Attempting to plan this trip, we started out with a lot of questions. Where should we go? What do we want to do? How long should we spend in each spot? How long is too long until our parents actually keel over & have a heart attack?
First we decided to focus our trip on South East Asia / Australia and made a wishlist of places and activities. Our bucket list items included: going to the top of the Burj Khalifa, paragliding in New Zealand, scuba diving in Indonesia, visiting the great Red Rock in Australia, seeing the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, feeding elephants in a sanctuary & more. From there, we started piecing our must-do actives into a trip.
Through friends, Airtreks.com was recommended to us as a great way to book multi-flight trips, efficiently and at a low cost. This company focuses on bundling flights together and finding the best deals based on our preferences.
Word of mouth played a huge factor in planning the nitty gritty of our trip. Shout out to Kiernan, Zach, Casey & Andrew, Christina, Amanda, Erin, Steve, Gordon, J.T., Rachel, Peter, Alexis, Alex, Sam, Maddy, Sirma and the Shields fam for all of the recommendations.
From there we scoured books, blogs, travel magazines and Instagram to find the places and activities that we wanted to try.
With scuba diving finding it’s way on our bucket lists, we set out to become open water certified in July. Erin got her certification through Pan Aqua Diving in New York City and Matt got his through Underwater World in Pennsylvania. I
