Our one way ticket is booked, and our first stop is…….DUBLIN, IRELAND! After spending a few weeks in Newfoundland with our friends and family, we’ll be heading to Ireland for a week, with plans to hit the major hot spots. Ireland wasn’t originally on our list of places to visit, but we are taking advantage of the new and awesome WestJet (Westjet_DUB) service from St. Johns to Dublin! We will also have the opportun
ity to hook up with some good friends who will be touring Ireland at the same time. It will be my first visit to Ireland, but Steven’s second. Here is a young Mr. Trickett in front of Temple Bar in Dublin, back in his university days Our plans after Ireland are still in the works, perhaps Amsterdam? Our ultimate goal is to make our way to Eastern Europe, so we’ll be keeping an eye on cheap flights to figure out our next destination. Our RTW countdown has officially started! We’d love to hear any recommendations for Ireland, or even suggestions for our next destination. jess+trickett
Things are getting REALLY real now. We officially sold our house last month. After weeks of painting, packing, cleaning and decorating, it’s done! What’s even better, is that it sold after less than 24 hours on the market! While we are so excited to hit the road, we are definitely going to miss this house, our first house together, which has some pretty special memories attached to it.
Our living room – where Steven and I got engaged!
SOLD!
Now we’ve got two months to pack everything up and get things into storage. The countdown is ON!
2013 was a big year for us. We got married, turned the big 3-0, and spent an unforgettable month-long honeymoon in Australia. We both love to travel, and we thought our trip to Australia in December 2013 would take care of that travel bug we’d been trying to fight off. Little did we know
, it would do the complete opposite
Sydney Opera House. Check out our Honeymoon Shirts!
Fast forward three months: we’ve sold our house, have the green light to take a career break, and we’re getting ready to TRAVEL AROUND THE WORLD!
For us, travelling is our happy place. We love the excitement a new city brings and can’t wait to take off on this new adventure! Our itinerary includes parts of Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. If we are lucky, we will also sneak in a couple of destinations in South and Central America. Our plan also includes some stops to spend time volunteering. We’ll share more of our plan when we can. Stay tuned!
Byron Bay
After a jam-packed trip to the Sunshine Coast, we made our way down the Pacific Highway to Byron Bay via Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Heading into Byron, we had heard some bad reviews from both local Australians as well as online so we weren’t really sure what to expect. -continue reading>
Noosa
The Sunshine or ‘Sunny’ Coast stretches about 2 and a half hours to the north of Brisbane. Noosa is a holiday / vacation town on the Sunny Coast about an hour north of Brisbane. The area is pretty ‘fancy’ and its main street, Hastings St., is lined with restaurants, cafés and upscale shopping. Hastings Street almost got us in the Christmas spirit with its Christmas lit trees and shops playing Christmas music. The main beach in Noosa is awesome; no crowds, no seaweed, and no ‘mossies’ (mosquitos – the Aussies like to shorten their words) and this is where we parked for the first two days.
The Jump
After a couple of beach days it was time to spice it up a bit, given its our honeymoon and all. So at 10 AM on Wednesday December, 18th I took to the skies in a yellow single engine Cessna. After reaching 10,500 feet, the door opened and my guide and I plummeted toward Coolum Beach below hitting 208 km/h before the chute opened (after 45 seconds of freefall). Freefall is pretty amazing, nothing like I had imagined. The only downfall was that I couldn’t collect Aeroplan points for the flight! jk
The Surf
Australia is famous for surfing, but until we reached Noosa as we travelled south, there was no real opportunity to give it a try. This is because the Great Barrier Reef, which sits off the coast, prevents any real ‘surf’ from reaching the shore from the northern tip of the Country down to just north of the Sunshine Coast.
Since about September, Jess has been talking about standing up on that surfboard so on Thursday the 19th, we headed back to Coolum Beach for our surf lesson. Jess didn’t know she was entering into a competition that morning. I would for sure stand up on that board before she did. Not the case. In fact, Jess stood up on her 2nd wave and the instructor insisted that I ‘watch what Jess is doing’ in order to do the same. Now that we have the basics, you’ll see more surf pictures as we work our way south.
