What We're Most Looking Forward to Next Year.

Lots of cool and exciting things will be happening next year, it's hard to decide our favourites. In this post we'll talk about some of the most exciting ones.

In the Philippines we're looking forward to staying on a remote houseboat on Coron Island and immersing ourselves in the beautiful sites on land and underwater.

In March we'll be skiing in Les Duex Alpes in France...For a whole month! I'm pretty excited to spend my birthday skiing. We will be able to have quite a few lessons to hone our skiing skills. Maybe by the end Mum will be able to catch up with us.😉

We will be catching up with Spanish friends (and stuffing our faces with Portugese tarts) in Portugal. It'll be great to see these friends whom we met when they were taking a year to live in Australia.

I think Mum and Dad are looking forward to a term of school in the Scottish Highlands more than us kids, finally...a break. For the first couple of weeks there, until our ears tune in to the accent, our most commonly spoken word will probably be "pardon". We're excited about forest school and we might even get to try award winning gourmet chocolate at "The Highland Chocolatier"😋.

Iceland will be pretty amazing with the geysers and humongous glaciers, but I don't think we'll be trying any Surströmming (Baltic herring that's been fermented for 6 months in a hole underground with just enough salt to stop it from rotting, possibly the stinkiest food in the world🤢).

The last one on this list is visiting Tierra del Fuego, the end of the world, the southernmost part of South America. It is one of the closest places to the South Pole you can visit and still be on land. It's cold but beautiful.

In the next post I'll tell you about Singapore, because that's where we'll be to start our 2020 adventure!

Where We're Going 2020

As I mentioned in my previous post, the 2020 trip has, and is still taking lots of planning but we do have a good idea of where we'll be and when. In this post I'll outline our rough plans.

January	Melbourne to Singapore Philippines
February	Hong Kong London Lisbon
March	Skiing in Les Deux Alpes, France
April	Geneva Back to London to catch overnight train to Scotland.
May	A term of school in Grandtully - Scottish Highlands
June	A term of school in Grandtully - Scottish Highlands
July	Iceland Croatia Montenegro
August	Portugal Morocco
September	Spain
October	Argentina Uruguay
November	Mexico Belize
December	Honolulu Home to Melbourne

That's our rough itinerary. The last parts could be subject to change

Planning, Planning and more Planning.

Before every holiday there is one essential process... planning. The key to a great holiday is planning. Of the four members of the family Patrick (me) and my Mum are the only ones who really get into planning holidays. I recently started booking accommodation and flights with mum. It's like starting a really exciting apprenticeship. Though I think I'll be right to take this on in less than three years.

When you're planning, you have to take multiple things into consideration. You need to think about how much you're prepared to pay but also how good the reviews are (if you're looking at accommodation). When you're booking flights you need to take into consideration the departure and arrival times, as well as the stop overs. Once we almost got caught up booking a Melbourne to South Africa flight via Hong Kong.

Similar things can happen when you're booking accommodation. It might say it's in a certain place but that can range from being right in the city centre to being 10 kilometres away from where you want to be. Like when I thought I was booking a 4 night stay in Stirling. It turned out to be 6 km away in Bridge of Allan, these things can happen to new holiday bookers.

Our 2020 year long trip has been in the planning for nearly a year, and counting. Needless to say, after all that work, there's still plenty more to plan and book. 

In my next post I'll give you a run down of the itinerary for the trip, roughly (some of the details are still a bit fuzzy).