The Trip

We will be in New Zealand 6 weeks and have booked only our first night there, so we will need our laptop. We are renting a car and plan on driving most of the time. New Zealand is basically 2 islands and we’ll spend approximately 3 week on the north island and 3 weeks on the south island.


We will be in Australia 4 weeks, and almost all of that time is booked ahead from camping 5 days in the Outback along with the creepy crawlers, sailing and snorkeling the great barrier reef (hopefully not getting sea sick), and an overnight train ride to the RED center of Australia.

We will be in Bali one week. We have scheduled a car and driver very cheap for 4 of those days.

We will be in Hong Kong 4 days. It was on our return flight home so why not stop for a couple of days?

The Planning

Our tickets are purchased, a house sitter has been found, our passport readied, and in a short time, February 9, we will be on our way halfway around the world. It’s been a lot of work planning a trip for 3 months, and when I told our son that, he said ‘I really feel sad for you, that it’s so hard planning a vacation for 3 months’. Well it has been a lot of work at times, but also very exciting at times.

One thing we decided right away was we needed a laptop computer. Who would ever think you would need a computer on vacation? We can keep in contact with everyone stuck back at home with email and Skype, and we can pay our bills on line, especially the credit card bill, and we can book a hotel, B&B, or Couchsurfer ahead of time while traveling, check airline flight status and confirm our reservations on line, map a route on line, and we can even blog. We are hoping we will be able to find time to add notes and pictures on this blog once in a while.