Australia

Good morning all, on this Monday morning here in Australia. I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer at my home in Avondale Heights, a suburb of Melbourne, freezing as I try to re-adjust to the Aussie winter, and feeling normal again after my body has re-adjusted to its timezone!! It's taken me a couple of days to get the chance to sit down and write this, as we've been busy with seeing relatives on both sides of our family and just re-adjusting back to normal conditions, but I thought I'd better give this a sense of closure, not to mention wrap up our last day in America.

Thursday 25th June 2009 is a day that will be remembered by a lot of people for a very long time. It started innocently enough for us - we awoke at the Wilshire Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and had breakfast, before I took my final drive in the Nissan Altima, taking it down to 7th and Western in Los Angeles to fill the car with petrol before returning it, then dropping the car back at the Budget Rent-A-Car office at 3600 Wilshire Boulevard, pulling into the car park and remembering the difficulties I had driving out of that same car park almost four weeks earlier!! After returning the car, then walking to the office section and returning the GPS, I walked back to the hotel, marvelling at how the walk seemed so much shorter than it did back on May 31st. Total figures for the trip - 7913 miles drive, with a total of just over $730 spent on petrol.

Sarah made sure that our bags were packed and ready to go whilst I was returning to the car, so on my return to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, we went downstairs and checked out of the hotel, leaving our luggage with the hotel and booking a service to LAX to leave the Wilshire Plaza at 6:30pm that night. With that done, and the time just after 10am, we headed for the Wilshire/Normandie subway station across the road, and headed for Hollywood.

Our plan was to go on a double-decker Hollywood tour, but this time we didn't book anything, thinking that it would be relatively easy to find a tour bus once in Hollywood. We had to travel one stop towards downtown LA on the subway, and then link up with the Metro Red Line, Los Angeles's train line leading to Hollywood. We hopped off the train at Hollywood/Vine station, thinking that if there's anywhere to be in the thick of things, it would be at the two roads where the Hollywood Walk of Fame intersected. Upon arising to street level, we saw a double-decker tour bus parked across the road, and quickly crossed over to check it out. The bus was sitting in front of the Hollywood Sightseeing office, and in talking to the proprietor, he sold us on the tour that was set to leave at 12:15pm that day, and also threw in a free tour to the Hollywood sign - enough to have me quickly reaching into the wallet to obtain currency!! We had about twenty minutes until the tour to the Hollywood sign left, so we spent a few minutes walking down Hollywood Boulevard and checking out some of the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before climbing into the back of what was an elongated ute with twelve other sightseers in open air seating, and headed out to the famous Hollywood sign.

It had started as a bit of a sombre day in Hollywood, with the passing of Farrah Fawcett that morning after a long battle with cancer, and there was more delays as a whole section of Hollywood Boulevard was closed to traffic, as they were setting up for the premiere of the new Sasha Baron Cohen (think Ali G or Borat) movie Bruno in front of Grumman's Chinese Theatre, with bleachers and a red (actually, it was black) carpet set up. Whilst on the way to the Hollywood Sign, we passed by Farrah Fawcett's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and saw a lot of people in the area paying their last respects. The ute then wound it's way up the Hollywood Hills and into the Hollywoodland housing area - the housing area set up in the mid-20's that spawned the now-famous Hollywood sign - it initially read "Hollywoodland" and was an advertisement for the housing estate, but long after houses had stopped being sold by the Hollywoodland company, the "land" part of the sign was removed and the "Hollywood" part left to become the iconic figure it is today.

We didn't actually go to the sign itself - people aren't allowed to get near the sign any more without special permits and the like, but we were transported to a look-out area in the Hollywood Hills that was billed as the best spot to take photos of, and with, the sign (we got a pretty good photo of both Sarah and I with the Hollywood sign, but I haven't been able to load it onto the computer to show you, as my repairman hasn't had a chance to look at the laptop yet!!). When we arrived, we saw a very expensive-looking white Maserati parked in the area, with cameramen taking a photo of a model who was waving her arms around in various poses on the best vantage point to take photos of people with the Hollywood sign. It turns out that they were shooting a feature for a British travel magazine called Tridente - which got better when they saw us in a sort-of tour bus, pulled the Mercedes next to the bus, and snapped off a host of shots of the twelve of us looking down at the Maserati - with the promise that the photos will be published in the July edition of the magazine (when I volunteered my address to send the royalty cheque to, the photographer laughed and said something about him not receiving any royalties, which I knew was a load of hogswollop!!). So the next month may be spent scouring the Tridente website for evidence of some new-found stardom!!

