With everything that has been going on in my life since the beginning of the year, planning for our upcoming trip has gone on the back-burner. However, with just over two months to go before we leave, the time has come to do something about it.
I have not been completely idle though. I did look at options to re-shop our cruise as soon as I started my new job. It turned out that we were best off sticking with the cruise package we had, but to cancel the flight arrangements and do our own thing. This meant that we are now flying back with Lufthansa via Frankfurt rather than with British Airways via London. I did go for the same British Airways flights outbound, but then got spooked by their cabin crew striking. So I am going to rebook this on Monday and we will fly with Etihad via Abu Dhabi. This has two big advantages. To start off with, we will be flying on an Airbus A380 from Abu Dhabi to Sydney. We will still be on a Boeing 777 from Manchester to Abu Dhabi, but this is a daytime flight and I don't mind it then. We will also leave on the Wednesday morning instead of late afternoon, which means that we arrive in Sydney late afternoon on the Thursday instead of early morning on Friday. This means we can get a good night's sleep and have a full day in Sydney on the Friday. We will use this for a full-day excursion to the Blue Mountains. Our hotel is pretty centrally located so we can still do a bit of sightseeing in Sydney itself before we head to the ship on the Saturday morning.
Now we just have to make up our minds what we want to do in the ports. Isle of Pines and Mystery Island are easy as there is very good snorkelling very close to the tender port. So we will just do this. The other ports require a bit of research, but hopefully we have this taken care of before the month is over.
Corinna
