I post to mention that I’ll post here on our travels beginning next month.  If you read this pass on the word.

Our biggest trip of a life time will take us to San Francisco to visit with Alex and then on to Australia, Papua New Guinea, and New Zealand.  The planning has been done and reservations made.  Now if we just don’t get lost.

In outline, we will visit with Alex and tour the strangely elegant city he lives in.  Autumn bird migration begins in August, so we should find feathered jewels in Golden Gate Park and at West End.

My sister will arrive in time to join our departure to Cairns Aus where we will recover from and adjust to changes in season, time, and location.  Then on to an old banana plantation on the island of New Britain in PNG where we will enjoy the warmth, beach and reefs of the Bismarck Sea.  The birding tour we signed on to will join us there and take us back to the mainland and into the central mountains with lodges at 7 and 9K feet above sea level.  There it will likely be cool and damp for viewing birds of paradise, megapodes, and bower birds.  

We will return to Cairns, visit the Great Barrier Reef, and make an auto tour of the northeastern Australia tropics before flying to Sydney where we will see West Side Story at the famous opera house.  We will rent a camper and make a loop to Canberra and the coastline south of Sydney.

We fly on to Dunedin at the southeast corner of the South Island of New Zealand.  There we will see albatross after visiting the fiordlands to the west of that town.  We fly again to Auckland to make a loop or the North Island.  Important stops will be on small offshore islands kept “predator free” to conserve native birds and other wildlife.  

We will lastly spend a bit of time in Auckland town before returning home.  Some trip.