After all of the photos were taken, we loaded back into the ute and headed back for the Hollywood Sightseeing office to link up with the double-decker tour bus - we were a touch worried when we were still at the Hollywood sign at 12:05pm with the double-decker tour supposed to leave at 12:15pm, but our worries were for naught - the driver of the double-decker tour was on the ute with us!! We wound our way through the Hollywood Hills, looking at all of the expensive multi-storey homes in the area, before arriving back at the Hollywood Sightseeing office just after 12:30pm, to which we transferred straight onto the double-decker bus to commence our main tour of Hollywood.

We started by once again passing by Farrah Fawcett's star on the Walk of Fame, where the official bereavement wreath from the Academy (or Screen Actors Guild - I can't quite remember which one) was being laid at the moment that we passed by very slowly on the bus. The TV cameras soon spotted us, and they stuck a camera directly at me whilst I gave them my very best two-fingered "peace" salute, which would have featured in the LA news that night - at the time, we thought it would have been the lead story. The bus took us around all of Hollywood's major sites, pointing out the places "where the stars eat", which seemed like every restaurant that we passed - some pointed out because some obscure TV star may have eaten their once some ten years ago (the little cafe that we had lunch in later in the day trumpeted the fact that part of the movie "Million Dollar Baby" starring Hilary Swank was filmed there, and the cafe was nothing to write home about, I can assure you). As we passed the Capitol Records building, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine, and ducked around to avoid the road closure for the Bruno premiere, we saw what looked to be fire trucks, but were in fact red ambulances, speeding away from us with their lights flashing - which got a "oooh, something must be happening somewhere" from our tour guide. The tour was pretty good, although I got sick of the number of places "where the stars ate", taking in some of Hollywood's most famous sites - I had to restrain Sarah from jumping out of the bus with the credit card in tow as we travelled into Beverley Hills and down Rodeo Drive, the most expensive shopping area in the USA (right up there above New York's Fifth Avenue). As we travelled past the La Brea Tar Pits, where dinosaurs perished millions of years ago and where a fossil of a wooly mammoth was discovered only recently when a car park was being built at the back of the property adjacent to the Tar Pits, one of the members of our touring party received a call from his girlfriend, and he realyed the news to us minutes later that some internet sites were reporting that Michael Jackson had just passed away due to a cardiac arrest. The news was met with disbelief amongst the touring party, especially seeing as the news was only just getting out, and mixed reports were being given - the tour guide received a phone call to say that Jackson had been transferred to the UCLA Medical Centre in nearby Westwood for a liver transplant, and when we crossed by the CNN studios, where flagship American talk show Larry King Live is filmed, moments after, the TV screens outside the complex said that Jackson had been hospitalised, but was apparently unconscious when the same red ambulances that we saw speeding by us had picked him up at his rented home in LA. The rest of the tour, as we weaved our way through Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, the Miracle Mile shops on Wilshire Boulevard and Melrose Avenue (which spawned the 90's TV series Melrose Place), went in a bit of a blur (and Sarah's camera had run out of battery just before we entered Beverley Hills) as we were trying to comprehend the Michael Jackson situation. We drove by Jackson's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Vine Avenue not long before the tour ended, which had really no-one around it, and just as the bus pulled over back at the Hollywood Sightseeing office, our tour guide received a phone call with the official word that Michael Jackson had died at the age of 50 from a cardiac arrest. As soon as we hopped off the bus, we walked the short distance back to Jackson's Walk of Fame star on Vine, where the TV news trucks had started to gather, and a small crowd had built, with a circle of about five guys in their early 20's sitting around the star. We stayed for a few minutes as the word started to get around and the news sunk in, and just as the first candles were being placed on the star, we took our leave, and headed back up to Hollywood Boulevard, where we walked around for about an hour looking at the stars on the Walk of Fame as Jackson's music played out of almost every shop, and after having a quick, and late, lunch, we made our way back to Hollywood/Vine station to head back to the Wilshire Plaza Hotel to pick up our luggage and await our transfer to the LA Airport.

