Are We There Yet?

So how does a geeky middle-aged guy get to take a vacation (holiday) consisting of traveling around the Mediterranean with three vivacious, gorgeous sisters without breaking the bank? He hooks up with an exceptionally gifted amateur travel agent who just happens to be one of the sisters (and his wife). Before I get into any trouble with this thread, I think I'd best just get started and let the photos do the talking.

Thanks to all my travel in Australia I found myself with 340,000 Qantas frequent flyer points. When arranging our flights we decided to use the points to pay for our tickets to from Washington DC (Dulles) to London (Heathrow w/ transfer to Gatwick)to Malta, return from Venice to London to Dulles (not inclusive of shuttle flight on Alitalia from Malta to Venice). We had enough points to do this Business Class but unfortunately there weren't any seats available from London to Dulles in this class so we had to do that leg in FIRST CLASS.

As I understand it (and I'm probably way off the mark), the itinerary was decided pretty much by Phatty (Judi) and Lori, based on "everyone's" input (e.g. Heidi - I was pretty silent on the planning) on the ideal Med trip: one part resort laze-fest, one part cruise and one part Italian holiday. Yes, for the Americans that is a shocking 3 WHOLE WEEKS! One of the few remaining benefits of investing the greater part of one's career (12 years) in one company is you get an extra week of vacation per year in the US (in Australia the minimum is 4 weeks per year with a bonus of 13 extra weeks after 10 years service). I the majority of my 17 weeks leave last year in Dubai - but that's on the previous blog.

So, I took my paltry 3 weeks for this "trip of a lifetime". Our trip started out with an interesting twist: we cruised into the business class lounge at Dulles; me in my "mufti" travel gear - earrings, 3/4 length pants, sandals and backpack. Lori, of course, was looking chic and beautiful - kinda like she belonged in business class. So, after finding that Dulles' currency exchange booth doesn't open at normal flight hours, we waltzed into the lounge and picked a spot to sit. Moving over toward the snack bar I was confronted by a blast from the not too distant past - an Aussie colleague - Rob Hawketts; he is the leader of the Government Operations part of the business based in Canberra. Rob and I did some catching up and then we all headed off to the plane.

Rob was also heading to London so we all were in the BC cabin together. There is a long story (and run-on sentence) about how Lori and I wanted to sit together in the middle of the centre row but I had an aisle seat and this meant we had a fan-shaped barrier between us but she would be (potentially) sitting next to some hot hunk without any barrier between them so we asked the attendant if we could change seats with whoever would be seated next to Lori but we had to wait to see who would sit there meanwhile Rob was two rows from us and in the middle seat but wanted an aisle seat so I proposed we just change with him whereby he moves to my aisle seat Lori and I move to the middle seats and the unknown middle-seater moves to Rob's seat which sounded pretty good to me but I had trouble getting the point across to everyone else so Lori and I got to stand up throughout the whole boarding process until the hunk sitting next to Lori didn't show up so we could take the seats and Rob could sit on the aisle next to me (GASP).

We enjoyed the flight to London then had a lengthy bus tranfer and a nice stay in a Gatwick hotel. In the morning we caught our plane at Gatwick for Malta. Upon arrival in Malta we caught our car and had a surprise ride-along named Nick. Nick was from Malta originally but had left to work in the UK. He was back for a short visit and proceeded to give us a guided tour of Malta and surrounds on our drive to our destination of Xlendi (pronounced Shlendee). We saw fireworks and took a nice ferry ride across past the Blue Lagoon (more on that later) to the island of Gozo, specifically the city of M'garr (I think pronounced "M" - Jar).

The roads were long, hilly, narrow and winding and when we finally arrived at our hotel Phatty and Heidi were up in the pool area having dinner. We were all pretty wiped out so we all headed to the room and some much needed sleep.