So here we are. It's 9.30pm in New York City and we're less than 12 hours away from getting on a flight back to London after nearly 9 months away. This blog is a breakdown of our experience (along with a few of our favourite photos) and we hope you enjoy reading it. We'll do one more entry on what we got up to in Boston and NYC after we've gotten around to writing it, but this is a little something to keep you occupied until then. I can honestly say that we're both looking forward to being home. Dave especially [View Full Entry]

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It's currently October the 28th, and it was almost a year ago that we began our round the world trip. More importantly, it's about 3 months since we arrived in Boston. "3 Months" I hear you cry?! "Surely you should have written this blog ages ago!". You'd be right, however one the blog writers has been putting off doing this for so long now that I've given up and decided to do it myself. Not wanting to embarrass that person, we'll give her a different name (Gelen Hiles), but it's her fault that you're getting a blog from me rather than [View Full Entry]

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There are two types of people in the US, we’ll call them type A and type B, with roughly 50% of each. Type A are the most friendly, helpful people in the world. If they see you in the street looking confused at a map, they’ll offer to help, if you’ve got bags with you they’ll ask if you want a lift to your destination (see later) and they’ll always be smiling and striking up friendly conversation. Type B on the other hand is different. There’re often moody, unhelpful, aggressive, use double negatives (“I ain’t doin’ nothin’”) an [View Full Entry]

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... As they went under a tunnel, the American was smacked in the face. The ugly woman thought to herself, 'That American must have touched that beautiful woman, and she smacked him...' The beautiful woman thought to herself, 'Obviously the American touched the ugly woman thinking it was me, and she hit him...' The Canadian thought, 'I can't wait to go through another tunnel, so I can smack this stupid American again...' Anyhow, I wasn’t sure what to expect from Canada, but if pushed for an answer I would have probably said a clean environment populated by smarter but less friendly [View Full Entry]

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Leaving San Francisco we took a 2 hour flight North to Portland, Oregon. While Portland still had a large number of homeless people it had a much nicer ‘feel’. Gone were the people swearing at lamp posts and areas in which you wouldn’t want to ever be, replaced by a smaller, cleaner and much friendlier city. Portland doesn’t have a great deal of tourist attractions so we spent our days there visiting things like ‘the smallest city park in the world’, ‘the largest independent bookshop in the world’ - which you need a map to navigate and walking [View Full Entry]

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Arriving in San Fransisco we went to the luggage claim area to get our bags. When we spotted Helen’s on the carousel, it didn’t look much like when we’d left it. The lock had been ripped off the top, exposing lots of sharp bits of metal. Inside the case was a note left by US customs saying that they had checked the bag. Now, I can understand that sometimes customs have to get into a bag to check what’s inside, but our bag wasn’t even locked! In fact, it was no where near locked, the zips (that you were suppose to [View Full Entry]

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[That’s funny because Hawaii is a string of volcanic islands (therefore hot) which are continually erupting and making new land. Alright fine it’s that not funny, but it is better than the last blog’s title.] The day we left Australia to fly to Hawai’i was without question the longest day of my life. No, Dave wasn’t being especially annoying (during these past 8 months I’ve learnt to combat this little trait of his with a technique I like to call ‘not really listening most of the time’). Neither was the alarm set particularly early or the flig [View Full Entry]

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Having left the Blue Mountains (which, judging by her last blog, Helen was very pleased to do), we started the trip down south towards the state of Victoria. First though, we had a quick stop in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Oh, wait! Before I tell you about Canberra, I haven’t updated you on my ‘list of animals I want to see before I leave Australia’ have I? Sorry about that, this is where we currently stand… 1) Koala - Seen in a tree at a caravan park 2) Cassowary - Seen at Cape Tribulation 3) Platypus - Seen in the [View Full Entry]

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Driving in Australia is a doddle. But that’s not to say we weren’t a little vexed to learn that, because of the darn rain and closure of a part of the highway, we needed to drive 800kms to get to a town only 50kms away. We reached the road closure blockade at around 3pm (at just the same time the television crews were arriving to report it having closed), turned around and arrived back at the same caravan park we’d left that morning at 7pm. The following day we got up, Dave drove, I drove and 650km later we went to [View Full Entry]

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It’s a bit of a pain Helen finished the last blog on Fraser island. We did very little in the next place we went to, Noosa - one of the big surfing towns along the sunshine coast - and therefore it makes for a rather boring start to the blog. In an attempt to make it seem slightly more interesting I may have embellished the following facts, but I can assure you that almost everything here is 100% true. After arriving in Noosa we parked up the van and went to the local beach to get some lunch and watch surfers [View Full Entry]

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