Before our eldest daughter got married, we wanted to take her on a trip. She chose New Zealand! We were super excited because to date, it’s the most gorgeous place we’ve visited. And when John and I went we spent only a few days on the north part of the north island. With our daughter Jessi, we were going to try and see a lot more!
Whenever we book a trip, we look at hubs to see if we should make a stop at a layover destination. Sure enough, using our points for this trip meant a few layovers. And ones we definitely wanted to take advantage of. We flew United Denver to LA, LA to Melbourne. Which was our first stop. We didn’t have a ton of time to spare, Jessi was a night nurse at St. Joseph’s hospital and could only take so much time off. So we opted for just one night there. Then on the way home we’d fly through Sydney and Beijing to save on miles, and get some extra sight seeing in.

The biggest surprise was showing up at the airport to check in and it wouldn’t let us. We needed a visa to visit Australia! Believe it or not, in all our travels, this was the first time we needed a visa so it wasn’t even on my radar. I had thought to check for China, but not Australia. Fortunately, Australia has an easy E-visa that we got online and had the visa info to so we could check in in less than 10 minutes. Whew.

We drove around town, and then checked out koalas and penguins on Phillip Island. So beautiful! You can’t really take pics of the penguins, but you’ll get the idea. We had a great time!