My Travel Plans For The Rest of 2017.

So far this year I've managed to visit; Melbourne, Perth, Singapore, Cambodia (a new country for me), Hong Kong, London, Paris, and Canberra. Singapore and Hong Kong were both on my original list, and I also said how I wanted to visit more of Australia. As you know, Perth is somewhere I've been to dozens of times before and I lived there when I was a child, but apart from Western Australia I'd never really visited many other places here. I loved my Melbourne and Canberra trips, and I have a couple more Aussie trips lined up for the second half of this year!

So, where else am I going this year? I've now booked all of my travel for the next few months, and am SO excited about it all! 

September is a super busy month for me travel wise. I'm going to Cairns at the very beginning of the month for 2 nights as one of my little weekend '48 hour' trips. My main reason for going is to visit the Great Barrier Reef - you can only swim in the water up there 6 months of the year due to the jellyfish, and with the ongoing coral bleaching issues I was desperate to visit ASAP. 

There aren't really any 'luxury' hotels in Cairns, so I'm just staying at the Hilton as I have my Diamond status with them so get a small discount and free breaky etc. I have two days up there, so I'm planning on doing a day trip out to the reef on one day, and then a half day on Fitzroy Island the next day. You have no clue how excited I am about this, and I can't wait to share it with all of you!!

Yep, Melbs again for the second time this year! Last time I went just for 2 nights and the main reason we went was for the Australian Open Tennis finals, so I'm pretty excited to go again mid-September for 3 nights and actually experience Melbourne and it's crazy cool bar scene properly! One of my besties from Perth is flying over, and another two friends from Perth now live there, so it's gonna be a little Perth reunion :)

Another trip to visit friends! This is a very quick New Zealand trip as we have a public holiday in early October, so I took two days off work to coincide with it. I'm flying out to Dunedin on the Thursday night via Wellington, then flying back to Sydney from Dunedin on the Tuesday. 

The flights were super expensive because of the public holiday, and the cheapest ones included a long stopover in Wellington. Luckily I also have a friend who lives there, so I'm staying there for a night and will have a few hours to explore, before getting back on the plane to fly down to Dunedin on the South Island. 

One of my oldest and closes friends from England, Katie, moved to New Zealand last year, so we're just going to have a few days together catching up, exploring Dunedin and the surrounding countryside, and eating all the food!

After New Zealand I then have a two month travel-break before my big NYC trip. I want to be in Sydney for the start of summer, and then I fly off to New York mid-December. It's always been a dream of mine to visit NYC around Christmas time, and every time I think about my trip my heart gets those excited flutters! 

I'm flying from Sydney to NYC in First Class with Singapore Airlines as I had a whole bunch of frequent flyer points, and I don't think I've EVER been this excited to get on a plane before! I've already booked my meals with their 'Book the Chef', and I'm having lobster twice and steak. #yolo. Sydney to New York is a bit of a pain in the A, you have to fly to Singapore (I'll be stopping off in Singapore for the day to give myself a break from flying), then to Frankfurt, then to NYC.

When I'm in NYC I'm gonna do all the traditional Christmas things, including seeing the Christmas Jazz concert at the Lincoln Centre, and the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular at Radio City Music Hall!

When I was looking at flights from NYC to London, all of the one-way flights were coming up at over £1000, but then I found ones with Icelandair for just £250. You could choose between a one hour stopover, or a 9 hour stopover...so I thought I'd do the 9 hour one and see a bit of Iceland! Because it's winter it will be dark when I land, so I'm going to go to the Blue Lagoon so I'm there when the sunrises, and then head into Rekjavik to explore a bit, before heading back to the airport in the late afternoon.

And then it's London!!! I was in Perth for Christmas last year and found I really missed Christmas at home. Don't get me wrong, I still had a really awesome Christmas, but the heat just isn't quite the same as having a proper cold Christmas. I'll be back in London for two weeks, and I'll be working in the London office for a few days before I go on holidays for a week over Christmas and NY. I'm not gonna have much time to catch up with friends, so I'll probably just do one big event in a bar for my main group of friends, then see a few of the ones I didn't get to see much when I was back in July individually. 

This one is still up in the air as I need to get the days off work approved first, but at the moment I'm planning on flying to Dubai on 30th Dec so I can spend NYE in Dubai with Nigel and Laura as a little reunion from our epic time together last year! I've heard Dubai is one of the best places in the world to spend NYE because of all the parties, so fingers crossed I can get the holiday days!! If I do get the holiday days off work, I'll be heading to Abu Dhabi to visit the Grand Mosque, and possibly back to Oman to see more of the countryside there.

It's no secret that I spend the majority of my disposable income on travel, and I honestly wouldn't have it any other way. There's just something so magical about spending your hard earned money seeing the world and experiencing new things, instead of on random 'stuff' and clothing! Each time I go somewhere new I learn something about myself, and that is invaluable. Every year I aim to visit at least two new countries I've never been to before so I'm not *always* going back to the same places. This year I'll have three new countries under my belt; Cambodia, New Zealand, and Iceland.

Next year I'm hoping to finally get to the South Pacific islands, but what I've found this year when trying to book, is that it's REALLY difficult to get to them. Despite their close proximity to Australia here are only a couple of indirect flights a week, and they're on annoying days like Tuesdays and Thursdays etc, so I think I'm just gonna have to take a couple of weeks off work in 2018 and do a little island hop to 2 or 3 of them.