Final preparations

Police station, bank, newsagents, tax agent, council, TAFE enrolment for Bridget ......... gradually ticking things off the list. Now dog, cat, mail, mowing the lawns ... all the arrangements still to finalise.
Last day at school today. Reports uploaded, checklists done, yard duty (today x 2), and the kids threw a "surprise party". They had fun. We had a few end of year gifts exchange hands, and now I have to get the room tidied up for the teacher who will have them for the last 3 weeks of the year. Good luck Carolyn.
Home shortly to get some packing done. We catch the Gull Bus from Geelong tomorrow morning at 7:15 am. We fly from Tullamarine at 11:35 am to Changi with Singapore Airlines, where we have a 4 hour stopover before heading on to Kolkata, where Bridget will meet us and our Indian adventure will begin.

Preparation

I've known that we would be taking this journey sometime in 2012, ever since Bridget was accepted to be a Young People Without Borders trailblazer in late 2011. She was originally going to be volunteering in India in early 2012, but for a variety of reasons decided to postpone travels until the second half of the year. She deferred her studies at RMIT and focussed on getting ready to travel in the latter half of the year. She was given a posting to Takdah, a village that is "an hour's bumpy ride" out of Darjeeling in West Bengal, India. This is a small neck of land in between Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet, north of Bangladesh. For many years, parts of this area were closed to foreign travellers, where you needed special permits to enter. I wasn't quite sure exactly when we would travel, but found out that she finished her placement on early December. That meant that that if we wanted Bridget to show us around, we would have to be there before she finished her posting. She is committed to be there until the Celebration Day on December 9th. I have had fun, but also found it terribly frustrating trying to connect our travels and accommodation. To start with Bridget was going to help organise and plan the first part of December and I would look at the latter half and time in Sri Lanka in January. All the advice suggested that we should organise a driver for our time in Sri Lanka. After some research on a variety of websites including Lonely Planet, I found a contact that I decided to email about travel around the island for 3 weeks. I provided dates and asked for a suggested itinerary, and was then sent a suggested plan and price. There will be five of us travelling and we now have travel and accommodation booked around the island from January 1st, when we are met at the airport in Colombo, until we fly out, back to Australia on January 21st.