Big Trip

Blimey! Less than four weeks to go. Actually, three weeks, four days, twenty three hours and twenty nine minutes (and counting...) before we're due to take off for Sydney on the first leg of our antipodean adventure. Finally things are feeling a little more real. Or perhaps just less surreal.

There still doesn't seem to be much happening. Our normal pre-holiday routine of setting things out on the spare bed hasn't started yet, and I'm feeling distinctly unprepared but strangely relaxed about it. Of course I'm always relaxed before holidays, because Sarah (what on earth would I do without her) does all the worrying. I posted our Christmas presents to New Zealand today, which is about the extent of my preparation so far. Lots of little jobs (finding out about insulin availability for Max, trying to work out how we'll manage his blood sugar with jet lag - his and ours, that sort of thing) are getting done. Still, there are over three weeks to go, and it's not like we're leaving civilisation.

Just as a reminder (as I imagine it will be mainly friends & family reading this), our schedule is Sydney - Darwin - Cairns (Port Douglas) - Brisbane during November, roughly a week at a time, then Christchurch for a couple of days. Then we'll spend December noodling round New Zealand's imaginatively named South Island in a camper until just before Christmas, when we'll be back in Christchurch with Sarah's relatives. We go to Wellington in time for New Year with more relatives, then a couple of weeks touring North Island, a few days in Fiji, a few days in San Francisco (what's it like in January?) before coming back to the harsh realities of work and school again at the end of January.

As I keep saying to people, it'll either be a complete blast, or we'll kill each other. Now, I'm sure there's something I ought to be doing...