23 days and counting...

Welcome to our blog spot! Lots of people have been asking about us sending travel updates and photos during our trip, so I thought this might be the easiest way to go about it. No promises about how good we will be at regular updates, but we will do our best!

Well, things haven’t quite gone according to plan in the lead up to our trip. I had a big list of things to do in our last 5 or 6 weeks. Little did I imagine that I would end up spending 3-4 of them in hospital!

Things are starting to feel a bit more in control now though. We unearthed our office on Saturday and discovered that we do have carpet after all, so that was a big tick off the list. Only 10 more days left of work, providing my gallbladder removal op goes according to plan, and 23 days left till we fly out.

For those of you who don’t know, our planned itinerary (providing no more unexpected sicknesses etc!) goes something like this:

• 29 April – fly to Gold Coast and spend a couple of days with Jo & Glen in Brisbane
• 1 May – fly to Japan, catch up with Ryan Oliver, visit a nostalgic car show so that Justin can get his year’s fix of classic Japanese cars (we seriously changed the dates of our trip so that we could make it to this!), and head to Osaka convention
• 13 May – back to Aussie (Sydney/Wollongong) in time for Nicole & Lawrie’s wedding and an all-to-short catch up with family and friends
• 18 May – fly to Vancouver, spend a few days buying and setting up a camper van, and a couple of days mountain biking in Whistler (for Justin at least!)
• 23 May – cruise through Alaska, round trip from Seattle
• 30 May – start our US road trip, through Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Montana – visiting a host of national parks, mountain bike parks and awesome scenery so that I can fill every piece of digital storage that we have with photos! I think it totals to around 200GB. I give myself about 2 weeks…
• Early July – drive through the Canadian Rockies and on to Edmonton, where we will hopefully live for the next 6 months. We have a home exchange teed up with a lady from Edmonton, so she will live our house for 6 months while we live in hers. Hopefully the recession hasn’t hit Edmonton too hard and we can find work there to fund our travels (not to mention our mortgage!) for the next few months. :-)