flying roundtrip from Seattle to Melbourne,
visiting a cousin I've never met,
visiting the property once owned by my great grandfather before he moved the family to USA,
driving about 1000 miles along the "Great Ocean Road" south of Melbourne and continuing up along the coast to Sydney (Google map here),
staying at AirBnB's along the way.
Details: It was last April 2016 that I received email notice from scottscheapflights.com alerting me to inexpensive flights from the USA's west coast to and from certain cities in Australia. Since I had never been to Australia -- and it was high on my bucket list -- I did some quick research -- and ended up booking flights from Seattle to Melbourne with a return from Sydney. Having heard that Australia can be expensive traveling -- I limited this first-ever trip to Australia to just two weeks in country departing November 1 but arriving November 3 because of dateline and travel time, and returning November 17.
Why so cheap? I don't really know except that I thought that perhaps United was attempting to fill up it's newest Boeing 787's Dreamliners that I'll be taking to and from Australia -- but "Scott" of scottscheapflights.com opined in our correspondence exchange that it might have been a competitive move by United to match what were likely "mistake" fares by Delta and Virgin Australia the prior week:
