I woke this morning to an email to say that Emirates had ridiculously cheap flights to Sydney going on sale today, which was an answer to prayer (no, seriously) as I got a whole bunch of insurance money paid (way more than I was expecting) last week and I thought that if I saw cheap flights to Sydney I might just go…. yay for getting a little spoilt once in a while!
So, I frantically booked the tickets today, checked with friends that they’ll be there (and got my credit card sorted out as it expired yesterday and they hadn’t sent the new one yet) and I’ll be off for a week at the end of the month!
I had a few reasons for wanting to go away – firstly, I’m not working and it seems a waste not to get out and enjoy my freedom for now and also a good friend has just broken up with her boyfriend and moved down, so I’d love to see her and give her a hug or two as I’m sure she’s completely broken hearted. She’s a couple of years older than me and met him in Israel on a Christian tour, but somewhere along the way he’s lost his faith and she had to make the call that it just wasn’t going to work. I think that takes huge courage for a woman in her thirties. Huge. Everyone thought they were perfect together, everyone thinks she’s making a big mistake. I think she’s made the right call, she wasn’t happy and knew it wouldn’t work long term with him, but what a hard thing to do after they were together a couple of years.
So I’m going to be living pretty tight to save some money for the trip – not that I’ll be living the high life when I’m there, but I would like to do a little shopping if I can and the Australia dollar is pretty strong at the moment which is annoying.
It’ll be interesting to see how I cope with the trip brain injury wise – I tend to do way too much when I go back to Sydney. Lots of racing around visiting people and shopping and stuff. This time round I want to be a bit more quiet, my strategy is to hopefully book a hotel in the city for a night or two, so I can have a base there and do the city type stuff easily and the rest of the time I will be in a lovely little part of Sydney staying at a friend’s house and it will be easy to get to Cronulla beach and a few other areas I haven’t explored yet. I’d like to do some trips on the ferry and maybe do the walk from Bronte to Bondi as I haven’t been to Bondi for a few years. I think that will keep me plenty busy! Also flying Emirates is going to be great as they do a full service meal for the flight and have on demand entertainment which will be very relaxing and a treat at the price I paid for the tickets 
. Also, I’d been thinking about getting away in NZ, but most of my ideas probably involved driving which I’m not really that great at doing for a long period of time so I think flying there and relying on the fantastic public transport is a much better option.
Go the recession and cheap deals on flights!
