Bought the ticket!!

We have to go now. Just spend most of the SSIA on the RTW ticket. Came in a few hundred shy of 10 thousand Euro for the 4 of us, and that includes the Australian visas which the travel agent has offered to organize.

It's an e-ticket, which is handy - one thing less to lose/get stolen. Letizia had a bit of a brainwave at the last minute. If the ticket allows, we'll take a flight from Sydney to Cairns and drive down from there to Brisbane, rather than driving from Sydney. There were a thousand miles or so left over on the ticket so this seems like a good way to use them and see a bit more of Oz.

Sinéad in ForeignAFares in Carrigaline did a great job. Really knows her stuff and has been very available to us.

Easiest 10 grand I ever spent!

New Zealand: Slight change of plan

As has happened for other destinations, when we look a bit closer and get down to booking flights, we swap things around. This weekend we booked the Australia-to-New Zealand leg of the tickets, and instead of flying into the North Island as originally planned, we are flying into Christchurch on the South Island. We've heard that the South Island is where it's all at, and that's where we'll get most of the traveling done before the winter sets in. Flights to and from Fiji afterwards will be from Auckland, so we really need to finish up there, rather than start there.

The question now is whether we base ourselves in Christchurch for the month, or try to find somewhere in Queenstown. Decisions ,decisions.

When we move to the North Island, we'll probably be basing ourselves in Wellington.

Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet and Watch

If I were still practising, I might be tempted now to check these four points of the male catholic compass, because today we put our money where our mouth is. Just a hundred Euro deposit mind, but money has now changed hands and that is a secular sacrament if ever there was one. There's another (tenuous) connection with the sign of the cross - it calls to mind the traveller's equivalent : that of groping at one's many pockets to check for tickets, passport, money (or the minimalist's version: toothbrush and visa card) on the way out the door. Today we are ticking all those boxes:

As well as booking the Beijing leg of the round-the-world ticket, we also began the hopefully straightforward process of getting the kids' passports. Biometric-ready photos and all.

The tickets are of the World Discovery Plus variety, and come in at €2.5k each (incl. taxes) but with a 25% discount for the girls (under 11's). This is more or less what we had budgeted for. Unfortunately we had to drop Tahiti as a stopoff due to the extra mileage. It would have required us to return to New Zealand in order to get from Tahiti to Santiago in Chile, so it really wasn't on. As an alternative we are looking at Fiji, but we won't go there just for the sake of it. More research required. The travel agents (Foreign A Fares in Carrigaline - are travel agencies as corny as hairdressers when it comes to names? Answers on the back of a postcard please...) have been very helpful and very contactable all along, including today.

The passports, even for Nina who was born in Germany (and whose birth therefore cannot be registered in Ireland) should be by-the-book. We did have to make sure that the photos were suitable for biometric purposes, and this means, amongst other things, no smiling! The two girls were hilarious standing up on a stool in the pharmacy in Carrigaline trying to keep straight faces for the camera. They managed it in the end, despite my best efforts, but the result was two very serious faces indeed. They'll have to live with those scowls for the next 5 years.

It feels good to have got to this point. Not scary. Not even particularly exciting. Just good.