Preparations

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At the moment we're just getting ready to leave work and we're trying to get organised to go away travelling soon. We leave on February the 18th, but will spend ten days before that relaxing and buying a few last things in Mallorca, Spain. Then we return to Somerset, get everything together, Alex will go to his last football match and then we'll fly from Heathrow.

We've booked the hostels we're staying in in Japan. We start in Tokyo, then move on to Kyoto, to Mount Fuji and back to Tokyo for the last night. We spend a total of 6 nights there, which isn't very long, but considering how expensive it's meant to be it's probably quite enough!

From Japan we plan to head to Singapore where we'll probably spend the first 2 or 3 days relaxing and recovering from jet lag and the hectic week in Japan. Then we'll get the train over the causeway through Johor and up to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We plan to spend five days and nights in K.L. before heading back to Singapore, where we'll hopefully see some family friends, go to the Orchid Gardens, the Night Safari and get a cable car ride to Sentosa Island to watch the sun either rise or set. We'll stay in Singapore for seven nights before flying down to Brisbane.

In Australia we hope to work for about 4 weeks before travelling around a bit, but we haven't really got any set plans for Australia. We'll probably use the Greyhound to get around a bit but nothing is set in stone. After about 10 or 11 weeks in Australia we'll move onto New Zealand. I think we fly into Christchurch and out of Auckland and have about a month to make our way from South Island to North Island. We might hire a car and drive around a little but we have no set plans there either apart from a whale watching trip from Kaikoura (http://www.whalewatch.co.nz/) - thank you very much Nic!

From New Zealand we head to Fiji, the island of Nadi. There we have a 4-5 day Feejee experience booked. We'll go round the island and go to a local village, watch a traditional dance and go tubing on a river (amongst loads of other things!).

We arrive into America via LAX. We have just over a month in the States and will probably spend a few days in LA and a few in NY at either end of the trip. We plan to travel round America using a 30 day Amtrak pass. We'll head in to Las Vegas, back out to LA and then up through San Francisco and San Diego to Seattle. Through the Glacier National Park (not sure about the name) across to Chicago before heading down through Memphis to New Orleans and back up to New York.

We've got most of the things we need for our trip in the way of clothes and supplies, though there are still many things to organise and plan which will probably begin to stress us out as the time to leave draws near but it won't overcome the excitement and anticipation of actually leaving and heading on this adventure to far away places which we're sure will be a once in a lifetime opportunity and experience!

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