Back in 2009, one of my girlfriends Jenn and I booked a trip to Australia. It was one of the most exciting things I've ever done. It was the first big trip I went on after graduating university and starting work. Jenn and I were working together at the hospital at the time, and we just decided to book it. I remember how excited we were, discussing it over Starbucks and reading all the travel books at Chapters. It was the first time I realised that traveling can be so easy - you just save your money and book a flight. It doesn't matter how far or how exotic a place might seem. You can sort out all the other details, but if it's somewhere you want to see, just do it.

Tj and I had been planning on doing our first trip together just the two of us. But instead, we changed it so I would go to Australia for two weeks, meet him in Thailand for a week, and then he would continue on traveling with his boys for a few weeks after that. I don't know how we sorted it all out but somehow we did.

The flight to Australia was awesome - it wasn't very full, so I had all three seats to myself, and three blankets and three pillows. We flew into Sydney. We were there for a few days, and even saw an orchestra performance at the Sydney Opera House but it was fall, and the weather got crappy. It was windy and rainy, so we booked our next flight up to Cairns! My luggage was soaked all the way through just from being loaded onto the plane - that's how strong the rain was.

We stayed at a lovely hostel in Cairns where we had a  private room for just for the two of us. Cairns was awesome (though I still don't know how to pronounce it - is it like 'carens' or 'cans'?). We went seadoo-ing and snorkeling in the great barrier reef. We even rented a car and Jenn drove to the Daintree Rainforest to go ziplining. The drive along the coast was gorgeous and a little lizard hopped across the road and we both screamed because it looked like a tiny dinosaur.  We had only bought a one way ticket to Cairns, but every time it came to booking the next part of our trip, we always wanted to stay another day or two.

Eventually we moved on to Brisbane. We really wanted to see the Australia Zoo, all because we were Steve Irwin fans. I got to hold a Koala bear, which felt like it was hugging me, but made my t-shirt really stinky for the rest of the day.

And finally it was back to Sydney. I did a hop-on hop-off bus tour and made my way to the famous Bondi Beach. The weather was much better this time.

It was the trip of a lifetime! It was the first time I'd been away from home for so long, so I'm sure I was a little whiny and homesick at times (sorry Jenn) lol. But I'll never forget such an amazing trip and all the fun times we had. Just looking at all of our pictures for this blog post reminded me of all the silly things we did.  I remember calling Tj and going on and on about how great Australia was, and how it reminded me of Canada only with cooler accents. Who would have known we would live here one day!! When it came time to make the decision about Australia, it was a pretty easy one. Even though it had been years since I had been here, and Tj had never been, I knew we would love it.