Group 1 left Sydney at 3.50pm on Friday. Ross, Jarrod, Sam, Tom, Luke and Cooper took 3 flights to reach Prague where they have checked in to their Airbnb and started their tour. They were arriving at 9.30am and hoping to be fresh and awake enough to hit the ground running.

Cooper had returned from his schoolies trip to Fiji the night before, so slept through much more of the flights than the others. Sam turned 18 while at the airport, and Jarrod sent us a photo of him in Abu Dhabi at 11.59pm on 6th December, saying it signified the end of his 31 hour birthday!

We have heard from them that they have arrived safely in Prague and are all excited for the reality of the many months of planning to begin. As for details of their days that are diary-worthy, I guess I will have to pester them to fill in the blanks later on!.

As part of our preparations, everyone chose a destination to research, and we met the weekend before departure to share a PowerPoint presentation on each location. Our plan is to repeat this when we return and present an updated PowerPoint of what we did in each place. “The cousins” (as Jess, Cooper and Oli are affectionately known) couldn’t believe that Aunty Nik was giving them a homework assignment for a holiday, but rose to the occasion excellently – Oli even had a section on coffee ordering in Rome just for me!