November 2005

Australia, this is a name that seems to bring comments from every person we talk to. Most say, "We want to go there some day", and then they tell us about someone they know who has been there. We are Steve and Chris Hennings and we have said the same thing.

Years past, we owned a campground in Colorado and we often had guests from Australia. Being friends with Lynn and Louise, we always wanted to hear about their most recent trip to "the land down under". When we were first asked about joining them on this trip we immediately said, "Sure, when do we leave?"

That was a year ago and now we are down to a couple of weeks from our departure. We didn't think about the planning it would take to put together an independent trip like this. Most people go on tours where all they have to do is show up at the airport with their bags packed. Not us.

We have been on the internet planning our hotels, rental cars, campervans, local attractions and places to go. Most people plan trips to the Australia's east coast and New Zealand for ten days to two weeks. We are doing our own thing. We'll be traveling to Perth and the west coast for the first half of our trip, and then to Sydney for New Years and down the south coast before heading to Hong Kong for the last four days of our 5 week trip.

Like most people we had to go to the bookstore to get the latest travel guides for Australia and Hong Kong. These were helpful, but we have found that for the most up to date information nothing beats the Internet. We had planning visits with Lynn and Louise and a lot of emails of thoughts exchanged

One stumble we had using internet was trying to book our airline tickets because were doing these eight months in advance and the airline website would not let us book a return flight after the first of the year. A trip to our travel agent at AAA got that straightened out. You may think that eight months was too far out to book our flights, but with Louise making reservations for our campervans and many attractions will be visiting in Perth, we had to make sure that we could all get there at the same time and not be left out!

Chris and I will be traveling from Denver to LA and then to Hong Kong with a five hour layover there, and then on to Perth. Lynn and Louise will leave from Vancouver, and get into Hong Kong about an hour after us.

December 9 is the big day, we leave Denver at 7:25 am and somewhere over the Pacific one day disappears from our calendar. It will be 6:45 pm on the 10th when we get to Hong Kong.

We are excited and almost ready, we have the cat and the house taken care of, so let's go. We will keep you updated as the trip progresses.

More to come...

Steve & Chris