Rough itinerary

There seems to be something magic about October 4 - flight prices apparently drop. So that looks like a good time to go. I've pretty much decided to book a multi-stop trip (Sydney to London, by train to Rome, the fly out from Rome to Sydney), rather than a return to London.

I'm tending towards flying with Emirates - their prices seem pretty good, and the service looks fabulous. Still looking, but I'd like to book fairly soon if possible.

We've narrowed down some of the places we'd like to visit, and this is the rough itinerary:

• Fly into London Heathrow. 
• Book into accommodation, hopefully somewhere fairly central, and spend two weeks (perhaps a day or two less) alternating between city sightseeing and day trips to Bath, Stonehenge, Cambridge or Oxford, York, etc. 
• Eurostar to Paris for about 3 days. 
• Overnight train (Artesia) to Rome.
• Book into accommodation (perhaps an apartment in Trastevere) and alternate between city sightseeing and day trips to Ostia Antica and Pompeii. Alternatively, we might stay in either Naples or Pompeii for a couple of nights, and spend more time at the excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum (both on the Circumvesuviana train line from Naples). If we do that, we might stay somewhere different for the rest of our time in Rome.
• Fly out from Rome to Sydney.

One other possibility we're considering is train from Paris to Venice, then train to Rome for most of our time in Italy.

And now we have a basic skeleton itinerary, we're going to start listing exactly what we want to see in the available time in each destination. And keep saving!