Counting down to departure

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Hi there

Welcome to the first installment of our travel blog where we will be recording all our adventures, experiences and musings during our pending trip to Canada. We aim to keep you all (well those who are interested) up to date on where we are and what we are up to through regular journal entries and gallery updates.

For those of you we have not seen for a while, and there are quite a few of you, we should probably fill you in on what we've got brewing. We had always planned on spending the two years after uni/t-col working in NZ so that Emma could get her teachers registration. As soon she had obtained that the plan was to blow this joint and bugger off overseas for a bit.

As it turned out we ended up living and working back in dirty ol' Invers. Not where we really wanted to be but not all bad. In fact we have had a really good time of it and living in the same town as your parents does have its benefits.

Once Emma had secured herself a job for this year we knew that she could complete her registration by the end of '06 and we could start working towards our aim of heading off overseas in '07. We started seriously planning for where we were going to go and what we were going to do back in February. On several occasions over the past few years Emma and I have talked about how we both really wanted to go to Alaska so we thought that next door neighbour Canada would be a good place to live and work while we explored (parts of) North America. We went ahead and organised our passports, got our 12 month working holiday visas sorted and booked our flights. We're off on Feb 2 2007.

So we're now 56 odd days out from departing New Zealand shores and heading out into the big wide world. Although it is still a couple of months away we are both really excited and trying to get everything sorted. Currently we're trying to organise our 9 day Aussie stopover on the way to Vancouver. We'll be staying 3 nights in Sydney (hopefully watching a bit of A1GP while we're there) then off too Brisbane to spend a few days with Si and Anna, and hopefully catching some of the ODI cricket series along with the obligatory trip to the Gold Coast theme parks. Then back to Sydney for 1 night before jumping on a plane to Vancouver on Feb 11.

When we get to Vancouver........... who knows? Any ideas?

We're trying to make some contacts and organise some work before we leave NZ but not sure how thats going to pan out. Not looking good so far anyway so if any of you have any contacts that could help us out let us know. Hopefully in the next month or so things should be a bit clearer and we would have at least orgainsed somewhere to live when we first touch down.

In the meantime there is no shortage of other things to be done. Organising bank stuff, resigning from work (I am sooo looking forward to that one), Christmas, New Years and just generally tidying stuff up. All really exciting stuff which we will keep you up to date with.

Anyway, thats enough rambling for now, I'm off to do some more planning.

Ciao
Gaz & Emmz

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until we depart Invers

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