Brisbane 9 December 2011

Up nice and early this morning for the flight to Brisbane - all went well.
We hired a car for the day in Brisbane - since we needed a fairly large car for us and the luggage, I'd booked a 'Commodore Sportswagon or similar'.  I was hoping to actually get a Sportswagon as they're on my list of cars I'd like to buy and I thought it would be good to have a test drive.  We did get one, and it's still on my list of cars I'd like to buy!  And astonishingly, Paul didn't completely hate it either - usually a car that's good for me to drive is not at all what he likes. All I have to do now is win the Lotto and buy one!
Driving out of Brisbane I got monstered by some bloke who wanted me to go faster - even though I was in the middle lane of a three lane highway, we were doing the speed limit, and I'd have had to run over someone else to go any faster.  He got bored with bullying me after a while and passed me on the left then chopped right across to the right hand lane, and sped off.  A couple of minutes down the road a police car with sirens and lights blazing went past us, then a couple of minutes later that same car is pulled over being booked.  I'm ashamed to say that I cheered out loud - you don't often see idiots get into such immediate trouble for their bad driving!
We went to visit Al and Ingrid - I hadn't been to their house before. I could have sat on the back deck for days just chatting and watching the trees and wallabies - such a lovely place!
After that we went to Joanne's place and visited for a while, then dropped off the hire car in the city and went to our hotel.  Nice apartment at the Oaks on Felix - we've stayed here before and it's always quite acceptable. Today's apartment has a view of the Story Bridge - I'll see if I can post a picture or two.
Adam decided he wanted to go to the Mana Bar - it's a video game arcade and bar combined.   He had a good time although he didn't stay all that long.  I walked to the Valley with him, and then back, so at least I've had a bit of exercise today.
And, tomorrow we sail away!

Holiday progress report!

Almost all the major bookings are made now.



I had to book a few hotel stays in between tours and cruises - I've booked places to stay in Manchester, Cambridge, New York and Fort Lauderdale.   I wrote before about how expensive the hotels in London and Copenhagen are - well, Cambridge gives them a good run for their money, specially if you decide to stay close to the centre of the city to avoid hiring a car.  In the end I've gone with the Crowne Plaza - close to the city, easy to access public transport including to the war museum even though it's a fair way out of town.  And, it's in the same street as three of the places on my 'things to see in Cambridge' list - Sedgewick Museum of Earth Sciences,  University Museum of Zoology, University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  And, by the time we get there,  hopefully I can forget the fact that we've paid more than $600 to stay for three nights.  eeek.

Another step along the way - I've booked our flights to England - two very long flights for old people like us.  We're going with Emirates - even my Qantas Club membership and the thought of a stack of Frequent Flyer points couldn't bring me to pay the huge extra amount Qantas wanted to charge us for the flight.  We leave Sydney late on 21 August, almost 15 hours flying time to Dubai, then a two hour transit, then another almost 8 hours to England.  However, both flights are on an Airbus A380, and our experience with the A380 to Los Angeles last year was that it was enormously more comfortable than our previous long flights on 747s.  So, we'll see.


We're not going to London first; instead we're leaving a couple of days earlier than we originally planned, and we've picked a flight that goes direct to Manchester.  Once we've recovered from the jetlag, we're going to visit some little country towns where some of Paul's ancestors came from - places like Hayfield and Glossop and Chinley.  Then, we're going to Cambridge as we originally planned, to see the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and also just to see Cambridge - it seems to me that you could spend months exploring Cambridge, but we've got three days! Then, we'll be off to London to start the coach tour.

Have also booked the flights from London to Copenhagen (British Airways) and from Washington to Miami (American Airlines).  Nothing much interesting in the way of choice for either flight - there were some cheaper flights but mostly on airlines with less comfort, more charges and less service, more fighting over seating / overhead lockers and in some cases less certainty that the flight will actually happen :-)    Rather than flying, we're going from New York to Washington via Amtrak, and that's booked too!


There's only one more major thing we have to book, which is the flight home from Los Angeles. It's still a bit too early to actually book the flights, but of course I've been checking it out.  Same as for all the rest of our flights, it's a one-way trip so there's little to no chance of ever getting a special deal.  I'm really torn about this one.

