Trip-Planning: Australia

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Australia 2018 is about to get real in a BIG way! Earlier this week, our daughter’s passport came in the mail and we now have all of our airline tickets and lodging booked. It’s safe to say that we are all getting excited for the trip, but we still have some legwork to do before we take off.

First things first, we have to come up with a rough agenda. We know we are arriving in Sydney early on a Saturday morning, flying to Brisbane Wednesday evening, and then flying home to North Carolina the following Tuesday. While we are in Sydney, we are staying at Bondi so we know we are going to get some beach sightseeing in even though it won’t be beach weather while we are there. In Brisbane, Nathan will be working some of the time, but the day before we fly home will be an entirely free day to enjoy as a family.

So, where do we start? First things first, we did some general internet research. Fortunately, Nathan has a friend who lives in Sydney, so we had some guidance on where to stay. We know choosing to stay in Bondi will mean that we have to travel a little more to get to the sights in the central part of the city, but we thought it was worth it to have a little quieter family retreat and laundry facilities in our lodging quarters while we are there.

We have been using travel books from Lonely Planet to help us with a good bit of our plans while in Sydney. We used G Suite tools to create a basic itinerary based on our flights and Nathan’s work schedule and now we are plugging in wish list items and links to things that we want to investigate. Using a shared document has worked well for us, because we don’t have many opportunities to sit and plan together a lot. This way, we can add our ideas into our document and when we do sit down, everything we have thought of is right in front of us.

Some other resources we love to consider when we plan trips are 1,000 Places to See Before You Die and Atlas Obscura. We can usually discover a gem or two we might not have previously discovered by referencing these sources. For instance, without Atlas Obscura, I would have never known that I could see the longest running lab experiment in the world by visiting the University of Queensland School of Mathematics and Physics while we are in Brisbane!

After we make our wishlist of all the things we want to do and see, we will start plugging things in giving consideration to the fact that we might not get to everything or that we might need to switch some things around due to weather or other things that happen while we are there.

Then, there is our last consideration. We are no longer just two adults traveling the world together. We are bringing a toddler along on this adventure with us! We know we are going to do some things that are just things that we really want to do as adults, but we need to be sure that we also include some touristy things our daughter will enjoy doing (even if she might not remember them exactly when she is older). For now, we have a trip to the aquarium in Sydney and a koala sanctuary outside of Brisbane on the list! The other thing we are going to have to pay particular attention to is how much we schedule for ourselves to do on any given day. Our two-year-old still needs daily naps and we are going to have a lot of jet lag to deal with across the board. We may decide to nap with her once or twice or every day, or we may use nap times to take in some of the more adult-oriented tourism experiences. (Art museum, anyone?)

Finally, we are also planning out some restaurants ahead of time. The books are helpful here to some extent, but our real source of information for dining will be Yelp. Even when we traveled through Spain (and most of the reviews were written in a language neither of us speaks), we were able to find some excellent spots based on ratings and a smattering of English language reviews. We use Yelp faithfully when we travel domestically and now that we have used it internationally once, we will rely on it again. We’ve already started looking and bookmarking spots that look interesting.

All in all, I’m sure this is going to be an excellent adventure. Just do me a favor and send good vibes and suggestions for 21 hours of travel with an active two-year-old. Please?