We arrived back at the Hotel just before 6pm, collected our luggage from the hotel's concierge, and waited in the foyer for our ride - which was a black town car run by a service preferred by the Wilshire Plaza Hotel, and carrying a $55 flat rate - about the same as a taxi. It sounds dear, and a much more cost-effective way would have been to simply take the subway out to LAX (the LAX Fly-Away buses had ceased operation for the day), but it would have involved lugging our luggage, which had grown by an extra bag as mentioned on our previous blog post, on the subway through three or four interchanges, and we couldn't be stuffed with that!! The car arrived just before 6:30pm - our flight wasn't scheduled to leave until 11:45pm, but we wanted to get there early to make sure that we had plenty of time to locate the right terminal, check in, make sure we were in the right spot and then update the blog - and had us at LAX just before 7:30pm. We were able to check-in for our flight straight away at a pretty deserted Terminal 4, and our boarding passes were issued for both the LA/Auckland and the Auckland/Melbourne legs of our flight. Our luggage was weighed and tagged - whilst our suitcases had both added about six kilograms each, and the extra bag was another ten kilograms, we were still way under our baggage allowance of two bags each at 32kg (70 lbs) per piece!! What was different though, was the the check-in desk didn't take care of our luggage - they booked it directly through to Melbourne for us, meaning that we wouldn't have to worry about it at Auckland - but we had to take it ourselves up to the TSA screening point further along the terminal, where it was then loaded onto a conveyor and disappeared into the depths of the airport, to be seen again when we arrived in Melbourne.

It was then time to pass through the Customs screening point, where not only did we have to pass our carry-on luggage, which included the laptop having to be taken out of its bag, through the X-ray machine, but I also had to remove my hooded jacket and shoes and pass them through as well!!!! All was good though - nothing beeped at me either when I walked through the scanner or when the bags passed through the machine, and it was onto the departure lounge, where we discovered that there was very little in the way of services aside from three shops selling LA souvenirs - there was a book shop/newsagent, a Burger King, a Chili's and a Starbucks coffee, and that was it. There wasn't even any internet-enabled computers, pay or not, anywhere to be located - the reason that our promised post at the airport didn't eventuate. The wait for boarding didn't seem like it was anywhere near the actual time that it took, and we boarded the plane just before 11:15pm, thinking that we might actually get a delay-free service.

I thought wrong. The plane didn't end up taking off until just before 1:00am Friday morning, a good hour after the scheduled departure time, as some bright-spark engineer over-filled the main fuel tank, throwing the balance of the plane out of whack. The excess fuel had to be transferred to another fuel tank, and the cargo then re-arranged to distribute the weight of the plane evenly, and whilst it was the sensible thing to do, it was annoying to have to wait late at night, with our eyes hanging out of our heads, because a trained and qualified engineer couldn't do his job properly.

We eventually got airborne though, and the Qantas staff wasted no time in bringing out supper - with Sarah again being served first, a good 25 minutes before I did - so that we could wolf it down and get some shut-eye. Sleeping on the plane was much easier this time around, likely because the excitement factor of the trip up wasn't there, and also because we had done it before, and we got a good six or so hours sleep, waking to look at the destination map and see only six hours remaining in our journey. I then watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button on the in-flight entertainment system, which took about two-and-a-half hours, before looking again at the destination map when the movie had finished and saw that we had only an hour-and-a-half before we reached our destination. I wondered if my calculations were out or if I had fallen asleep again when I saw that the highlighted city on the map wasn't Auckland, but the Fijian city of Nadi. Eventually, other people started to look at the destination map and think that something was up as well, and the captain soon came over the public address system to tell us that there would be another delay - early-morning fog had set in pretty thickly over the New Zealand cities of Auckland and Christchurch, so we would have to land at Nadi, re-fuel and wait until the fog had lifted. We were at Nadi for right on an hour, and we weren't able to leave the plane during the stop-over, so by the time we took off again for the two-hour trip to Auckland, we were pretty keen to get the flight over with!!

