Our Summer Holidays Have Been Planned...

After much deliberation, we've finally got around to planning and booking our first sojourn out of NZ since arriving in July. We'll be heading over to Melbourne for a week at the end of July, and while we're there will be catching an evening session and a day session of the Australian Open. Very exciting!

The holiday starts with a free car rental - Emily found out that car rental companies let people hire vehicles at no cost if they only go one way; a simple method of returning all the cars back to the airport for their next rental arrangement. So we'll be collecting our free ride from Wellington airport on the afternoon of Sunday 24th January and driving overnight up to Auckland airport to arrive for an early flight over to Oz on Monday morning.

Once there, we'll have a day to recuperate before heading to the evening session of the quarter finals in the Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday, as well as general entrance to the ground for the following day session. It's sure to be scorching hot, so we feel a night session is best for watching the tennis, and hopefully on the next day we can find a nice stretch of shade from which to watch the action on one of the big screens.

Once the tennis is over and done with, we will have until the following Monday to explore one of Australia's primary cities, and we'll update you with more news once we work out an itinerary.

We have talked about what's happening afterwards as well: my contract at work will have expired, and Emily will attempt to get a month off from her job so we'll have time to head down to Queenstown in the height of summer - something we didn't get a chance to do when we were travelling around in Leland / Leland II. We may even do something similar with a campervan, although we have no solid plans at this stage.