I've never organised a trip of any kind abroad before. Let alone one of this magnitude. And the first time I'd properly travelled abroad without parents was just last summer!
Anyway, first port of call was to decide which countries to go. Both Phil and I have wanted to go to the USA, namely California, for a holiday. New Zealand is somewhere I've always wanted to go, Phil went when he was younger, and loved it, so was more than keen to go again and see more of it. And finally, Australia being a third obvious choice of countries to visit while on your travels.
Secondly, we needed to figure out how long to go for and create a budget to work towards. All I knew was that I wanted to be back before Christmas, and didn't want to be away for as long as 6 months. So, after spending an age creating an itinerary; Lonely Planet in one hand, Google Maps in the other, a month later I got a pretty detailed plan of all the places we'd want to go to, all the things we might want to do, how long we'd need in each place and how much driving would be involved. Eventually we had some rough dates. For budgeting, I got fake quotes for all the flights we'd need, fake car rental quotes, an average price for accommodation for four-ish months, a total price for activities, etc. I produced a very rough figure.
We were made aware of Virgin Atlantic's 'The Great Escapade' deal. They offer a set price on flights, and you can go anywhere in the world. You are only allowed to cross the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans once, and there is a 29,000 mile limit. So I was able to trial out various routes to get round the world with the countries we wanted to visit. Easy. Australia back to the UK required a stop-over at either Singapore or Hong Kong. I decided on Hong Kong (sounded a bit more of an exciting place to go), as we'd have been able to add on a few days and be able to experience the place, at no extra cost for flights. Sorted! A couple of months saving and we were in a position to book our flights. The flights were important in making it all the more real, instead of a distant fantasy. Rang up first time, but we were too early, flights can't be booked earlier than 11 months before the last flight. So we had to wait until January. It's a long wait, but January comes, we give them our itinerary, (they can't do the exact dates but that's fine, it was to be expected), they take all our details and say it takes a couple of days to process the quote, so they'll get back to us. A few days later, they give us our quote, but I need to transfer my money into Phil's account so we can pay for it all in one go. This takes a few days obviously, and once we explain this, they make us aware there is a threshold before the prices change again, so to pay what we were quoted we must ring back with payment before that date. We do, but unfortunately the card machine is down apparently and it will take a few days to be fixed. This is no fault of ours, so are promised that despite this taking us past the threshold, we will keep our original quote and he will call back when everything is back up and running. Did he? No. Two weeks pass and we still haven't heard back. We call back, get someone new, explain our situation and the best she can do is apologise and say she'll have to get us another quote, which will take another few days to process and that she'll call back. Did she? Of course not. Five days later, I checked out Flight Centre, where I could email them an itinerary and they'd call back with a quote within 24 hours (why can't Virgin Atlantic do this?). Sure enough the next morning I get a quote, including an internal flight in Australia which hadn't been included in 'The Great escapade', and it's £200 cheaper! We go for that, booking it later the same day. We still call back Virgin Atlantic anyway, to complain more than anything, but before that she proceeds to make up some excuse about not calling back, and then tells us our new quote, which is almost £300 more than the original! So we complain. In essence, three weeks down the line and we'd still not booked flights with Virgin Atlantic, but within 24 hours we were quoted and actually booked our flights with Flight Centre, with an added flight, Aussie visitor visas sorted too (thanks to the very helpful Jason), general advice on how to get around the countries we are visiting and potentially saved ourselves £500 in the process! We did have to change the dates again, knocking a few days off each place but by this point I really didn't care. And so it was done, we were really going.
I got a very useful planner which helped me to organise my scrappy scribbled notes that had accumulated, and organise my thoughts (as being organised is not my forte). So from there, it was a case of booking and buying things as and when we could afford it. Hotels for Hong Kong and Las Vegas were booked with the money we saved on flights. Next was travel insurance, Visa Waiver Programme for entering the USA, Greyhound bus passes for Australia (between Sydney and Cairns), and the ferry to cross to South Island, New Zealand. I created lists of things we'd need to buy, lists of things we need to do/check out before we go, looked into how to manage money abroad, worked out how many miles of driving we'd be doing, petrol prices, looked up the averages in the weather, time differences, looked into accommodation, of which I'd only planned to pre-book some of, but subsequently ended up booking ALL 55 places to stay, (through fear of not finding anywhere to stay in a place we don't know our way round!) which was the most tedious and frustrating part of it all, when you have a strict budget but still want to be safe and fairly clean. Created a blog. Hired cars. Registered ourselves with LOCATE. Written up itineraries and places we're staying for all the parents. And to save money on GPS assistance, and to aid map reading (never ever driven a successful journey just with a map!), I've also looked up every one of the 41 drives I'll be doing on Google Maps and saved them to print.. So, four months later, extensive research, 1000's of reviews and a lot of frustration, a few mistakes, and thanks to The Lonely Planet guides, TripAdvisor, Jason at Flight Centre and everybody else that has given me helpful hints (and to Katie for sitting down with me and going through the New Zealand part to help me to squeeze an ambitious ten weeks, down to six!) here we are, (almost) ready to go.
And all of a sudden it's become ten weeks to go and we're beginning to get very nervous... Mixed with excitement, of course. I'll be pretty chuffed with myself if I can pull this all off!