The one positive that the delays gave us was that it cut down our waiting time in Auckland - instead of a five-hour lay-over, we were looking at only about ninety minutes instead. We landed in Auckland, cleared the screening point at the International Transfers station, and then waited for about an hour before we could descend to the departure gate. In that time, I took $50 out of an ATM to find that New Zealand money is of the same plastic-y consistency of Australian cash, and bought a drink and a sausage roll that tasted like it had been sitting in the bain marie for a week, and gained $40-odd dollars change. I kept a $20 note and Sarah took the rest as souvenirs to say that we had been in New Zealand, and it also meant that I had three different countries' $20 notes in my wallet, an Aussie one (which had been there all trip), a Kiwi one and a US one!!

Our flight was supposed to leave New Zealand at 1:00pm local time - it was now Saturday 27th June - and arrive in Melbourne just after 3:00pm local time, with Melbourne time being two hours behind Auckland time, meaning four hours of flying time. The plane, which was a lot smaller than our LA/Auckland plane - it was the size of a domestic Australian plane - actually left closer to 1:30pm - we boarded late, and then had to wait on the tarmac for other planes to take off at their scheduled times before we could up and leave. We got going just after 1:30pm as it was, and they again wasted no time in bringing the food out - Qantas must think that if they feed people quickly after a delay, they'll forget all about the delay!! They were pretty good with it - the food cart came around, then the drinks (Bundy Rum and Coke - you beauty!!), and then the ice-creams, which took up a good two hours of flying time. By the time I caught a bit of shut-eye, read a book and knocked off a few puzzles from the That's Life Crack A Code book that you'll remember from one of the very first posts, that was bought with the $15 allowance that Qantas gave us as compensation for our initial flight being late, we were ready to descend into Melbourne, and back home.

In arriving at Melbourne, it took almost no time at all to clear Customs, thanks to the SmartGate passport control process that Australian airports have introduced. Instead of having to line up to speak with a Customs officer, instead you put your passport (if you have an e-Passport) into a little machine face-down on the picture page, it asks you a few questions, then spits out a ticket. You take the ticket to the second SmartGate gate, insert it into the machine, stare at a camera where it verifies that your face matches the digital image recorded on the passport, and you are away. Took me three minutes - it took Sarah a little longer though, as the machine didn't recognise her face, so she had to go through the manual gate. The main delay was waiting for our luggage to come off the plane. Sarah's suitcase and the brown duffle bag were on the first lot of luggage unloaded, and my suitcase was one of the first bags down the chute on the second unload, so we gathered them, headed for the baggage screening point (where we were seperated, as Sarah had to declare a packet of Milk Duds that she had brought back to Oz for her friend Natalie), had my luggage screened and passed, and walked out into the Arrivals terminal, where both Sarah's Mum, Trish, and her cousin Ingrid were waiting for us - Sarah emerging a minute or so after me.

And so, Shaun and Sarah's American Adventure has ended. Thank you so much to everyone for keeping track of our little holiday - it astounded us to check the site stats every so often and see how many people were reading this. Unfortunately, after a couple of days of getting our bearings, it's back to the real world tomorrow - work starts again on Tuesday, and I'm commentating the EJ Whitten Legend's Game - a charity Australian Rules Football match - tomorrow night at Etihad Stadium for Melbourne radio station 3WBC (check it out on-line from 8:30pm Melbourne time on Tuesday June 30th - would make it 10:30am US Eastern Time on Wednesday July 1). Thanks in particular to the Red Sox crew who kept checking out the blog and adding their comments along the way - plans are already in place for a return next season at around the same time, but with my brother for a baseball holiday!! And so ends this little blog - it's been a pleasure writing it for you, and I hope that it gave you a good insight into our travels, and provided any future US travellers (or Americans coming to Oz) with a few tips and hints for their trip. I'm going to end this blog in what some will consider a very familiar fashion - with the same ending that I used to use for a weekly column that I wrote on the Eastern Football League website. So, for the final time on our holiday, you can stick a fork in me, as I am done.

