Back to Real Life

Well, after an absolutely fantastic, life-changing year travelling the globe Andrew and I are now safe and sound at home in Scotland. We have been back for just over a month now and have been really busy sorting out our lives.

It is great to be back among family and friends again, but the weather and the day-to-day life is taking a bit of getting used to.

Our big news is that Andrew proposed a couple of weeks ago and obviously I accepted straight away. So we have booked our wedding for July 2007 and are really looking forward to a big party with all our family and friends to celebrate. I am really excited and obviously can't wait to start looking for my dress but also to plan our next trip abroad for our honeymoon, Andrew's hinting at Africa so I'll let him investigate our options.........

I managed to get a job as a Speech and Language Therapist in Angus which is near Dundee, so I am looking forward to getting back to my career and to earning a wee bit of money. Andrew is busy at work already, he got the first job he applied for, and a great job at that, he's managing a Systems Development team in a Law Firm so it's a bit of a career change and all very exciting for him, with courses and meetings lined up in England and Chicago over the next few months he's on the travelling band-wagon again already, he really is the luckiest man around.

It's a new start for us and we are determined not to slip into old habits and to take on board a lot of what we have learnt about ourselves this year and apply it to every day.

So everything is settling into place just now and it’s almost like we’ve never been away, with that in mind, and before we forget, I’ll let Andrew answer some of the questions that he regularly receives via this blog…………….

Greetings to you all from the Motherland, as Fiona has explained things are turning over nicely here, I’ve added some photo’s from God’s country, they’re from Dunfermline (the toon whar my quine comes fae) and el Capital, Edinburgh, one of God’s finest creations (with the help of some old money and a forward thinking town planner). I'll add another blog for Dundee (my home town and where we're living now) in due course, probably about 8 months from now at this rate!

I hope you enjoy the photo’s, I plan to keep updating this site for the foreseeable, we’ll have a few trips up to the Highlands during the summer, as Fiona mentioned I’ve got a work trip to the Windy City (my kinda town, Chicago is…..) and I’ve also got a boys jaunt to Ireland in May/June, I’m sure they’ll be a few stories from these trips that will make a blog or two, but let’s concentrate on (finally) finishing this trip.

The questions we always get asked are:

What was our favourite place? - I would say Japan, Fiona would say Vietnam, now we loved everywhere and I can go into great detail about the merits of every place we visited but to put a really short answer to a difficult question we chose one place.

How much did a trip like this cost? - Tickets were around £1500 each ($2600US / $3500AUS), insurance was another couple of hundred pounds each and we took £15,000 ($26,000US / $35,000AUS) with us and came back with SFA and had another grand on our credit card.

Sounds expensive, but we never scrimped and saved, we weren’t extravagant often but we always slept in a medium to good hostel and ate well every day, we enjoyed local drinks everywhere and they had very little bearing on the money we spent. You could have done everything we done much cheaper but we liked to live in a wee bit of comfort when available, we always took a double room over dorms when available and rented cars rather than buses in Australia and New Zealand and also took some (cheap) internal flights in America, Australia and China.

Did you work your passage? - Not quite, I worked for two months and Fiona worked for three months, all in Perth, Western Australia. By doing this we managed to live off our wages in Perth and it ultimately meant that our ‘savings’ lasted us 10 months as opposed to 12.

Did you need visa’s for everywhere and are they easy to get / did you get them all before you left home? - Most places yes you need a visa but it’s different for everyone depending on what your nationality is. We never got any from home, we generally got the visa for the next country we were visiting from the country we were in at the time (if you know what I mean). This was simple for us as we always had at least a week in each country, you should look at these in great detail though as it is always pricey to get an on-the-spot visa if you’ve only got a day or two to spare.

Did you take cash and or travellers cheques for everywhere? - No, we were really lucky coming from the UK as we had access to our bank account at no charge in every country we visited, no currency conversion fee, no cash withdrawal fee, no monthly account fee and online banking made it real easy to keep up to date with our spending. Every country we visited had ATM’s in at least the capital city so as long as you withdrew enough until the next cash point all was good, you always got the best conversion rate available also.

What would you do differently if you were to set off again? - In a word, nothing, there are plenty of things that we could have done ‘better’, staying in some places longer, shorter in others, going to fewer places in each country etc… but I’m a great believer in everything happening for a reason and I truly believe that we had the best time possible in all our destination, we haven’t regretted a single thing so why change anything? With hindsight I’m sure there are more practical and perhaps logical ways to do things but I’m sure that would have changed the whole outlook of our adventure and I wouldn’t change anything.

Are you really that handsome in real life? - Yes, Yes I am.

That covers most of the frequently asked questions (from memory) if there is anything else anyone would like to know then drop me an e-mail on the contact pages. Thanks for all your best wishes and feedback on our pages over the year, it’s hard to believe that we’ve had over 47,000 hits on our blog but I’m glad that you’ve all enjoyed it, we’ve enjoyed writing it and we especially liked reading your feedback and comments.

I hope it inspired a few of you to go and see somewhere you’d never planned to and gave others a chance to see places that they’ll never get to.

Until the next time, take care of yourselves, and each other.

Shaggy OUT……………………………..

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