NickGrunseit

The final blog entry of this trip, and probably for a long, long time contains 'Bests and Worsts', some stats from our trip, and a postscript story of our time since the holiday ended in Australia. Read on! Bests and Worsts of this Trip Favourite Country- France where the people, places, and food were wonderful, Iceland a close second. Ignore anyone who claims French people aren't pleasant, they're wrong. The French are lovely (outside of Paris which being a huge city is excusable). Funniest Moment- in Dubrovnik an eager small boy of three plunged off the wharf into the sea and his grandmother fished him out making sympathetic noises to him and winking at us and laughing behind her hands as she walked him off to get changed. Favourite Foods (general)- France; despite the breakfast being ... read more

Our train from New York to Washington DC was generally painless, better than Spanish rail anyway. On arrival in Washington DC central we confronted an absurdly complex metro ticket machine (you can't buy them from a person) it involved pressing a button 6 times plus telling the machine how much money you wanted to pay it (!) We then headed onto the metro station platform that was dimly lit and with a platform 2km long. We couldn't understand why on earth the metro station lighting is so weak in Washington DC, it makes the platforms fairly uninviting and feel marginally less safe, the distance of platforms meant our first train went roaring 100m past us when it stopped and we had to run after it. After checking into our decent hotel that was a bit ... read more

We arrived in NYC okay on the night of Thanksgiving day and waited ages in the famously long airport customs lines, they fingerprint every passenger coming through! I was surprised they had a football game on TV in the customs area, usually airports treat these areas extremely seriously! We had arranged a shared van transfer to our hostel in the Upper West side of Manhattan, it ended up being a frustrating, long transfer. Our driver was surly and uncommunicative and dropped off everyone before us. The company had advertised they only had you share a van with people going to the same part of Manhattan but this was totally false for us, we wanted to go to West 101st street but spent most of the transfer around East 33rd ! The hostel was a little dispiriting, ... read more

Ratings explained: 1* - worth a look 2* - Good Times 3* - Unmissable + - emphasis on the rating We flew into Madrid, boy were our arms tired! Arriving in Spain so late in the year meant our average temp was about 9C, and we had a lot of overcast skies. Our overall six month trip plan of 'chasing the sun' had been successful pretty much all the way into October but November seems to be a 'bridge too far'. In Madrid we had a little apartment for a week and our neighborhood nearby reminded us a great deal of South Kensington in London; it's clean, reasonably prosperous looking and well lit and on arrival there were suitably English grey overcast skies and cold! Our first sight in Madrid was the Thyssen Bornemisza art ... read more

Istanbul blog. To travel back in time for anyone reading these Turkey entries in order we must go back to the first day of the Turkey tour to cover our first day in Istanbul. It can be noted that on the memorable date of 10/10/10 we spent 10:10am on this date inside the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and 10:10pm at dinner. We started the day with breakfast in our hotel - it seems the Turks idea of breakfast items are roasted capsicum, eggplants, carrots, ham, cheese, dips, olives, feta, yoghurts, sliced cooked cocktail frankfurt, salad, all sorts! Our first stop was the hippodrome which is near Blue Mosque and Hagia Sofia. Here there were some Obelisks; one from 1500BC they'd pinched from Egypt that looked like it had been made yesterday! The granite was so smooth ... read more