Here we are, sitting at Melbourne Airport at the international departure gates, waiting for Qantas Flight QF093, schedulled for 10:15am. Scheduled, though, is the key word. An announcement just came over the public address system saying that QF093 has been diverted to Sydney due to weather here in Melbourne (strange, considering the thick fog that had blanketed the city earlier this morning has now disappeared, replaced by thin clouds and bright sunshine - or at least it is staring out the window here at the airport), and the departure time has been delayed until 12:45pm. AAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHHHH!!! Means that arrival time in Los Angeles will now be around 10:00am Sunday morning local time - the rental car is booked to be picked up at 12:00pm, and the agency shuts at 2:00pm. Could be cutting it fine - if needs be, a call may have to be made to Budget when we hit America!!

So for now, we wait...................

OK, I know, I said I was going to update this on Wednesday night, and it's now Saturday!!! I beg forgiveness - it's been a busy week with work and travel preparation!!

But here we are, at 7:05am on Saturday morning, just one day away from the holiday that we've been looking forward to since mid-November last year. I'm officially on holidays now, according to Central Cleaning Supplies, my employer of four (and likely many more) years, which is an awesome feeling!! Not completely free yet though, as I've got a pretty big Saturday ahead of me with the Eastern Football League, hosting our EFL Saturday broadcast from 1pm until 5pm today of the Vermont vs Scoresby Division One clash, which (warning - shameless plug coming up) you can listen to live at www.efl.org.au, then dashing back to EFL headquarters to send through the day's scores to the daily Melbourne newspapers and organise our EFL Sunday radio show for tomorrow morning - a show I would normally be hosting if not for Qantas Flight QF93 waiting to whisk me away to the land of liberty!!

So why am I doing all of this work for a show that I'm not going to be on?? The man entrusted with the responsibility of these shenanigans as a rule, EFL Media Manager Anthony Stanguts, is in Italy at time of writing, courtesy of SBS and Heineken, and a contest that they ran for a trip to the UEFA Champions League soccer final which occured last Thursday morning (AUS time). Old Gutsy didn't enter the competition himself - a mate entered for him - but was lucky enough to receive the phonecall saying that he'd won!! Luckily, he did the right thing and took his mate with him!!! I thrust up my hand as soon as I heard and asked for the responsibility of leading the broadcast today, as I love the five-year involvement I have had with the EFL as part of the Media Team, and also hope that by adding these strings to my bow, it might pay off down the track somewhere!!

But I digress, and will start talking again about our holiday rather than someone else's - after all, it's my blog, not Gutsy's!!! I almost can't believe that I'm on the verge of my first overseas trip - and my first plane trip that will be longer than an hour (in contrast, Sarah is a more experienced aeronaut, having completed air journeys from Melbourne to Port Douglas, a marathon four-hour journey in contrast to my Melbourne to Sydney and Melbourne to Hobart efforts, where the plane takes off, levels out for long enough to have one beer, then starts to descend again!!). Part of the reason that it feels so surreal is because this trip has been in the planning stage for over seven months now, and it's strange to feel that all of the planning, all of the research and all of the dreaming is starting to pay off.

The seeds of this trip were planted back in mid-November 2008, when I was on my last annual leave stretch. Sarah didn't have that time off, and so I was a dutiful boyfriend and picked her up from work a couple of times that week (we don't live together yet - I'm in the Melbourne inner north-westen suburb of Avondale Heights, and Sarah resides in trendy inner-eastern Hawthorn). One night as we were sitting in her flat talking, and I was making Sarah slightly jealous by regaling her with stories of the nothing-ness that was being performed on my time off, we started talking about the possibility of taking an overseas trip together. We started throwing up destinations, and when Sarah mentioned "America", an alarm bell went off in my sub-conscious. In my younger and more impressionable years, I was almost infatuated with America, going so far as even performing the Star Spangled Banner as part of a talent show when I was in Grade 6 (won the show too - must have been back in the days when I was partly able to hold a tune)!! I probed further, and Sarah got quite excited when she mentioned the prospect of seeing Times Square in New York and Sea World in San Diego. I immediately thought of the Boston Red Sox, the US Major League Baseball team whom I have taken quite an interest in, to the point of almost becoming as fanatical about the Sox as I am of my beloved Western Bulldogs in the AFL. The next day, during a prolonged bout of nothingness, I decided to jump on the Internet and do a bit of research into this trip. The thought was always to do a "road trip" across America, as I love nothing more than to jump in the car and explore the country via driving long stretches of highway, so I spent the afternoon and devised an itinerary of sorts, which was met with excitement when presented to the beautiful one later that night!! The decision was then made - we're going to America, and we're doing it in June 2009 - a risky proposition for a dedicated footy-head like myself, but given that the Queen's Birthday weekend here in Oz represents a week off for the EFL, it made the decision much easier!!! It was almost fate that Qantas announced a 2-for-1 sale on international fares a little over a week later, and dollars were coughed up and flights booked!!!

