We arrived at Dublin airport and Anne was waiting for us at the arrival gate camera in hand taking a very bad shot of a scraggly looking Soph and Owen. Thanks! Owen had arranged to hire a car for our time in Ireland, they drive on the left hand side of the road and we weren’t staying in central Dublin so a car was really the best way to get around. We headed off to find our way to Enniskerry, which is a very small town around 20 mins outside of Dublin, in other words out in the country. The hostel [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Heathrow, for some reason when we arranged our round the world ticket we had asked to arrive in London so that we could spend some time there before travelling to France, well things changed and Owen bought tickets to the Blizzard Convention which was in Paris the next day (Saturday), so after going through immigration and picking up our bags we had to check them back in and wait for our flight to Paris. By this stage I was not so much a fan of airports planes or anything that resembled them. Our flight to Paris was short [View Full Entry]

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We arrived into Chicago late in the afternoon on Monday 23rd June 2008 (yes our blog is very behind). Once cleared through customs we jumped into a taxi, let me just say that we might as well have had someone who couldn’t speak English because neither of us could understand a word this guy said and he didn’t fill us with a heap of confidence that he knew where he was going either considering the amount of times he had to look at the address. As we found out our accommodation was a little out of Chicago central so I guess [View Full Entry]

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After spending 5 days in Vancouver the next part of our journey took us to the ski village of Whistler. Whistler is one of the most beautiful places we’d ever been to all the buildings look like massive log cabins. In the winter it’s filled with people skiing and snowboarding and in the summer it’s filled with people taking part in adventure sports like dirt biking, although you can still ski and snowboard right at the top of the mountain during summer the amount of people on bikes was huge. It’s another one of those places built around tourism and like [View Full Entry]

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If you recall our plan was to go to Victoria once in Vancouver instead of while we were on the cruise ship well that was a bad decision, once we started looking at the cost of getting there we realised we probably should have gone while we had the opportunity, so unfortunately we had to give it a miss. For the last two days we decided to take advantage of one of the trolley tours available, essentially the one we chose drove all over central Vancouver picking people up from their hotels (the popular ones anyway, we had a little walk [View Full Entry]

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So now we begin the Canadian part of our adventure. We arrived in Vancouver and jumped in a bus that would take us near the hostel that we would be staying in for the next few days. We checked in and popped upstairs to our room, we had a private room with ensuite, a TV and free wireless internet which came in handy, not anything near 5 star but we have found that really you only turn up there to sleep and shower what’s really important is your location. After having a look at all of the tourist brochures in the [View Full Entry]

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Today we woke early as we were one of the 1st groups to leave the ship. As I mentioned previously they’re very organised with getting everyone off the ship, we were put into a group which had a designated disembarkment time and basically had to wait around until then. You could imagine what it would be like if 3000 people all tried to get off the ship at the same time. Once your time comes you head to the exit, leave the ship and continue on to US customs where our luggage would be waiting for us (US customs like to [View Full Entry]

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Wow, it’s been a long time since we’ve written something, apologies for that, internet access isn’t always guaranteed so it’s hard to try and keep this up to date, and if we spent all our time writing our blog we’d have nothing to write about. Anyway we were up to Day 6 which was at sea; one of the things about cruising is while it’s an experience of a life time the ‘at sea days’ if the water is choppy it can be a little rough on the stomach, something Soph unfortunately had to deal with. While she didn’t get really [View Full Entry]

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We arrived in Skagway at around 6am, fortuneately for us we did not need to be up that early, so like most days the customary sleep in occured. One of the good things about being here is that you get around 18hrs of sunlight so you are never really in a hurry to do things on the boat. Skagway is one of the tiniest towns i've ever seen the population averages around 800 residents, the day we arrived there were 3 other ships in port so the population jumped to almost 10,000 in a matter of hours. It's amazing to think [View Full Entry]

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This morning we set the alarm to wake us up at the crazy time of 5:00am, I have really gotten used to sleeping in so you can imagine how hard it was, but as soon as we pulled back the curtains to see outside it was more than worth it. We first started to notice that the waves looked like they were hitting something off in the distance but we could quite make out what, it turned out to be small chunks of ice that hadn't turned that forsty blue/white colour yet. As we slowly cruised up through Tracy Arm those [View Full Entry]

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