made it to "oz"

Hi all-- We arrived in Brisbane, Australia this morning after the longest flight of our lives. We departed from Billings on the 12th at 2:30, flew through Denver where we got to hang out with my best friend Heidi, then flew to LA where we caught our flight to AUS. Heidi upgraded us to 1st class for the 1st two flights so that was awesome. We flew to AUS on Virgin Australia and the flight was awesome except for the fact that it was 14 HOURS! With a flight that long and the time difference, we completely lost a day and arrived here today, the 14th. Our flight was actually to Sydney, but we got off in Brisbane for a layover and decided to stay because we were headed that way anyway. I had originally saw that our flight went through Brisbane and tried to book to there instead of Sydney but it was actually more expensive--weird how that works--so we just got off here anyway and it worked well. Next we are planning to head to the Great Barrier Reef and do some scuba diving!! We are really excited to be here. For any of you in Sydney, we'll be there at the end of our time in AUS so we'll see you then :-)

Getting ready for our departure

Hi everyone-- well this is my first attempt at "blogging." John and I have always joked about the idea of blogging, but after several of our friends started blogs while they were travelling and a million people asking us if we were going to have one, we decided it might be a good idea. As of today, John & I both have one week of work left--woohoo!!! Then we have to move out of our house (we're having a garage sale and selling everything we can't fit in our cars), complete our scuba certification (we have to do 4 open water dives in Jenny Lake--burr!!), and move everything to Montana. We'll be spending a little over a week in MT--My mom is getting married on Oct 4th (!!!), my cousin Val's wedding is the 10th, and we fly out of Billings on the 12th. Hopefully we'll have time in between the two weddings to go backpacking in the Beartooths :-) We have one-way tickets to Sydney and are planning to buy all our other tickets as we go. We are both really excited and I personally can't believe how close we are to our departure date. We have so much to get done before we leave! I guess that's it for now, but hopefully this will serve as a good way to keep track of us on our journey--especially for those of you who are going to meet up with us along the way :-)