The Old Fogies Travel Round the World

It has long been an ambition of Mr Curmudgeon to travel around the world, one day when coming out of the post office, he suggested it again. I think he was surprised to hear me agreeing with him.

September 2017 was the chosen month to do this and Mr Curmudgeon started planning our trip in July. He is excellent at booking holidays, and although this was a bit daunting he started booking. There was much discussion of the places we were going to travel to, Sydney Australia was a definite as was New York, but we were undecided on the other venues.

We looked at Dubai then Sydney, Singapore then Sydney, I especially was enamoured by visiting Raffles Hotel there, but in the end our chosen first venue was Hong Kong. This now Chinese city was going to be interesting as it would be the only official non-English speaking, although there is still a lot of English spoken there.   After Sydney we decided to travel to the New Zealand City of Auckland, which on the face of it did not have many spectacular sites, but seemed a good place to capture our breath before tackling North America.

Again, much discussion on where to go in North America before travelling to New York, Vancouver was discussed but the travelling was so difficult so we decided on San Francisco and then to New York our final venue before travelling home.

I was a bit apprehensive as we had not undertaken a long-haul flight before, and we are getting on a bit, when Mr Curmudgeon told me it would be 12 hours to Hong Kong I started getting really nervous, that’s seemed like a long time being very inactive, and I started to get concerned about things, for example what about DVT (deep vein thrombosis), would I be able to sleep, would I cope,  I did not share all my concerns with Mr Curmudgeon as he sometimes gets frustrated with me if I start panicking.

The surprising thing was that travelling from Auckland to San Francisco would mean crossing the international date line, this meant that September 16^th would be an extraordinary long day of 36 hours but never mind I had to get Hong Kong out of the way first.

After everything was booked, the next step was deciding what to take, what would the weather be like, would we need a mix of warm clothing as well as summer clothing. Packing our suitcases became a real discussion, with Mr Curmudgeon telling me off for taking so much.

September 1^st dawned bright and clear, OMG today was the day, having checked everything around the house, clearing out the fridge and just doing that final check we were ready to depart to Heathrow, I cannot wait for the Elizabeth line when it will take only 25 minutes but the trek to Heathrow took us about an hour.

After the check-in, we went to the gate and Mr Curmudgeon took some photos of our BA plane, it was an Airbus so very modern but definitely not sleek looking.

There was no going back now we started boarding we were on our way – OMG what had I let myself in for.

Look out for posts from our trip we had some great fun and want to share it with you.

Old Fogies Travels are the adventures of two elderly Londoners (The Old Fogies) as they explore their home town and travel around the world looking out for the strange, unusual and absurd.

Our articles are published on our blog but also listed on the website of our friends at Visiting London Guide.com here.

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