The End of the World.... trip.

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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 terrible and disastrous, the Patiserries, and especially dinners were often delicious and wonderful.

Favourite Meal- Nick's 30th Birthday meal out in Reims, France. Escargot and Crab filo pastry entrees then Steak in cognac and pepper crusted sauce for Nick and honey glazed lamb shank and delicious veg for Alicia. We enjoyed good champagne all night and some delicious patisseries for dessert.

Favourite City- Honorable mention to St Petersburg in Russia, but New York City must take this award for being the city we'd most like to live in the world if we were to move away from Australia again. There's so much to see and do in New York and the food was great.

Worst City Streets- despite Granada, Spain having the most disgusting, dog crap laden streets Athens, Greece easily wins this award as it was so uniformly unpleasant walking around almost everywhere.

Best Beer- Sadly we didn't touch on any truly great beer countries like Belgium or England this trip. I NEVER would have guessed that USA would win my 'best beer' vote yet it has. Anchor Steam beer in America takes the crown, with Pale Ales: Dogfish 90 minute IPA and Sierra Nevada IPA also all from America as honorable mentions.
The most satisfying beer was a giant fishbowl full of beer on La Rambla in Barcelona after a month drinking in France which only serves tiny thimbles of overpriced, crap beer.

Most Unsafe- Bad turbulence flying into Istanbul airport made us think our luck had run out, we never felt more worried for our lives than these moments with the plane shaking fairly hard.

Best Bargain- a 1.19 Euro bottle of Cote du Rhone red wine in France was very good and comically cheap.

Best Single Experience- Hot air ballooning in Cappadocia Turkey was the best travel experience. The best experience was finding out Alicia was pregnant; we'd only been trying for two months and couldn't believe our great fortune!

Worst Single Experience- Moscow transfer drive from airport to hostel. I don't want to talk about it.... we hated it.

Best Times- Driving Iceland, the amazing landscape of this treeless and stunningly contrasting land are second to none. We'd strongly, emphatically recommend Iceland to anyone. Go for at least ten days in summer and preferably camp so you can make your own food and pick your own places to stop, a 4WD would be a useful luxury but not a necessity.

Worst Times- Moscow during their awful heat wave and bush fires; there was no fan or A/C at our accommodation and we just couldn't get any respite from the punishing heat and it was some of the worst nights of our lives.

Best Photos- Icelandic fabulous landscapes and scenery was narrowly beaten by the Hot air Balloon ride in Turkey's Cappadocia at sunrise, an astoundingly beautiful experience.

Hidden Gem- We thought Collioure on the coast of France was wonderful, we arrived on a hot summer day to find a stunningly beautiful town with castles, forts, colourful buildings, boats, little sandy beaches and a little lighthouse ringing the waterfront. We had a delightful swim and adored our time in Collioure.

By the Numbers

We visited 14 countries, over two continents traveling over 173 Days (excluding our home: Australia). The top three countries for days spent were: France (29), USA (27), and Spain (24).

We spent about 24 hours apart from one another over 4,152 hours, which is 99.42%!o(MISSING)f the trip time spent together!

We calculate we spent $40,916 Australian dollars on the whole trip; we kept a daily diary of all spending so this number should be close to accurate although it's certain we forgot some of the costs of online bookings in this figure.

We flew 22 times, a heck of a lot more air travel than rail travel (proportionately) compared to our 2006 Europe journey.

We took 16,300 photos including a record of 300+ in a one hour session when we were in the hot air balloon.

My travel diary is 220 pages long typed in Times New Roman size 12 normal font. I managed to distill that content into 103 pages of Travel Blog content which was published online. Kudos to any of you who read it all!

Based on a conservative estimate of time spent per day on Travel Diary writing, Blog writing, and photo publishing work Nick spent 10.8 full days or 259.5 hours producing all the written and blog content recording our trip. If we added the time it took to take the photos it would be a LOT more. Nonetheless I still had time to read War & Peace, Catch 22, Kafka's main novels, and several other decent books on our trip, Alicia smashed at least four times as many books as Nick without the Travel writing duties to slow her down.

Postscript

Nick was glad to send Alicia off with her parents for a day or two after arriving home to Sydney Airport 10am on 23rd December 2010. We'd been together for so much consecutive time we were due a break, and it's hard with her being morning sick all the time (especially on Alicia!!) it was good to get some respite. Rest assured though we missed one another and were back together promptly.

Alicia must have picked up a nasty cold/flu on the flight, she gave it to me and her parents over the next few days and we all suffered bad head colds, phlegm, hacking cough, and sore throats.

We had a gorgeous, sunny, blue Christmas day with weather around 25C, we ate well, got lots of fine presents and had a big catchup with lots of family. It was good to walk on the beach in the sun again and smell the sea air, this is one of many things I've missed about being away from Australia.

As we progress into 2011 the new “five year plan” has been launched successfully with Alicia carrying our healthy baby, due August 2011. We've finally celebrated our engagement and Nick's 30th birthday with friends and family and Nick's hunting for work. We are presently staying with family and friends until we get back into work and can find our own place around Sydney to settle into. We've found a stunning wedding venue and aim to marry in March 2012.

The 'Travel Bug' has been killed at least temporarily for both of us and we're looking forward to re-entering a normal life in lovely, sunny Australia, and starting a new exciting adventure of parenthood a bit later this year.

Thanks to all our readers, even those of you who just skimmed the photos. The stats on my blog show me I'm not just 'shouting into a vacuum' and this content may help inspire some of you to have wonderful holidays like we've had.

Happy travels and “Good Times” to all.
- Nick & Alicia.

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Photos

View from Family Home
Nice place ain't it?!

Our Baby full Profile
The Head is to the left!

Comments

[Carolyn Lewis]

Blogs
Wow, you two are amazing. I will truly miss receiving these blogs - they have been wonderful and inspirational. I have no doubt that your next five year plan will be as exciting as the last and look forward to sharing in at least a small part of your next five years.

[Dan]

Stats
This was the part I enjoyed: the statistics, even though they never have a practical application