Sunday 3rd January 2016.

New Year, New Start, New Adventure. I'm so excited that me and my sister Kirsty, are Australia bound for the next 8 weeks to travel up the east coast. Our plan is to do some if not all of this in a camper van, much to the amusement of our friends and family. Apparently they don't see us as "camper van" types, whatever that means. We have all agreed it's best I'm the main driver though as Kirsty, although clever, is possibly the dizziest person I know and very accident prone. I'm sure there will be a few stories to come there.

We had a 50 hour trip to get to Sydney and would pass 4 time zones, so I was obviously not particularly excited about the jet lag that would be to come. We had to fly to Dubai, Bangkok then on to Sydney (all with Emirates). The connection at Bangkok had a 19 hour wait, which we made a call would be a good thing. We booked a hotel at the airport for when we got there to get some rest before the last 9 hour flight to Sydney.

We started our journey back off in Birmingham airport with an hour delay. We also didn't realise we needed a Visa even if we weren't going to be working in Australia (we had been told this by a couple of people). So after trying to check in and failing without the visa, we had to get one last minute from Emirates help desk. It cost £25 and is valid for a year.

When we finally got our first leg of the journey underway about 21:30, we were pleased to find we have row of 4 seats between us. I lay and watched 'Up' which was actually more depressing than I remembered then tried to get some sleep, without much success before we landed in Dubai. One flight down, two to go.