Set the wheels in motion, and watch them turning round ..

Hi and welcome to our blog.

It’s getting close now … very close.

Some years ago, we were involved in a mission trip to Zimbabwe with some others from our church, and we kept a blog to document our travels and give our family and friends back home the ability to follow along and keep up to date with all of the news.

This trip is just the two of us, and we are off to the USA and Alaska. When we tell people that we are off overseas on holidays, it’s not uncommon for people to ask “Just the two of you?”. Now while family holidays to the Gold Coast are traditional, I can’t for the life of me understand why we would consider dragging our boys around the world on our holiday … so I can only assume that it is a rhetorical question.

So as we have been planning for this trip, The One That I Love (TOTIL) suggested in the nicest possible way that we consider keeping a blog of this trip too … and when I say “we”, I mean “me”.

You may think that the title of this post is a little puzzling. Indeed. If I am expected to put in the effort to create a post every day, then it only seems fair that you should have to do a little bit of work yourself and try and figure out it’s meaning.

This trip was supposed to be a cruise on the Majestic Princess to New Zealand, but somewhere along the line it became an Inside Passage cruise from San Francisco up to Alaska  and back. One of the things that I love about cruising is that we leave home in Brisbane, cross over the Gateway Bridge and once we arrive at the cruise terminal it’s like we are immediately on holidays – there is no sitting around in airports, flying 20 hours, suffering jetlag …

This cruise combines both – flying to the USA and cruising. So we figured that if we were going to go that far, we may as well make a real holiday of it to include New York, San Francisco and then the cruise. I’ve never been to NY and always wanted to … but never thought it would happen.

When we plan a trip away, TOTIL won’t permit getting excited about it until we are less that 100 days to departure. 99 days ago that seemed like a very long way away. Now it starts today (Brisbane to Sydney), and then tomorrow is the big one – Sydney to San Francisco, and San Francisco to New York. How exciting!

So back to the title of this post .. here’s a hint – it is the first line or two from a song by a famous Australian singer. Here is another hint – the singer is John Farnham.

The song sums up all of my emotions very well right at the moment. The next line says “I want to sail across the ocean …” and that says it all. Today is the day. The bags are packed, everything is done (largely due to the efforts of TOTIL I need to point out …), so let’s go.

But the song also talks about turning the pressure down. Ain’t that the truth. With everything going on at the moment, it’s been a pressure cooker for the last week trying to get everything organised to go. Work has been crazy, long hours, not enough sleep, stressing about stuff, awake at 4.00am … grrr 🙁

And then there is the need to finish off all of the things that have been on my list for the last 99 days and yet are still incomplete. No problems – I’ll leave a list and the boys can do the last few things while we are away.

I think that I’ve done everything that needs to be done to make sure that all of those complexities in my life are organised to keep ticking along while we are away.

Speaking of the boys, we are leaving three of them at home … although current understanding is that one will be in WA for a couple of weeks, one is house-sitting for someone else, so there may only be one still here.

If you speak with him at any time, please remind him to put on the dishwasher occasionally, the wheelie bin goes out Monday nights, put some chlorine in the pool twice a week, water the plants …

And if he looks like he is fading away, he might need a meal 🙂

Ciao