbor bars). I'll especially need to hit a bar or two if, as planned, we climb the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

Then we head to Adelaide for a tour of the wine country. That's followed by a few days on Kangaroo Island, a wildlife refuge off the southern coast. We then go to Brisbane for a couple of days, then it's off to Heron Island for three days of scuba diving off the Great Barrier Reef.

After that I managed to finagle a side trip to New Zealand, where the wife and kids will go skiing while I go red stag hunting. We meet up and take a train to the Franz Josef Glacier area, where we go heli-hiking (take a helicopter up the glacier and then hike down). After that we board a plane and head for home, 30+ days and thousands of dollars later.

We're spending a bundle on this trip, but like I said, we started saving for it close to 20 years ago. Plus I had a bunch of frequent flier miles and credit card points that we used for plane tickets and hotels. So it's not putting too big of a dent in our pocketbook.

Internet access will be uncertain, but I've got a few posts pre-scheduled to fill in the gaps, so there should be something new here most days.

Stay tuned...