I had a vision and pitched it to Tracey who was very agreeable at the time. The vision was to take Rhiannon and Renee to America when they were old enough to enjoy all the fun it presented. I imagined I was going to be the cool Aunty and do all the fun things that I love to do. Little did I think about the possible problems that travelling with teenage girls will present let alone travelling with my SISTER. In any case I realised it was something I wanted to do and it couldn’t be that bad could it? Those that know me will realise the many different scenario’s that have been going through my head since the day I realised this was really going to happen
The saving of the money started many years ago and we now had to make a decision when was the best time to go that would least impact on the girls schooling. We decided to try and work around September 2010. The oganisation of the trip of a life time then started about 18 months prior to this when both Tracey and I listed all the places we wanted to visit. Whether we would be able to fit them all in or for that matter be able to afford to go to all of them it didn’t matter we just wanted a starting point and a ‘wish list’. Once we both had out lists we put them together and discussed those that one of us didn’t want to go to or didn’t feel the need to go to and finally came up with something we could take to the travel agent (the wonderful Wendy).
Wendy gave us some ideas on what would be best for families and what wouldn’t and we started to narrow down the itinerary. Our first draft included a few places that we just wanted to go to because ‘CSI Miami was filmed there’. We really only wanted to go there to say we had been there and seen that. These types of places that would cost a bit just to visit for one night were quickly deleted so we could spend more of our time and money at the important places such as Disneyworld, Orlando and New York shopping :)
Finally we had what we thought was a reasonably good itinerary. It included all the places we really wanted to go to so I was feeling quite good about it at this point. Our original intention was to be away for about 4 weeks and incorporate the school holidays. The girls wouldn’t miss much of school and I could tolerate that amount of time being around other people 24/7. Little did I know this was not how it would work out when we had our final itinerary.
We were originally due to return on 23 October, however, Rhiannon requested that if we were going at that time could we please, please, please stay for Halloween. Lots of tooing and froing back and forth with our travel agent the first draft was completely changed to accommodate enough ‘rest’ days and being in LA for Halloween. The order of cities we were to visit changed and the length of time blew out to 7 weeks. This in turn increased the budget significantly as well. Not that I minded too much as at this stage of the process. I kept saying to myself how bad could it be spending 49 nights sleeping in the same hotel room and three other people. Of course it was all a bit daunting when I thought of it like that but then again I was very excited to be spending this fabulous journey with my much loved nieces (and my delightful, lovely, witty and gorgeous sister (add by me hehe)).
We are in the final stage of preparation with packing bags and arranging things that we will require for our journey. It is with excitement and anticipation of the wonderful things that I will see (even though I have seen them before, seeing them through the eyes of the kids will hopefully give me a different prospective) I start the countdown…………
10 DAYS TO GO
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