• It would be possible to fly home for as little as maybe $800 each, but that's on Air Pacific with a stopover in Nadi and reviews tell me their fleet of planes is fairly old, not so comfortable and with fairly ordinary inflight entertainment.  
• Qantas of course is an option. At the moment it looks like they'll charge us about $1390 each - a bit annoying when an American on the same flight travelling to Sydney and back going back to Los Angeles later will have only paid about $1290 return!  The Qantas flight would almost certainly be on an A380 and of course direct to Sydney.  And, because of Qantas Club (and frequent flyer points) it would be a better deal for us than almost any of the other airlines we could fly with.  Princess will kick us off the cruise ship before 10am but most flights to Australia leave late at night, so there's a long wait in LA regardless of who you fly with, and the Qantas Club is a reasonable place to wait in..   
• There's also a possibility that Princess will be able to book a flight for us.  Mostly it doesn't make a lot of sense to let a cruise line pick your flights, for normal return trips especially - they often chose horrendous connections and you regularly get charged a lot more than you would to book it yourself.  But, for one-way fares, they can be really really competitive because you can get the benefit of their bulk fare purchases.
• And finally, Air New Zealand offers a really interesting alternative. They're currently saying around $1300 each for the trip, with a stopover in Auckland which isn't all that exciting since it's not long enough to leave the airport, it just means it takes 2 hours longer than the Qantas option.  But, the attractive thing about Air New Zealand is that for an extra $300 each, we can get one of their Skycouches.  This means we'd get three economy seats together for the two of us.  This alone is definitely a huge improvement in comfort over only having two seats.  But, even better, the Skycouch seats are deliberately set up so that the footrests can come up level with the seats and create almost a bed to sleep on - not quite long enough to stretch out and not particularly wide either but definitely room to lie down.  I suspect we're going to be really worn out by this time, and the thought of this level of comfort for such a small extra price is very attractive.  I've got a little while longer to decide, but this is looking like a fairly good plan right now.

I've probably raved on enough for now - next step is actually getting ready for the P&O cruise which is only 4 weeks away now!  I am so busy at work I have no idea how I'm going to find time to even pack, but I'll be on that cruise even if I have to buy a new tacky t-shirt from the shop on the ship every day!!!!

Looking at the past

It occurred to me a while ago that with a trip to the UK coming up, there might be an opportunity to look up where some of my ancestors came from.  What I've proved so far is that:

• I'm definitely a Queenslander.  Everyone in my family's past was born in Queensland, or came direct to Queensland when they immigrated and married someone with the same sort of background!  And, very few of us ever seem to leave - I'm feeling like such a traitor living here in Canberra!
• I've got more German ancestry than I thought - on both sides of the family.  

My mum's family basically came from Ireland (her dad's family - the Strains) and Germany (her mum's - the Weckers).  There's a bit of confusion about the Strain family, there seems to have been some movement between Scotland and Ireland that I'm still trying to track down.  As it happens, we won't be getting to Ireland or Germany on our trip next year. We will be getting to Scotland but we'll have to see if I can track down any actual family history there rather than just vague confusion about whether they were there or not  :-)

My dad's family is a different story - both his mum and dad were born in London and the small amount I've found so far about their parents seems to be saying the same thing about them, although any further back on his mum's side will also take me to Germany.  The houses at all of the London addresses I can find have clearly been rebuilt over more than once since then - one of the streets doesn't even exist any more.  And to be blunt it seems fairly likely that if I found pictures of these places when my forbears lived there, they wouldn't exactly be the nice open streets and upmarket looking houses and units that Google Street View shows me today.  One of the streets for example rates a mention on website about Jack the Ripper, and at about the time the family was there.  I'll still go and look at some of them - as it happens they're mostly within walking distance of our London hotel - but the actual houses all seem to be long gone.

Once I started looking at my family history, we got interested in Paul's too.  So far we've only started looking at his dad's family a little.  Turns out they're all Queenslanders too, but originally were country people from the Peak District (a bit of a surprise since we thought they were from Wales!).  The two main towns we've come across so far are Hayfield and Glossop.  So, although it doesn't seem that there are many Brelsfords left there - they apparently all went to the USA or Australia long ago - we've decided to go to Manchester first and have a look at both places, and hopefully in the meantime we can track down some more information about the Brelsford past.

Two more countries added to the list!

Today we got an eMail from Princess Cruises, telling us that they've had to change the itinerary on the Panama Canal cruise that's the last leg of next year's big holiday.

Although we're still going to Panama, of course, including shore excursions around the Canal, we're now not stopping for the planned day at Fuerte Amador in Panama. This is a bit disappointing, because we'd have been able to go into Panama City from there, and from the small amount of research I had done so far, it looked like an interesting city to visit.

