I am starting to get excited. In just a few short weeks from now, I will be welcoming two of my pixie pals, Jan McCallum and Mary Browder, to Australia for a month long visit. OK, I have been excited for months, looking forward to their visit, but now I am getting really excited! And a bit panicky about everything that needs to be done so that I can have a holiday with them when they arrive.

I am always a bit torn when I am looking forward to an exciting event. I want the days to fly quickly, so that the fun times can begin, but part of me wants to stretch the days so that I can enjoy the anticipation for longer. And get the guest room tidied up!

This will be Jan’s second visit to Australia. Last time she came, we had never met in person. I waited for her at the airport but although I scanned every face as the crowds surged off the plane, all I had was a little Facebook profile photo to go by, and she managed to walk right past me! What a lot of water has gone under the proverbial bridge since then! After spending time together on that trip, a Kenyan Safari and countless late night Skype calls, we certainly won’t have trouble recognising each other this time. On that first visit I invited Jan to stay at my house, even though I had no real assurances that she wasn’t an axe-murderer! Luckily it turned out she had no homicidal tendencies and we had a great time together, and have been firm friends ever since.

Mary, on the other hand, I have not met. But somehow I don’t think I will have any trouble recognising her. After more Skype calls and emails, and sharing our lives through our Storybook pages on Facebook, I sometimes have trouble remembering that we have never actually been in the same place at the same time. I continually marvel at the world we live in, and the way we can communicate across the miles. I still remember long distance phone calls where you would have to pause after every sentence to wait for the signal to reach the other end. And you would try to say everything you wanted to say before the ‘pips’ went off after 3 minutes. A ‘trunk call’ was such a luxury! Now we send emails, texts and even call without a second thought – I love it!

Mary and Jan are coming for a whole month, and we will be travelling around Australia, catching up with our team-mates and friends and seeing as much of the country as we can fit in. I am thrilled to be showing off our beautiful country to them, looking forward to catching up with people I haven’t seen for too long, eager to meet some people for the very first time, and excited about seeing parts of Australia I have not visited before. If you are reading this, and you are in the places we will be visiting we’d love to catch up with as many of our friends – Facebook and real life – as we can. Jan and Mary arrive on March 7 and leave on April 5. We will be based in Sydney, but travelling for most of the time. We will be in Canberra on March 10-11, then driving (slowly) to reach Melbourne by March 17, stopping off to visit Justine in her gorgeous Sapphire Coast abode on the way. We will catch up with Janice in Melbourne and Kerrianne in Geelong, as well as meeting up with some of our Kenya trip-mates while we are down south, and plan to be back in Sydney by 23 March. Of course I have to introduce our visitors to Australian Rules Football, and it just so happens that the 2012 season launches in Sydney on 24 March – we will be there with our red and white scarves flying! On March 27 we fly to Adelaide, and then to Perth on 30 March, where Jenny will host us on her side of the country before we fly back to Sydney on April 3rd, just in time to say a sad farewell.

We really would love to meet you if you call any of those places home. We won’t be doing any training on this trip, but it would be so much fun to have some get-togethers, and put some faces to names. We feel we have gotten to know so many of you through your pages and stories that you share. So email me (shelley@pixels2pages.net) and we will see what we can do. We especially would love to hear from you if you would like to organise a gathering, or have ideas about a venue. I suspect that March is going to be one long party! – bring it on!!