Our first post from Australia !

It's been three days since we arrived in Australia now and it's time to post an update on what has been going on since our last post. After our last post, we packed our suitcases and our laptops plus some last minute packing. We went to the Schiphol airport around 13:00 together with our parents who wanted to wave us off at the terminal. Around 15:00 we arrived at the airport hotel called CitizenM and which is really nice. It's a smallish room but you got everything there and there's plenty of gadgets for the 30+ kids , so we weren't bored. Also free movies on demand and easy check in and check out ( all done with computers , very fast and efficient ) made our stay at the CitizenM very comfortable. We had a Burger King meal at the airport but they did have sandwiches at the hotel in case we wanted something healthier. At 19:00 we went to bed, the sound insulation in the hotel was so good that we could not hear the planes taking off 100 meters down the runway ( no idea how they do that ). I didn't get much sleep that night, perhaps I dozed for about half an hour or so but the stress of the emigration kept me up most of the night. That said, just laying on the bed proved to be enough anyway. We woke up at 07:20 and after showering and having a takeaway brekkie we walked to the terminal ( 3 minutes walk ) and checked in our luggage around 09:00. Our luggage was about 5 kilo's overweight but Singapore Airlines was very friendly and didn't charge us extra. In total our luggage weighted 75 kilo's ( and as emigrants we were allowed 30 kilo's per person ) and we had about 12 kilo's of hand luggage with us ( mostly the breakable stuff like laptops and mediaplayers and the like ). After checking in we met up with the parents in the terminal and stood outside in the fresh air for about 1 hour till we decided to go catch our flight ( which was scheduled for boarding at 11:30 ). One thing I never got used to in The Netherlands was the constant amalgamation of human presence. Wherever I would stand, there'd be 2-4 people within a minute and this "group effect" only got worse. After 1 hour of standing outside , I counted about 22 people who amalgamated around my presence. Strangely, when we got there, we were the only ones. I will never get used to it; it's typical Dutch herding mentality and you see it on campings too. If you see a group of caravans standing on top of eachother with wide space everywhere else , then you can bet they are dutch. Anyway, back to where we were : The goodbye's.

The farewells were hard. Our parents and Lex's brother were there to wave us off. I think I only saw my mother cry once before and that's when my grandmother passed away. It was a difficult goodbye, tears and quick jokes to 'keep the spirits high' all over the place. The queue was quite long and by the time we were at passport control, we lost sight of them. After passing by the passport control, we moved to the gate and grabbed a chair at the gate opposite of ours ( less crowded, but the same views ) and sat down for an hour and went to the toilet a few times : I've never been an easy passenger I must admit, however when I pilot something myself then I love it : I think the loss of control is what gets to me. Don't like trains, don't like planes ; never have and never will. We got on board the plane and after a short taxi we were off in the air !

It felt good to leave Europe behind.

Counting days : Our last post from The Netherlands

Well, this will be our last post from The Netherlands. We are leaving for the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport in 5 hours where we have booked a Hotel for the night. We want to go to bed around 20:00 tonight in order to get a good rest before the flight. We have been getting up at 07:00 every day for the last week and it helped us feel more relaxed during the day. Our flight leaves at 11:30 on Wednesday ( Singapore Airlines ) and we will arrive early morning on Thursday. The total trip takes 27 hours so we will try and get some sleep on the second flight from Singapore to Brisbane. We took some flight tablets with us ( PrimaTour ) which hopefully will make our flights a little less aggravating. We got some pictures today from our Puppy and our Puss ! Puss looked a bit angry and unsettled, the puppy looked a bit lost also, but they are both doing reasonably ok and Lex has taught our Puppy what the words "We'll be back" mean so he's convinced the Puppy will tell the Puss that everything is indeed ok and that we will be picking them up in 3.5 weeks. Lex has a job interview next week , a job on the Sunshine Coast ! It's a simple job fixing desktop computers, but it would be a nice start and most importantly it will be on the Sunshine Coast. We are weighing our bags at the moment and making sure none of the bags is heavier than 32 kilo's while taking as much as possible of course. We have gotten everything we wanted to take with us and everything's ready. Some final dust cleaning to leave the house clean when we leave, and then we wait a few hours.
We'll be glad when we finally land in Brisbane and we can stop counting days, hours , minutes. And then we'll catch ourselves counting "Only 3 weeks till we can pickup the pets"

two more sleeps !

I still remember like the day of yesterday when we said "Only 5 months now". Well, guess what ? Now it's only 2 more sleeps ! It's scary and exciting and a mix of emotions all at once. Tuesday we will be leaving for the Hotel in Amsterdam Schiphol ( the Airport ) and stay there for the night. The Hotel is at walking distance from the departure hall so we don't have to worry about parking tickets, breakdowns or flat tires or anything else actually : It's a real nice feeling and it's a great way to start a long trip like this one.

Our parents will be there to wave us off at the airport ( they have booked a hotel in the area also ) so we'll probably see some tears flowing. Before they know it they will say "Only 5 months now" :)

Flight Tracker

By now, everyone will have lost the Flight Tracker links I'm sure, so here they are again due to popular demand :

Brisbane arrivals :
http://bne.webtrak-lochard.com/template/index.html

Singapore tracker :
http://www.flightview.com/TravelTools/default.asp

They work by following the plane beacon that every commercial plane is obliged to have on board and which transmits data every so many seconds. This data is then plotted on google maps ( or microsoft Live maps ) and results in an actual location plot of the plane. Good luck tracking us :)

Our pets have landed !

We tracked the plane that our pets were on and they have just landed. We hope they are all right and we'll call the Sydney quarantine on Monday to make sure they are OK.

Puppy and Puss are on the plane !

This morning was an early one, we stood up at 04:00 AM in order to be in front of the dutch traffic jams. It's good we did too, because when we left at 05:00 AM , the roads were already getting busier. This is one big part of The Netherlands that I will never miss : The insane traffic. We packed the Puss and the Puppy in their transporter boxes which we already bought 1 year ago to get them acclimatized, and set sail ( wheel ) to VCK Live Animal Transports at the Amsterdam Airport. The roads were incredibly busy but we only had two small 1-2 kilometers of traffic jams, which is a lot better than the usual 30-80 kilometers of traffic jams every morning on that road. Ofcourse, you have to get out of bed at 04:00 for this luxury.
When we arrived we were greeted by the very friendly Linda from VCK who seemed to have done this thing a million times before : Something that was reassuring. She took some photocopies of everything, then put them in a few different envelopes and went to get the animals. We had to replace Puss's quarters with a certified kennel-carrier, but the Puppy had a certified one which saved us 200 Euro's. They will arrive in about 24-27 hours from now in Sydney and go in quarantine for 30 days. Brisbane doesn't have a quarantine quarters so we'll have to pick em up by car , which is ok because we'll see some of Sydney too.

We miss our babies a lot.

How much is 1 cubic meter ( 1m3 ) ?

I had trouble at first to imagine how big 1m3 really was. Was it 17 boxes, 10 boxes, 5 boxes ? And how big were those boxes ? Well, here are two pictures of how much 1m3 really is ( 6 big boxes + 2 small ones in our case ). I put the shoe and water bottle (1.5 liters) on there so you have a reference to the dimensions of the boxes. ( Uninteresting trivia : it's a real Harley-Davidson shoe that we bought in America while we did the Route66 on our rented Harley Davidson motorbikes ! )