Plans and preparations

Here we go! No longer constrained by concerns for my mother’s health (since she died last June at the impressive age of 95), we’re free to leave Australasia and travel to real Foreign Parts. In choosing our destination we were determined to limit ourselves to a fairly small geographic area, to avoid the if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Paris syndrome. Peter has a yen to visit rural France, having only been to Paris and Marseilles. I thought we could include Spain and Portugal without exceeding the limit for the number of countries you can visit in 6 weeks and stay sane. And we both have had a lifelong dream of barging up and down French canals. With those parameters and a huge swag of Frequent Flyer points between us, we got on the web and started exploring. By mid-April when we were off to Port Davey in Nahani, thereby going out of internet access for an extended period, we had used our points to book a return flight to Paris, organised a Eurolease deal giving us a new Renault for the whole trip, found a centre for our first two weeks by renting self-catering accommodation in the Loire Valley near Amboise (see http://www.vrbo.com/23364), and made firm plans for the last fortnight by renting a powerboat from Daon to explore the rivers and canals of Anjou (see http://www.canalboatholidays.com/selectregion.aspx?countryid=290). That leaves a little over two weeks in the middle free to drive ourselves around Spain and Portugal. We are pathetically excited about the whole trip, because it is over a decade since we crossed the equator into the other hemisphere. Peter has even stopped dreading the long flights to the other side of the world as we’ve managed to book business class flights on Finnair from Hong Kong to Paris via Helsinki, business class on BA from Paris to London, and premium economy on Qantas from London to Melbourne. Qantas is generally very miserly with frequent flyer bookings, but its partner airlines seem more generous. Our only real cattle class flight is the first leg from Melbourne to HK, and we still have hopes of upgrading that before we leave. Meanwhile, I’m trying to resuscitate my schoolgirl French and am pleasantly surprised to find that although I can no longer remember what happened yesterday with any certainty, the French that I learned five decades ago doesn’t seem to be too far below the surface for retrieval. Vraiment incroyable.