Planning our Trip to South Africa

Our big family trip this year is to South Africa! We are taking 3 weeks over Christmas to visit this awesome country as a family and to celebrate the holidays and Montana's graduation from High School in June of 2013.
 
As this is a huge trip, we thought we would document our planning process and share the resources I find to help other families plan a large trip like this. Expect to see a blog post once a week at a minimum for the next few months. Not only will we share our excitement, videos we find and planning, this will also keep us on track to plan and book each part of our trip. We will also share our fears and worries about a trip like this.

So look for our updates every Tuesday morning. We would love it if you could share your ideas or resources with us too!

If you would like to follow us, then please please click on the subscribe to button near the top of the right column. We would love to share this adventure with you!

Here is a video that I found that got me excited about this trip!



Do you have any suggestions for us? Please comment below:

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Cheap Flights?

This is a great video about flying Low Cost airlines! Its all in good fun!  My good friend Cath Andrews from Explore Italian Culture sent it to me! Thanx Cath!

If you fly low cost airlines, (especially Ryanair in the UK) then you will really relate to this video.
If you are not from the UK, these ladies are hilarious from Fascinating Aida.

I would love to see them live! They remind me of  my friend Rick Green's comedy troop from Canada - The Frantics!

Enjoy!

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A New Efficient Way to Board an Aircraft?

Could it be true? Is there a way to board an aircraft without the usual bumping, grinding and fighting for space in the overhead bins and the aisles?

According the the new TV show "This vs That" there is. It is called the "Steffen Method" and makes sense to me! Steffen is a scientist who was tired of the chore of boarding an airplane created a computer model that looks like it would work. "This vs That" tried it out!

Essentially it follows a diagram of boarding as follows:

1. Start with families and people with special needs boarding first
2. Fill every other row, starting from the back, with window passengers entering first, then middle seaters, then the aisle seaters.

Check out this video to see how the test went! 

As you can see it was quite successful! It took half the time the normal boarding takes! Now how can we get the airlines to adopt this method....and to be honest the passengers too. I don't think that people travelling together will want to board separately, but hey stranger things have happened!

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The Flight Experience in Singapore

On our recent trip to Singapore, Warren wanted to try the Number one rated experience on Tripadvisor for Singapore - the Flight Experience Singapore. So we booked it before we arrived in Singapore to make sure that we could do it.

Essentially this experience is a training simulator for a Boeing 737. Warren LOVED to fly, so this was a no brainer for us. It is expensive, but worth it. Warren actually did the "flying" and I observed from the jump seat.

The Flight Experience is located at the Singapore Flyer complex. We arrived a few minutes early to settle in.
We chose the 45 minute experience which gave Warren 2 take off and landings. He chose to take off and land from Toronto (our hometown) and from Las Vegas (go figure!).

The co pilot takes you through everything you need to know. I have to say that this was such a blast even from the jump seat. You really feel like you are in the cockpit of a real plane and Warren felt like he was flying a real plane!

As you can see in this video, we got to give the copilot a tour of Toronto, well the downtown core anyway.

We totally recommend this experience. We purchased the video that went along with it as a memento, it wasn't too expensive either. It includes the audio of what Warren and the Copilot said to each other.

Here is the website for the Flight Experience Singapore and see the reviews on TripAdvisor

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