31 January 2011 Epic. I am, in many ways, tempted to leave it there. To do so would rather defeat the point of keeping this blog yet, when faced with a day that provided in so many wonderful ways, attempting to sum it up in a couple of thousand words feels as if it would be to do the day a disservice. There are times in the life of the average 32 year old woman when her intuition appears to be so finely tuned as to teeter on the brink of premonition. Last night, I like to think that I had one those moments as I set about drifting off into the land of nod for the second time. The words were, roughly, as follows: "I have a feeling that when we wake up tomorrow ... read more

27 January 2011 It seems that I may have underestimated myself when I gaily announced that my status as a morning person was likely to be confined to Manly. This morning, I was up and raring to go even before 7am. Our first night of free camping was a success and, as expected, it was impossible to sleep significantly past dawn. I didn't look at my watch when I first squinted out of the window but the sun was just coming up and one of the many camper vans that we had parked amongst the previous evening was on the move. I swear that several had already gone. Nonetheless, I elected to try to grab a few more precious moments sleep before waking Gregg. That brings me back to before 7am when we pulled out ... read more

The Pink View Australia - epic, like the movie? For me, no. The joy of our visit to this gigantic country was not the country itself but the opportunity to catch up with friends and family. After nearly 5 months on the road, it has been an absolute delight to see familiar faces, some of which we haven't seen for quite some time. Australia, itself, left me feeling rather underwhelmed. I think that this was in no small part due to the unbelievable expense of doing anything here. We were lucky enough to be given a bed every night for which we are immeasurably grateful but, even that, did little to stem the daily haemorrhage of cash. My tip top advice for anyone visiting Oz in the near future is save, save, save! I do ... read more

21 January 2011 We awoke again to glorious sunshine streaming in through the open French doors next to our bed. We already had a plan for the day, the displaced idea from yesterday - namely to go to the world famous Bondi beach. We also wanted to try another of the ferry services to/from Watson’s bay and our first decision of the day was which order to do our visiting. We headed out onto the Manly ferry and headed into Circular Quay. En route passing a huge empty tanker of some kind that dwarfed our ferry, and the ferries aren’t that small. We got to Circular Quay and our timing meant it far more sensible to come home via the other ferry as opposed to head that way now, with this in mind we got ... read more

17 January 2011 Our last morning in Woolongong had arrived, we surfaced early enough to say our goodbyes to our very generous hosts, but not so early as to take Lydia up on her very kind offer of dropping us to the train station at the same time as she was dropping her dad (7:15 is a bit too much for us). We put our stuff together in our packs and took our stroll to the bus stop for the first part of the journey, in glorious sunshine. Moving days are however the one type of day when you actually hope for a bit of cloud so you don't start sweating the minute you don your pack. This was not to be and the morning showers were deemed irrelevant about 5 minutes after stepping out ... read more