All good things must come to an end

Regular readers may have noticed that Garry and I have been clocking up a considerable number of increasingly exotic holidays. Our travelling madness does have a reason. With less than five months left to run on our UK work permits we're packing in as much sight-seeing as possible. Come December our time in London will end and we'll be heading back to Australia for good.

However, we plan to go out with a bang. In the months ahead we have the most amazing travel schedule slotted into every spare day of annual leave we can muster. Highlights include:

• An eight-day cruise of the Alaskan panhandle, followed by a brief road tour up the George's Highway to Denali National Park in central Alaska.


• A three-day detour in Las Vegas while enroute to family and friends Down Under.


• A long weekend in Tauranga, New Zealand visiting my parents, before heading to Sydney, Australia for three days of work.


• A week in India for work as I'm making my way back to London. Garry's coming with me. While I'm slaving at the office he'll be enjoying a whirlwind tour of each city I visit; Mumbai and Delhi. We've also planned a three-day weekend that will see us soak up the sights of Udaipur and Agra. Watch for photos of us at the Taj Mahal.


• A long weekend in November (part of the last round-the-world ticket we've just bought) to Bucharest, Romania. I also have a buiness trip scheduled the same month to Malaysia.


• A five-week grand tour through South America as we relocate back to Australia. This trip will see us take a nine-day train journey through the snow-clad alps of Austria and Switzerland before flying to Chile. We love those round-the-world tickets!


• A cruise of Antarctica where we're scheduled to spend Christmas Day.


• A long weekend on Easter Island where we'll see in the second decade of the new millennium.


• A tour of the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile. It's said to be the driest location on earth.


• Another brief stop-over in Tauranga, New Zealand before we finally hit the shores of Australia for good.

In between all of this globe-trotting we've also have a few London-based adventures scheduled. The first is a tour of Buckingham Palace. We brought a couple of open-dated tickets a few months ago and plan to use these in September. We've also booked a final television chat show production evening in early-September.

We're off to see Chatty Man, hosted by Alan Carr, a man who gives the term 'camp' a bad name. His show has risen through the ranks and increasingly attracts A-list celebrities. In recent weeks he's interviewed Grace Jones, the cast of Twilight and Kylie Minogue. I've secured front row seats for this event thanks to my humiliation on national television a few years ago.

Life back home in Australia could seem rather dull by comparison. Either that or we'll simply be glad to have some time to finally rest!