At this moment six years ago I was on a Qantas 747 en route to Heathrow Airport and thence to Paris for our honeymoon. It was our first of three trips to Europe. Earlier today I put down a deposit on a fourth.

Yesterday Flight Centre held a European Travel Expo at Darling Harbour. This year the days of the week corresponded with those of our wedding and I thought that the event had a nice element of synchronicity about it.

The day before I had looked up in the sky above my head and saw a Qantas 747-400. I wish I could say that it was Qantas that we would be flying with but sadly they were prohibitively expensive. I would like to have picked our holiday out of their European travel booklet, our honeymoon hotel, the Victor Masse was still in there. That we could have flown out the next day would have been even better.

Sadly, we do not have that much freedom. And experience tells us that we can do it much cheaper by researching our own hotels.

I paid instead for flights with Air China, via Shanghai and Beijing. Yes, despite our experiences in China we would fly back through there. It's not that it's a bad country or that there is anything wrong with the airports (except the toilets). In fact, we found the airports very efficient for domestic flights. I would just rather a stopover in somewhere comfortable like Japan, Hong Kong, Seoul or Singapore. We want to visit Thailand as well. Oh well, this might be our chance to visit Suzhou or Huangshan (Yellow Mountain).

In Europe the idea is that we will visit Eastern Europe and France again. I have notions of going to Scandinavia, but who knows?

Then again, we may find the whole trip is called off or greatly delayed. We have a decision point arriving soon and one of the advantages of the Air China fare, apart from its price, is that full payment can be postponed until after that point.

We were in an Aldi supermarket today when we came across bags of German ginger biscuits, including the spiced ginger "magen brot". We had to buy a bag!

While in Frankfurt in 2004 we visited the Friday night street market/beer garden and stopped by the sweet stall pictured on the right. Convinced by the stall owner to try some magen brot we liked it enough to buy a bag. Initially we thought that he had given us too much, but then I found myself compulsively eating square after square of the ginger bread. My only regrets were not buying more and that it generates a fair amount of internal gas!

It's only a month and a day until we begin our trip to Singapore, Europe and Japan. After weeks of pouring over travel books and train timetables we have finally pinned down our plans. This time we are giving ourselves longer at each stop, at least three nights in every location except London and Barcelona (two each) and St Malo (one). All the hotels, bar those in France, have been booked. I am still waiting for a few of the French hotels to respond to availability requests.

As with our last trip, virtually all the planning and booking has been done by ourselves, using the web. The savings can be of fifty percent or more when compared to the prices given in the travel brochures. That said, there is something about going through a travel agent and using brochures that I miss. On our honeymoon trip to Paris we did all our booking through Qantas Holidays. All we did was look through the Qantas Holidays European travel booklet, pick out a hotel, a day tour of Mont St Michel and purchase some museum and transport passes.

Planning time begins again! After five months pause where we digested our last overseas trip, we are back to serious planning for our next overseas holiday, pouring through travel brochures, books and websites searching for accommodation options, timetables and any other useful information.

We were going to stay in Australia this year, but B's brother is holding a wedding reception in Singapore, which is a convenient transit point for further travels. Taking advantage of earlybird airfares we will stay a short time in Singapore, with a day trip to Johor Bahru in Malaysia to fix up B's identity card. We were originally going to stay for a week, but we realised that we didn't have enough time in Europe. Plus there is comparatively little to do in Singapore that we haven't already experienced there before.

I have uploaded a major selection of images from our three week trip to Europe via Seoul. The photos are divided up into countries and locations. I'm still working on a proper write-up of the trip. For now you can enjoy the diary entries made as we travelled along.

Seoul Photos, Europe Photos

It hardly seems like three weeks, but we are back in Australia. Actually, we arrived many hours but many of those have been spent sleeping!

Our last stop in Europe was Amsterdam after a very bumpy ride with Air France. Sadly, we didn't get a chance to cruise on the very attractice canals. We did visit the Red Light District at night. It seemed like the sex side of it was overwhelmed by the numbers of drug pushers. The sickly scent of marijuana was very strong - it gave me a headache and it's a smell I never want to sniff again. Certainly had no desire to try.

After the Musee d'Orsay, we had to see the Van Gogh museum (the Dutch pronounce his surname like they are choking. In fact, Dutch sounds like a combination of choking and bringing up phlegm). Then off to Schipol airport and a 10 hour flight to Seoul.