A little background on this trip.

In January 2005, Doug and Travis decided to go to Australia in January, 2006. We started looking for flights using miles in early 2005 and had trouble getting business class seats all the way to/from Australia. We had good luck getting to New Zealand and decided we'd spend a bit of time in NZ and then just pay for flights to Australia. As we started looking at things in New Zealand, we realized that our four week trip wasn't going to give us enough time to see everything we wanted in NZ, let alone trying to see any of Australia. As a result, we ended up sticking just to New Zealand. You can see a website that covers that trip at http://fosterandfrye.com/newzealand.

Early in 2008, Continental Airlines announced they were going to be changing the number of miles required to get roundtrip business class Australia flights from 110K to 190K. We decided that we'd try to get to Australia once again before the milage requirements went up. To use Continental miles for Qantas flights, you have to call every morning at 7AM (and I mean at exactly 7AM - not a minute later) to see what may have opened up 11 months out. Continental generally gets no more than 2 seats a day - and often none. We lucked out pretty early on and got seats to Sydney for December 14th. Several weeks later, we started calling for return seats. And calling. And calling. Days turned to weeks but finally Doug was able to get a return seat on January 15. Travis still had nothing. We started looking at alternative options. To buy a return Business Class flight back in Q1 was over $17K! Doug has miles on several other airlines and started calling some of them to see if there might be a way to get another flight back. Finally, we found a 2nd flight back. On a different airline. From a different city in Australia. To a different city in the US. Certainly not ideal - but at least Travis doesn't have to permanently move there.

We thought that was the hard part! Then we started trying to decide exactly where to go once we got there. Some friends (Cliff and David Ray) are meeting us for the 2nd half of the trip so we figured out what everyone wanted to see and do and then put together a plan. Again, we thought that was the hard part!

Then we started looking at places to stay. It's summer holidays in Australia so some places were busy. For the most part though, it's just tough trying to decide which of the hundreds of places to stay best suits our needs.

So that's the scoop. We've been ready to go for quite some time now and are really looking forward to both seeing Australia and taking a long break from work. We hope you enjoy following along on this site.