So here we are now, almost ready to go. Below is our intended itinerary for the trip, so you have an idea of where we are going to be from day-to-day. This itinerary has gone through some tweaking since mid-November - it started with us touring America in a Recreational Vehicle before I decided that driving on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road in a vehicle much larger than anything I had driven before wasn't the best of ideas, and has since been changed to a intermediate-sized car from Budget, with hotel accomodation on our travels as the go.

Sunday May 31st has the potential to be the longest day in history. Actually, scratch the word "potential", it will be the longest day in history!!! Qantas Flight QF93 leaves Melbourne Airport at 10:15am, meaning that the recommended time of getting to the airport in 8:15am, which means 7:15am for someone like myself that has a phobia of being late!! It also means that rising from the boudouir no later than 6:00am is on the cards, which hasn't impressed Sarah, who just L-O-V-E-S a good sleep-in. I suggested the possibility of rising at 5:00am, but was quickly given "the look" - a fearful thing, as anyone who has experienced it from one Sarah Jane Lynn will testify - so that idea was quickly consigned to the back-burner!! The flight takes a touch over fourteen hours, as we have scored a direct flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles, which means that the plane is scheduled to touch down at LAX at approxmately 12:30am Monday morning, Melbourne time. Given, though, that there is a seventeen-hour time difference between Melbourne and LA at the moment, it actually means that we get into LA at 7:30am Sunday morning local time, which makes me wonder whether Qantas have emplyed DeLorean, with the addition of Doc Brown's flux capacitor, to fashion their fleet of aircraft!!! We've booked our rental car in Los Angeles, but I decided to book at an inner-city location rather than at the airport for a couple of reasons. The first, being a dedicated tight-wad, is so that I don't have to pay airport taxes on the rental, saving us a good hundred bucks, and the second is so I can get a look at the intricacies of American freeway traffic before I jump behind the wheel. The car is booked to be picked up at midday, which will give us time to clear Customs and Border Protection, catch the LAX Flyaway bus to Union Station (for you Aussies, the equivalent of catching the Skybus from Tullamarine to Spencer Street...I mean, Southern Cross Station), jumping on the Metro Purple Line subway train, alighting at the Wiltshire/Western station, and walking to the Budget Rent-A-Car outlet on Wilshire Boulevard to pick up the car. From there, we're driving to San Diego, about a two hour drive from all reports, where the Good Nite Inn Sea World San Diego will be our destination for the first two nights - accomodation that I booked just before Christmas when I found it on the internet for $AUD54 per night, and thought I couldn't pass up a bargain like that!!

Monday June 1st is Sea World day - the gates open at 10:00am, and we'll be there waiting to have Breakfast with Shamu, the killer whale who is the star of the show at Sea World, and whom Sarah is most excited about seeing.

Tuesday June 2nd sees us venture to the San Diego Zoo for the day, before the big road trip to Boston begins!! Anticipating to hit the road at about 3:00pm, and will make to Las Vegas that night before turning in, likely at the Las Vegas Hilton, and turning our back on the allure of Sin City for the night, knowing that we will be back later in the journey.

Wednesday June 3rd is when the fun begins!! Full day of driving awaits, with Denver, Colorado being the intended destination, which means about twelve hours of driving through what is reported to be some pretty incredible scenery, where we could experience the searing heat of the Nevada desert and see snow on the peaks of the Rocky Mountains in the same day!! The driving continues for the next three days, with the intended overnight stops being Des Moines in Iowa on the Thursday night, and Cleveland in Ohio on the Friday night, before rolling into Boston late Saturday afternoon (with the hope of maybe catching the Red Sox that Saturday night against the Texas Rangers - but don't tell Sarah, I haven't spoken to her about that yet!!)

