burning koala

Just got the news last night that our visas are approved! If it wasn’t 12:30 at night, we would’ve popped open some champagne. So, of course, our next step was to get online and secure some travel to Sydney.

Unfortunately since we didn’t know when (and if) we were going to get approval we’ve not had luck finding great prices. We looked at all the options, as we are coming back in November for Angela’s sister’s wedding. Since round trips are usually cheaper we looked at leaving now and coming back in November, then we’d have to figure out how to fly back to Sydney one way. Then we tried looking at multi-city flights where we left now, came back on November 5th and then back to Sydney on November 13th. All of these were severely hamstrung by the fact that we were looking to fly in under two weeks. If we were able to fly out after Aug 8th, all the fairs went down about $1,000 for each ticket. That’s a lot of shrimp on the barby! We ended up finding a moderately priced one way ticket, but it’s still a shame that timing cost sooooo much.

Still, we are going. And that is worth something at least. Our official lift-off time is 6:40PM on Thursday. Now we just have figure out how to get our stuff down to two checked items each and one carry-on. We’re pretty much bringing with us all we will have for the next year – except what we buy there – and it’s tough to whittle it down to two bags each.

We’ve set up our insurance plan for Australia and need to figure out how much money we are going to take down to set us up, but for the most part we are ready to go.

If you don’t hear from us before, we’ll see you on the flip side…