We rose early for a pre-planned bus (*shudder*) day-trip out to Windsor Castle, Bath & Stonehenge. Our tour guide, Deborah, was an absolute classic and knew London (and England) extremely well and kept us entertained the whole day. First stop was Windsor Castle, which was a grand old castle with a fantastic collection of old weaponry, art and other royal paraphernalia. It was great to go into the rooms where the Queen actually entertains guests to this day! Our next stop was Bath, which is famous for the ancient Bath built there when the Romans discovered a hot spring. A lot [View Full Entry]

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Finally we had a sleep in! Although after such a long tour it didn’t really rejuvenate us as much as we would have liked (nothing to do with the previous night’s drinking though!) :) We had to check out of the Royal National as we’d decided back in Australia that we’d switch hotels, so that meant a wait until 2pm to check-in at the Phoenix Hotel-Best Western Kensington. To fill the gap, we basically jumped on the net and had some great Indian food for lunch. We jumped into a taxi to take us over to the hotel, which was cool [View Full Entry]

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Well the last 28 days have just flown by! We can't believe where the time has gone, and where we've managed to visit in that space of time. Looking back at all of our photos, it all just seems surreal!! We had a tour group of 50 people, 46 Australians, 1 Kiwi (living in Australia) and 3 Canadians. As you can imagine with so many Australians on tour there was an automatic bond. We describe the experience as being a little like big brother, without the evictions (although sometimes people felt like they'd like to add that in! haha). We all [View Full Entry]

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… Well we are talking about Amsterdam after all!!! Read what you will from the heading, we won’t go into detail with this one . We can say though that our whole tour group had a fantastic time in the city on our first night in Amsterdam on the 6th of July. The 7th of July was our free day in Amsterdam. Steve had decided the previous night that today would be the day for fulfilling his Contiki dare. Picture a Penis hat on Steve for the entire day… yep, attractive! It was so funny the amount of stares, comments, sniggers, [View Full Entry]

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After a long drive from Lucerne we finally arrived in Germany once again in a small town called St. Goar in the Rhine Valley. This is a big wine growing region, where they grow their grapes on the sides of hills to get the optimum amount of sun. We checked into our small hotel, which had possibly the narrowest staircase we’d ever seen especially considering everyone’s suitcases were now bulging at the seams! Our activity for the evening was a wine tasting excursion to sample some of the local wines. JB walked us along the streets and then down some stairs [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Lucerne on the 3rd of July to much colder weather. Our hotel was 7000ft off the ground up mount Pilatus and so we had to catch cable cars (a little like chair lifts) up to the top which took approximately 30 minutes to reach the hotel. AS you can imagine being so high up the mountain, it was just freezing - we felt like we were in the middle of the snowfields! In saying that, can you imagine our surprise and shock when it did actually snow and at times quite heavily on the 4th and 5th of [View Full Entry]

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We stopped over for a very early lunch in the 4th smallest country in the world, Liechtenstein, on the way to Switzerland on the 3rd of July... as you do!! We only spent an hour and a half here. The centre of town was very small and everything including food was quite expensive. The scenery was very beautiful, but we didn't find the place very interesting. It was a good experience to see it though :)! [View Full Entry]

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We reached Tyrol at approximately 10am on the 2nd of July, ready for white water rafting. We suited up... wet suit, wetsuit shoes, a waterproof jumper, vest and helmet... we hadn't realised there would be so much gear for it! There were 8 of us in our raft, 7 girls and Steve being the only male! The rapids weren't as big as we thought they would be, but we still had a lot of fun. We did not fall out at all! The ride went for just over an hour. We had to jump in the water just to get a [View Full Entry]

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We spent the whole day on the 1st of July travelling from Vienna to spend one night in Munich basically to experience the famous Hofbräuhaus beer hall! We have to admit though, it was pretty cool to go to the most famous beer hall and consume many 1L steins of beer. Enjoy the photos! [View Full Entry]

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The drive in to Austria was absolutely amazing. Such exquisite landscape - very mountainous. First impression of Vienna was that it was a beautiful city. Kim loved it! Everything was relaxed and laid back, it was very clean and it is just really pretty to look at. On the first night in Vienna a few of the guys, including Steve went to see DJ Tiesto (World #1 DJ) @ the Pyramide Eventhotel. Kim ventured out with some of the other people on our tour for dinner and got to experience the taste of the famous Wiener Schnitzel and Austrian beer and [View Full Entry]

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