Sunday June 7th is my highlight day of the trip. We rise early in Boston to head to the venerable Fenway Park, sacred home of the Boston Red Sox and one of the oldest Major League baseball stadiums in America. To make sure I got tickets to see the Sox at Fenway, which has been sold out for every game in the last 460-odd, I purchased a Red Sox Nation Ultimate Fan Pack back in January (the equivalent of buying an AFL membership). The Fan Pack gave me not only two tickets to a game of my choice, but also a free Fenway Park tour for two, which will be undertaken at 10:00am on this Sunday. I've entertained the thought of taking a Sherrin with me and having a kick on the hallowed turf, but fears of being frowned upon may see the footy left behind!! Then, at 1:35pm, the Red Sox play the Rangers again in the final game of a three-game series, which is going to be so awesome that words wouldn't do it justic.

Monday June 8th sees us leave Boston, and drive for four hours to one of the busiest cities in the world, New York. Times Square is high on Sarah's agenda, as is, unfortunately for the bank account, shopping on Fifth Avenue, and we'll take in a New York tour and a Broadway Show in the two nights we are there.

Wednesday June 10th, which is my brother Daniel's birthday, will be celebrated by taking the short drive from New York to Philadelphia, doing my best Rocky impersonation running up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, then spending the rest of the day weighing in on the often-raged debate about which of the host of local merchants makes the best of Philly's signature dish, the Philly Cheesesteak - yum!! Frugality will be ignored, as will belts and zippers!!

Thursday June 11th sees us leave Philadelphia, and hit the open road again. The intended destination is Orlando, Florida, where we are booked into the Courtyard at the Marriott Village in Lake Buena Vista for three nights from Saturday June 13th, so we pretty much have three days of quite leisurely driving in order to make it down to Orlando.

Once we hit Orlando, though, it's Mickey time. Saturday June 14th and Sunday June 15th will be spent at Walt Disney World in Orlando, which should be an awesome experience. The Saturday also marks a year since I once again set eyes on the most beautiful girl in the world, and Sarah and I re-started a relationship that laid dormant for seven years, since our days spent at the Student Village whilst studying at university.

We'll leave Orlando on Tuesday June 16th - the birthday of both Sarah's brother Andrew's and her cousin Brigid- and spend three days working our way up to Elvis country in Memphis, then swinging onto Interstate 40, which has replaced the old Route 66, the famous Mother Road, to Flagstaff in Arizona, which we intend to hit on Thursday June 18th. Flagstaff sits a comfortable hour's drive from the Grand Canyon, which will occupy us on Friday 19th June, before again hitting the road late that day and making trip number two to Las Vegas!!

This time, though, we're doing Vegas properly, spending Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights in Vegas, before leaving on Monday 22nd to head to San Francisco.

Tuesday June 23rd is my darling girl's birhday, so we'll spend the day in San Francisco doing whatever Sarah wants, which will likely be a sleep-in, followed by a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, chips for lunch, sightseeing and shopping during the afternoon then more chips, or an alternative potato-based dish for dinner!!!

Wednesday June 24th will see us drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles down Highway 1, reportedly one of the most beautiful drives in America (similar to the Great Ocean Road for us Aussies), before spending the night in Los Angeles and flying back to Australia at 11:45pm on Thursday June 25th. After a five hour stop over in Auckland, New Zealand, we will arrive back in Melbourne at around 3:30pm on Saturday June 27th - unfortunately too late to go to the footy!!

Well, that's our trip in a nutshell (and a bloody big nutshell it is!!). I'll be updating our blog every night (US time, so expect it late morning-early arvo in Australia), so make sure you check back in - I promise I'll try and make it funny and informative for you - as well as posting our happy snaps along the way.

I can't wait for these next twenty-four hours to pass, then go on the trip I have been dreaming about for so long now, with the love of my life by my side.....

G'day all (thought I'd start things off as Aussie as possible)!!

Welcome to the Travel Blog for our upcoming trip across America. Plane flies out on Sunday morning, meaning that seven months of planning, researching and anxious waiting are almost coming to an end!!!

We'll put a more detailed first post up later in the week (check around Wednesday night Melbourne time) - just wanted to put this up so that you didn't see a weird-looking blank screen when you enter our blog page!!!

Check back with you then,

Shaun and Sarah