Three months today!

I guess that with 3 months to go I should pop up a bit of an update as this blog is a useful reference for those with whom we are staying. The itinerary stands thus:

Sunday 21st April - Perth to Tokyo via Sydney. 3 nights in Tokyo staying at Tama Ryokan, Takadanobaba nr Shinjuku.

Thursday 25th April - Tokyo to Athens via Zurich. 3 weeks island hopping. The initial plan of being independent, backpacking types took a bit of a turn with us booking a 5 nights stay to a really nice hotel in Santorini and flying there from Athens. I'm sure we'll try to be a bit more "back-packy" after that!

Weds 15th May - Athens to Manchester, via Heathrow. Staying in North Duffield with my cousin.

Sunday 19th May - Cheshire to maybe kill Zombies and catch up with friends. A Beatles based tourist experience should be in order whilst we are on the wrong side of the Pennines.

Sunday 26th May - to Brittany with our most excellent friends, the Buckleys, for a week. With a day trip to Paris thrown in for good measure if I can get cheap train tickets.

Sunday 2nd June - back to Britain.

Wednesday 5th June - to London for a long weekend, staying in Highbury with the most wonderful Johnathon & Stuart. Tickets booked for Matilda in the West End.

Sunday 9th June - back to Yorkshire for a few days, maybe with a side trip to Cambridgeshire to visit family.

Thursday 13th June - fly to New York, via Zurich. Staying at New York Budget Hotel for 6 nights which is nice and central near the Empire State Building.

Wednesday 19th June - fly to Washington DC for 4 nights. Staying at this place which is about as central to the tourist bits that we can afford.

Sunday 23rd June - To Orlando for 11 nights staying in Crescent Lakes in our "Bargain of the Holiday". We will have 5 days in Disney and 3 days at Universal Studios. I want to go to Kennedy Space Centre but no-one else shares the love for this notion. Harrumph!

Wednesday 3rd July - To San Diego. Spending Independence Day with our good friends the Arnolds. Hopefully watching the fireworks in San Diego, hopefully they will last longer than last years when someone pressed the wrong button and every firework went off at once rather than over 30 minutes. Ooops!

We will have a side trip to Vegas and the Grand Canyon from 8th to 13th July before heading off to San Francisco on Monday 15th July.

We return to Perth via Sydney on Sunday 21st of July after leave San Francisco on Friday 19th. We lose Saturday somewhere over the Pacific Ocean!

And there you have it 13 weeks of travel, all very exciting and creeping closer by the day.

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Untitled

treverien - Google Maps

Holiday House in Treverien, Ille-et-Vilaine, France FR11061


I'm just messing about with Blogsy trying to see how to put links & maps up. The above are links to the Brittany house we are renting.

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Vac Swim. Welcome to 2013.

 

As this will be my view for the next 10 days it seemed like a good idea to do a bit of blogging. Our friends, the Buckleys, got in touch overnight to say they had been able to book their flights to Brittany for our week there. We booked our flights a couple of weeks before Xmas with Ryanair whom, I suppose, are OK if you know what you are letting yourselves in for. They are reasonably cheap but very no-frills indeed. We have rented a house in Treverien, Brittany, for a week. It is called La Forge and is by a canal and most definitely NOT in a tourist area. The hope is that we can immerse ourselves in the romantic picture of what being in France actually entails. We will see how the reality works out.

There really is so much to arrange when you have 4 people going around the world for 13 weeks. We have found some really great free tours in New York but they need to be booked months in advance as does the obligatory trip to Alcatraz in San Francisco etc etc.

I had a bit of a result overnight too hearing from the lady who owns La Forge our Brittany home. She has a son in Sydney with whom she will be staying next Xmas. She suggested that I could send him a cheque to pay for the house and she would use the AU$ when she visited. Win-win. I save on the transfer fee and we both get a better exchange rate.

I also set the kids research tasks this morning and printed out sheets where they had to research where we are staying in each destination and look into 5 activities for our stay there including costs and distance from our accommodation and how we could get there. So far they have been observers in the whole process. They need to do a journal for school but we have negotiated that this could be a Blog instead. It's a whole lot more 'Now' than a journal and a damn sight easier to carry about.

 

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