“Oh the places you’ll go.” by Dr. Seuss
Andrew and I are going to take our long awaited “Retirement” trip! Andrew retired effective March 31, 2020, and with taking his vacation days first, we left on February 24, 2020 to travel to “Down Under” for 3 months, starting out in Perth, Australia. This vacation would include a side trip to New Zealand, a cruise back to Australia, meeting up with my friend Karen in Melbourne, a flight on an Airbus 380 on our way to Sydney from Melbourne and then a cruise from Sydney back to Vancouver. However our whole trip fell apart on Friday, March 13th in Auckland, New Zealand when Canada closed their Vancouver port to cruise ships and then the cascade of cancellations started involving our cruises, hotels and flights we had booked instead to get us home. We ended up spending some time in New Zealand checking out the country as United then cancelled our flight home, so we had to wait to find a different way home. On March 24th, one month after we left Canada and 11 days after entering New Zealand, we got notice from Canadians Abroad that Sydney, Australia was open for transit only. So, as we were in Christchurch at the time, with very little notice, we hopped onto an Emerites Airbus 380 to Sydney, then a Qantas 747 to Japan, changed airports and after a 14 hour layover and a call to my parents to bring food to the airport in Vancouver as there were no meals being served on flights, we got on an Air Canada 787 and flew home. We got home a month to the day we left – however our luggage unfortunately continued on the Emerites flight from Sydney to Dubai and spent the next several months in Dubai during the COVID shutdown before coming back to us 5 months later!
Now we are using our cruise credits left over from our cancelled cruises from 2020 and going to Europe! Let’s go!