wonderwend

Dear all, In a couple of days time Dan and I will have been back in the UK for seven months. When we got back I started working at a Special Needs school in Maidstone and I am still there. Poor Dan did not have the luck that I had with getting a job and he had a long six months of job hunting. However he started his new job in London last week and he seems to be enjoying it. Our travels are like a distant memory. Getting back into work did not prove to be too hard although I still have the odd day when I drive to work in the rain and remember going to work on a dive boat...it's not quite the same! This feeling has not been helped by the fact ... read more

Dear all, Can you believe it, tomorrow we will have been home for a week. Life has been a busy of mixture of visiting people and sorting our lives out! We have been up to Huddersfield to visit family and we have now managed to buy a car. Things in the UK don't seem to have changed too much. Someone should have warned me that there are a load of new pictures on coins...I nearly accused two people of trying to give me foreign money!! Asda still make very good hedgehog bread and it tastes especially good with marmite on it! (my first meal when I got home!!) We have also been into our barn to get some things, my priority was getting some jumpers as this summer weather seems to be a bit rubbish at ... read more

Dear all, Its been weeks since I last wrote, but in the last few weeks I have been building up to my biggest achievement of the whole trip. I mentioned that I have been studying. Three weeks ago I began my Instructor Development Course which got me ready for my exams. Three days ago the Padi Examiners arrived on the island and I sat theory exams, standards exams and then they watched me in the sea and the swimming pool...and this morning I passed! So I am now a Padi diving instructor! My weakest subject was diving physics and Dan spent many hours tearing his hair out because for him physics is a perfectly normal thing and for me it was like learning a whole new language! But I actually managed to get 100% in my ... read more

Dear all, Dan and I arrived safely in LA 3 hours before we left. We picked up our hire car which only had 56 miles on the clock and then managed to drive to our hotel without getting lost. If you saw the roads around here you would know that not getting lost is a huge achievement each time we go out! On our first evening we drove into the Mexican area of LA and had some Mexican food. This was not planned, we just found it when driving but as we are no longer going to Mexico it felt like a good second best! Yesterday we got up at six and drove to San Diego for SeaWorld. As you can imagine we felt right at home there the only problem being that we were on ... read more

Dear all, Its been ages since I last wrote, Matt has been and gone and we are heading off to Fiji in the morning. Anyway this is what we have been up to.... On our way back to Auckland to pick up Matt we went via Kaikoura. Our main reason for going back to Kaikoura was to see the Sperm whales as our previous trips had been cancelled as the whales were not around. We got up at six in the morning and went out on the 7am boat..but no whales! No dolphins either! Sadly our time had run out as we had to leave Kaikoura to get the ferry from Picton back to the North island. So no sperm whales for us....we will just have to come back to New Zealand! After the ferry trip ... read more