We have to go home eventually and after searching for flights we found the cheapest route was from Frankfurt, Germany to Wilmington, North Carolina. So off to Dusseldorf we go. Our quick bus trip was a little longer than we expected due to some idiot trying to smuggle weed into the country. Pot is legal in the Netherlands but not in Germany, so don’t you think the border patrol might be looking for something like this? The police never did figure out who was responsible even after “arresting the entire bus”, threatening fines and making a lot of noise. After a [View Full Entry]

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The Netherlands was a quick hop from Edinburgh and so off we went. You hear all the stories about Amsterdam so it was up to us to confirm whether or not they were true. We decided not to stay in the city center but to try out some of the neighborhoods around it. Our first place was a really nice apartment which sounds like an odd thing to get excited about. After living in just one room (bungalow, hotel or guesthouse) for the past year this was great. It had a kitchen and we cooked every meal in it. Our next [View Full Entry]

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After spending a couple of good weeks with family we were off again to explore Scotland. This time we headed up into the highlands to some trekking. We caught a train about halfway up the West Highland Way and made several treks in the Crianlarich area. Perfect weather was on our side and made this hill-walking even more beautiful. The walk was everything from small farms with livestock roaming the hillsides through dense forests past small waterfalls through more farms, more cows, more sheep, big birds, rabbits and more colors of green than you can imagine. We had such a good [View Full Entry]

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After leaving Norway we decided to continue our European travels and go to Glasgow, Scotland to re-meet my (Cliff’s) family. My mom is from here and it’s been nearly 30 years since I’ve visited. I had vague memories of some of the places I had visited when I was young. Ruthie has met some of the family but never traveled to Scotland. Checking these spots out with Ruthie was a lot of fun. We were very fortunate to stay with family, thank you Marion and Peter and also Stevie and Allison. It was not like our usual mad touring but more [View Full Entry]

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We took an unplanned trip up to Trondheim, Norway to see our friend Karin. We met Karin in New Orleans a few years back and she is married to another friend of ours, also from New Orleans. Karin is now a Norweg-Orleanian. It wasn’t long after we arrived before we were on our way to the first of many parties. Her friends are very nice and loaned us clothes so we could survive the Norwegian spring. If you remember we have no winter wear and it was damn cold there. We became totally immersed in their lives and them in ours. [View Full Entry]

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We had a nice flight from Nepal through Qatar on to England. The English are so nice and orderly which is quite a shock from our previous travels. People actually line up in queues and give you lots of personal space. We caught the “Underground” or the “Tube” to our guesthouse and it turned out to be the smallest most expensive place we have stayed on our entire trip. We had to take our backpacks off in the hallway because the room was so small. I could sit on the toilet, brush my teeth and shower at the same time. I [View Full Entry]

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The captain said “If you’ll look out the right side of the aircraft, you will see Mt. Everest”. There it was the tallest mountain in the world. It was a bit in the distance, but there was no mistaking what we were all looking at. After landing (on the second try) we made it into the capital city of Kathmandu. The ride into the city was an eye-opener. From an island with no cars, to a traffic nightmare. Trucks, cars, and motorcycles everywhere passing as they please, horns blaring constantly, avoiding each other and the livestock in the road. The town [View Full Entry]

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On April 9, 2009 we both participated in a beach and dive clean up with our friends from Phi Phi Barakuda Dive Shop. PADI Project AWARE promotes these beach and dive clean ups all over the world for Earth Day. I cleaned up the beaches with a few of the girls that morning and then joined Cliff and all the divers on the boat for the underwater clean up later that afternoon. It is amazing how much garbage makes its way into the sea and what people leave on the beach. We picked up plastic water bottles, straws, cigarette butts, bottles, [View Full Entry]

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It’s been 3 months since we last spoke. No excuses, no apologies. We flew out of the Philippines in late January and landed at the airport outside of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We caught an express bus to KL Sentral (mid city bus terminal), not really where we had intended to go. We had sent our Lonely Planet guide book back home because we were so familiar with the city, or so we thought. Well, instead we were let off at the train station, a place we had not been before so we had no idea where we were. We ended up [View Full Entry]

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The Songkran Festival, Happy New Year, Thai style. It’s April 13, 2552 (Thai calendar) and today is the day they celebrate their New Year. This really can’t be described, at least not by me. We all join in with the locals and proceed to throw massive amounts of water on each other and everyone else. Over the past couple of days, you could feel the excitement building, with small buckets and tons of water guns for sale. The Thais have been telling us for days to be ready to get soaking wet. I had no idea how wet. It’s like running [View Full Entry]

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