The time draws nearer! We have now paid for our airline tickets, so it’s all go. We fly out on January 17 – Donna’s birthday – at 9:30am, and arrive in Toronto at 4:30pm the same day, after a 23 hour flight. It will be a long day, and we will stretch out Donna’s birthday for as long as we can. She worked out that she will get about 41 hours worth of birthday! I’m wondering if I fly back the next year on *my* birthday whether I can skip one altogether? Speaking of which, my return ticket is booked via Vancouver where I hope to get off the plane and head up to Whistler for a few days before flying home. I’ve always wanted to ski at Whistler, so there’s another thing I can cross off the Dreambook list! We spoke to Dave and Heidi today, and I mentioned that we would be flying Air Canada. Heidi mentioned that she would see if it were possible to get some sort of upgrade to business class, at least on the domestic Canadian leg. I think we did well to partner up with someone whose wife works at Air Canada!

We also joined the Aeroplan frequent flyer scheme, which is aligned with Air Canada as part of the Star Alliance group. The points won’t be much use to us back in Australia, since Star Alliance doesn’t really have any local Australian airlines… nearest one would be Air New Zealand. However, if we earned enough points to get some decent discounts on car hire or hotel accommodation while we are in Canada it would come in very handy. We better start thinking about what to pack now! We can only have 2 bags of 23kg each, plus carry-on luggage. It sounds like a reasonable amount for a holiday, but when you are packing up to go live somewhere else for a year, 46kg each is really not a lot! We take more than that when we go camping for a weekend!