And so it begins...

Saturday, Rich thought we could leave by 10 am. We got out of the driveway at 6:30 (pm) and had to turn around at 183 cause I forgot my tennis shoes. If that's the worst thing that happens, we'll be doing ok. We made it without incident to Houston and have about a half hour left until we leave for the airport.

The kids are more than ready to get on the airplane. Andrew flew to Disneyworld when he was about 14 months old. He doesn't remember it. Connor has never flown. They'll have window seats for all but the long flight. I suspect they'll crash on the second leg and not awaken until 6 am Texas time. That'll be about halfway across the ocean.

They each have a new coloring book and crayons, plus a truck and an action figure. I've got the paper airplane and origami monster book with paper. And there are 3 hours of battery life on my laptop with a selection of movies in case of total meltdown. (of course, this would never happen with my angels)

I'll try to post an aiport picture of the gang either in Houston or Denver. This is so much fun.

More Intinerary

After Melbourne and the Great Ocean Road, we'll be off back north, this time via the mountains. We'll spend a few days near Katoomba, seeing scenery like the Three Sisters. Next, it's off to 2 weeks at a farmstay cottage in sheep country. After that, we've got a week to travel north to the beach. We'll stay there the rest of the trip, with short side trips to tropical north Queensland and fossicking in the gem fields to make our fortune.

Today is my last day at work!

Our itinerary

Saturday, July 30: drive to Houston

Sunday, July 31: fly, IAH-DEN, DEN-SFO, then the big one, SFO-SYD. It's a 14.5 hour flight. The kids will probably sack out during the first two flights and be wide awake for the final one... We still have to figure out how to charge a laptop in the depths of United's economy seating.

Monday, August 1: we don't have one of these.

Tuesday, August 2: arrive in Sydney around 6 am local time. Pick up the rental minivan from an offsite rental place fairly near the airport. For a while, we were picking up from Williams St. in downtown Sydney. Not my idea of fun -- fly for a day and a half, then drive out of a huge city's downtown area on the wrong side of the road. I learned to drive in Aussie, so it will come back to me, but I'd rather it come back on a country highway rather than old downtown streets. We'll spend the day driving as far south as we want, then will check into a motel as soon as we can't stay awake any longer.

Weds-Sat: Drive to Melbourne via the coast. The only stop currently scheduled is at Wilson's Promontory. I'm sure there will be many more stops in parks, playgrounds, beaches, caches, and lookouts.

Sun-?: Great Ocean Road.
http://www.greatoceanroad.org/index.asp
http://www.tourism.net.au/Victoria/Ocean/
http://www.parkweb.vic.gov.au/1park_display.cfm

More itinerary later.

Caching

One of the things we're looking forward to the most is caching in Australia. http://www.geocaching.com and http://www.geocaching.com.au are our resources so far. We're going to do a lot of walking in state and national parks and hope to raise our total caches a great deal.

Let's see if I can add an image. Here's an old picture of the boys. Cool. Looks like that works nicely. I'll upload a new picture of the boys later.

As you can tell, I'm mainly trying things out with this post, like images, and web links. Gotta make sure I can do all this before doing it for real.

Why this blog?

I created this blog so we'd have someplace to record all the fun we'll have during my sabbatical and our 10 week trip to Australia. Over the next few weeks before we leave, I'll try to put up some maps and other info on where we will be. During our trip, I'll try to post pictures and text of our adventures.