However, instead, we're going to go to two extra places - San Juan Del Sur in Nicaragua, and Cabo San Lucas in Mexico.  

In my youth, Nicaragua was a place that you would never dream of visiting, but now the travel websites say things like "Once viewed as a 'no go' holiday destination, Nicaragua has overcome civil unrest, dictatorship and natural disasters." - and even from a quick look it does seem that we should enjoy our short time there.

And of course, I've heard of Cabo San Lucas - it looks like a lovely 'last stop' on our very long holiday.

So, the count for this holiday is now 13 completely separate countries, some of which we visit more than once!  Just have to hope that the dollar stops its downward slide, or I'll be working until I'm 97 to pay for it  :-)

Hotels and other plans

Gradually getting the plans done. Travel insurance is now all ok, although in the end not with Travel Insurance Direct. All good though.

I've now started looking at hotels. There's no need to rush for some of them, but both Copenhagen and Fort Lauderdale have lots of cruises starting and finishing there and hotel prices don't tend to get cheaper as you get closer - not unless you want to risk not being able to get a decent room at all.

Fort Lauderdale looks like it will be ok - I've had a quick look today though and it seems I'll be able to have a reasonable choice of places well within the rough budget I've set.

Copenhagen is also kind of under control - we already know which hotel we're going to stay in, we just need to decide whether we're going to spend one night there or two, and then I can book it. A lovely lady on the cruise has organised for us to be able to access their group booking rate, which reduces it from 'wildly expensive' to 'a little less than wildly expensive'! However, I knew going in that Copenhagen translates into English as 'leave all your money here' so I'm not really surprised.

Not the case in the UK. I also knew that hotel rooms in London would be very expensive, but it seems I've underestimated just how how expensive. We're going to stay in Cambridge for the first few days after we get to the UK, then go to London the day before the coach tour starts. Since the tour starts fairly early from a meeting point at a hotel, it makes sense to stay at that hotel the night before - lots of people do, and the coach tour company will book it for us at a slight discount from the currently quoted price. However, the slight discount is still $356 for the night for the two of us - including breakfast but even so, wow!. And, although it's a nice hotel - it's the Thistle Marble Arch - and in a good location, it's certainly not top of the range. Ouch.

12 months until we leave for the UK and USA

Tomorrow is 23 August, and as well as being my baby sister's 50th birthday - hi Rose! - it marks the "12 months out from our next big holiday" milestone. If those 12 months go as quickly as the last few months have, we'll be in the UK before we know it :-)

12 months out means that we can buy travel insurance. We have pretty much decided on Travel Insurance Direct - not because it's cheaper but because people who have actually made claims against their TID travel insurance report that they get good service and no apparent rip-off. Their sister company Budget Direct were quite reasonable for our claim for the stolen Lancer too, although no-one could ever make Paul and I happy about anything to do with that nasty little experience.

Anyway, on to happier things. We've decided we'll probably leave Sydney on 23 August 2012, fly to Heathrow then hop a bus to Cambridge for a few days. We'd both like to see the Imperial War Museum Duxford which is just down the road. Plus, there are all sorts of other interesting things near and around Cambridge. And, we don't get to go anywhere near that neck of the woods on the actual coach tour.

Then, we'll get to London - maybe in a hire car or maybe just on the train - on 28 August. That puts us in London for the start of the tour which is early the next morning.

I'm also planning other things as we go along - there's still heaps of things to organise. Little stuff like hotels in a bunch of different places - Cambridge, London, Copenhagen, New York (or Washington, haven't decided yet) and Fort Lauderdale - as well as lots of other bits and pieces. And, some of the biggest bits are yet to come - the air fare to London and home from Los Angeles has me quaking in my boots. These airfares are the biggest single entries in my 'budget' document, and I'm still not convinced that I've set aside enough money for them - only time will tell :-)

Insight it is

We're definitely going for the Insight tour I mentioned in my last post. So, with deposits paid on all the big ticket items, it's pretty much pinned down now - except for a million little detail things of course. My holiday document is currently 55 pages long!

However, it's really starting to feel like it will happen now. Just gotta get through the next 387 days, most of which I'm starting to feel I'm going to spend at work - I haven't had a two day weekend since June, and it's not looking like it will get any better any time soon.

Still, it's really something to look forward to!