Tickets bought

Now we have airplane tickets! We're heading to Cairns (Australia) first, leaving mid-September, tour around the area for a month, then fly to Auckland. We fly back to Seattle from Christchurch in January. This way, Ciel doesn't need an extended-stay visa for New Zealand. She hates me, because with a NZ passport, I can get into Australia and New Zealand with no problem at all! (We had a few headaches trying to figure out how to send her passport to the NZ embassy in Ottawa for a month, and still be able to fly out before airfares got a lot more expensive.)

-mark.