- Travel insurance! Must email our travel agent, Emma, for a quote, but from quick perusal of the brochure she gave us, NRMA looks better.
- Buy an umbrella stroller – last time we didn’t know what an umbrella stroller was, and the stroller we took was big enough it had to be “checked luggage” for a number of our flights, especially on smaller planes. We definitely want to have that stroller with us for the in between flight bits, where we have to get a toddler, two older kids, hand luggage for the lot of us, plus Elli’s car seat (which we will be using for most flights) from one plane to another, sometimes with a couple of hours to fill in. And we’ll be wanting to take a sling to carry Eliane in, cause that stroller is going to be full!
- Return stroller to friend’s who lent us one that they have used as travel stroller but that we’ve decided is too big.
- Buy a second suitcase. We have one good suitcase, which was fine with just the three of us last time, but with the five of us? I don’t think so!
- Consider whether we have appropriate bags for our carry-on luggage.
- Oh, get passports for everyone (except me, I had to renew mine last time). Getting a baby passport photo done is always fun! (not.)
- Declutter/tidy house for the house sitters!
- Organise to use that house cleaning voucher I bought a while ago, before it runs out at the end of August!
- Decide whether to let the housesitters manage the chooks or ‘board’ them with a friend.
- Book accommodation for the night we are spending in Athens (part of a night anyway – our flight out is about 5am, and it’s an international flight, so I’m guessing we need to be at the airport by around 3am. Fun!).
- Write packing list.
- Buy gifts for people we’ll be staying with.
- Ask friend’s who own the house on Karpathos whether there’s anything they’d like us to take over for them. Get a housewarming present for their house (which is new) (I’m thinking some kids books to leave there – and maybe some grownup ‘holiday reading’? After all, what’s a beach house without an Agatha Christie novel?)
- Pick up the tickets from the travel agent.
- Check with the travel agent about that flight that keeps getting moved up and back by five minutes – should we be worried about the connecting flight yet? There’s now only 45 minutes between them.
- Get approval for Eliane’s car seat from qantas and find out whether or not we’ll have to take it off the plane in Singapore.
