Open Evening and Travel Buddy!

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I started talking to a girl - Emma - through emails, that I met through gapyear.com. She has similar plans to me and wants to travel Thailand, Oz, Fiji and New Zealand. She's wanting to go for longer than I am, and we'll have different timescales/things we want to do for some of the trip, but we started talking about flying out and doing the first bit, mainly Thailand, together. Hopefully we would've picked up confidence by Oz, so we could either travel some of it together if we have the same plans and are getting along, or go seperate ways if we want to, which we're both happy about doing which is cool 😊

There was an open evening in the Southampton STA branch on Wednesday, Emma lives in Southampton and found out about it and asked if I wanted to go along. Would give us chance to meet and find out some travel info! To be honest the talks they gave wasn't really anything I didn't already know as I've done a fair amount of research, but was a good night anyway and good to meet a potential travel buddy! So hopefully we may do Thailand together, see how the plans go 😄

Started looking more in depth at the weather too. Thailand's pretty warm/hot all year round, with different rainy seasons. Been using travelfish.org, Jan and Feb seem a couple of the driest months so that's cool. With Oz, depending on when I get there etc, may be worth going up the east coast rather than down, to hopefully get the best weather and avoid the rainy season in Cairns in Jan/Feb/March. Then I need to look at fitting in some of the west and maybe the centre. Think I may end up with some cooler weather in NZ, as it'll probably be autumn, if not coming up to winter. Not sure whether to look at putting it before Oz or in the middle of doing the east and west coast, instead of doing it after. If I do Japan that'll probably be at the end.

Blimey, how long's it going to take to make my mind up?!

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