On our last night in Noosa, we arrived back at our house to find this guy waiting for us on the porch.
You can imagine the nights sleep we had after this sighting. Apparently its a Huntsman Spider and although it can give a nasty bite, it doesn’t possess enough venom to kill a human. Thats great hey?
Next stop is Byron Bay for the weekend, before heading off to Melbourne for Christmas on the beach!
jess+steven
Airlie & The Whitsundays
December 2013
Friday the 13th was a long day of travel for us as we left Cairns for Airlie Beach, the gateway to the Whitsunday Islands. The flight took us from Cairns south to Brisbane where we had a five hour layover before another short flight up to Airlie Beach. After a day in transit, we arrived at by far our nicest accommodations yet and maybe the nicest we’ve ever had. We were perched on a mountainside with an infinity pool overlooking the Coral Sea and the Whitsunday Islands.
The go-go-go that we’ve been doing was starting to catch up to us so aside from our Whitsunday cruise to the famous Whitehaven Beach and Daydream Island on Sunday, we took advantage of the idyllic location and tried to recharge our batteries.
Whitehaven Beach and Daydream Island
On Sunday the 15th, we headed to Abel Point Marina to catch our 7 AM departure for Whitehaven and Daydream with Cruise Whitsundays. You would think that given the amount of research and planning we did for this trip, we would have known about the March flies or Sand flies that inhabit Queensland’s northern beaches. I mean we were prepared for mosquitos and had plenty of repellant, but this was no match for the thousands of swarming flies. I think we killed 100 between two of us during our two hours on the beach. These are just the facts, not complaints… there will be no complaints on this trip.
Despite the flies, the beach really is amazing. The silica sand is like baby powder and the water was the clear blue-green you see in postcards.
After our morning stroll on Whitehaven, we boarded the boat and headed to Daydream Island. This island has one resort with a crushed coral beach, a few restaurants, swimming pools and an aquarium with a living reef. Here we had lunch and got a break from the sweltering heat in the resorts pool before grabbing the ferry back to Abel point in Airlie and to our mountainside retreat.
Travel tip: When choosing your Whitsunday’s trip, be sure to choose the tour that takes you to Hill Inlet. Hill Inlet is where you get the dramatic view of the ‘swirly’ sands of Whitehaven beach. We did not choose Hill Inlet and unfortunately did not see this view; another reason to come back.
What an insane week. In the past 7 days we toured Sydney, found Nemo on the Great Barrier Reef, cruised the croc infested Daintree river in the Daintree Rainforest and walked the world famous Whitehaven Beach. As I write this we are preparing to board our flight back down to Brisbane, Queensland’s capital city, where we pick up our rental car and head north up the Sunshine Coast to Noosa. After this, we do not fly for ten days. Stay tuned as we’ll provide an update on Noosa, Byron Bay and the rest of the Sunshine Coast in the next few days!
jess + steven
Daintree Rainforest & Cape Tribulation
December 2013
Thursday we woke up to some RDF (that is rain, drizzle and fog for fellow mainlanders), but given the temperature had already hit 25C and we were heading for the worlds largest rainforest, we weren’t too worried about it. Our 4×4 picked us up at our motel at 7 AM and we headed north from Cairns up the coast past Port Douglas, Mosman and into the Daintree. Our first stop was at the Daintree river where we took a guided boat tour through the croc infested waters in search of ‘salty’s’ (Saltwater Crocs). We spotted a couple, but they were only about 3 feet long.
Next we stopped at a small nature reserve that help to rehabilitate injured kangaroos. While there, we got to feed them and enjoy a BBQ lunch. After lunch, we continued further north through the jungle to a small creek where our guides prepared fresh fruits and Daintree tea for us while we when for a dip in the creek.
Stay tuned for an update on our Whitsunday island cruise…!
jess + steven
Welcome to our blog! We are Steven and Jess, a young (ish) Canadian couple from Newfoundland, Canada. 
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