a little planning

Our Itinerary 

With summer fast approaching, I know my mom and I will begin planning our Australia/New Zealand vacation.  I keep thinking about how I don't get a big vacation this summer but it's OK because I get a really big vacation in 7 months.  I'm certainly OK with that.

I've been looking at shore excursions a little bit and I get more and more excited each time I look at them.  We have booked a few excursions the other day.  In Dunedin, we booked an excursion to see the penguins....as soon as I saw the description, I knew that was the one we had to book!  In Tauranga (Rotorua), we are doing an excursion called Hell's Gate & Rotorua Highlights.  It includes going to Hell's Gate Geothermal Reserve.  The description of the excursion sounded interesting.  We shall see.  Then in Auckland, we are doing an excursion on the America's Cup yacht.  We've heard good things about it.  There are a few other ports that either don't have excursions available yet for us to book or we haven't decided which excursion to choose.

We did have a change in our itinerary that we were informed of last week.  Apparently Christchurch is not allowing any ships to dock there the remainder of the year, so we will be docking in Akaroa instead.  It's 75 kilometers from Christchurch and apparently the same types of excursions are available but since they never had available excursions shown from that port, I'm not sure what types of excursions will be available.  

We've also booked all of our airfare.  We've got a bunch of different legs of the trip BUT almost the whole time we will be in business or first class, thanks to many many air miles.  We have one flight that is no longer than 4 hours in coach, so I think I will probably manage just fine :)  We have several 10+ hour flights.  I've only been one flight that has been that long, so hopefully I'll be OK.  I can usually sleep on flights and it shouldn't be a problem seeing as how we will have lay down seats most of the time.  We skip a day in there on the way over and then on the way back, our day is like 48 hours long and seems like it's going to last forever.

We've got our hotel booked in Sydney.  Thanks to Capital One Rewards, we were able to book one night before leaving on the cruise using points.  To book the hotel after the cruise, we weren't able to use points but we wanted to stay at the same place, Shangri-La.  We also have to overnight in Shanghai on our way to Sydney.  My mom looked and looked for a good place and finally came up with a nice hotel that had good reviews so she was able to book that using Capital One Rewards.

So, things are coming together and I know it will be here before we know it.  Now if I can just manage to get through the next 4 days of school, then I'll be another year closer to retirement!!! :)  I really don't view teaching that way...I do love it, but it's been a tough year and I will be glad when it is over!