The night before leaving NZ I had been chatting with our housesit host in London from 2015. She asked if we would return to housesit for them in August. Our plans were now made for the winter but it felt great to be wanted and appreciated feeling that a positive connection had been formed from the previous chapter. It was a poetic start to our new chapter, creating a link from the previous chapter to the start of this new one We left home by bus to Auckland on Saturday May 21. I was well prepared for the trip with loads of yummy snacks and a heap of downloaded movies to pass time. I barely looked out the window the whole way and the trip went relatively quickly. It was bad weather and strong winds according ... read more

We arrived at 6.15am and headed for our housesit in Herne Hill. It was a half hour walk across the bridge to Vauxhall Station to catch the 196 bus to Herne Hill. On leaving the bus station we read a notice alerting that there was a possibility of all underground tube lines would stop because of strike action from 4.30 pm until the end of the next day. This meant that busses would be to full capacity and there would be chaos travelling from the city I thought to make a note to avoid city travel for the next 2 days. It was great walking through the city with absolutely no traffic around. It was possible to look around rather than to try to dodge crowds and the person walking extra slow in front on the ... read more

The cheapest way to fly to Skellefteå was from London with Ryan Air. There are very few airlines travelling to the north of Sweden and amazingly, we found a budget airline that did. This was a main reason why most of our travels were based from London. The last time I had visited Skellefteå it had involved a flight to Stockholm and then a 10 hour bus ride north overnight, so this was still much more convenient and economical. On arrival at Stansted, in London, we were greeted by 2 very young police officers standing together holding machine guns. They were surrounded by excited children wanting to look at their guns and the officers were proudly obliging. Stupid me, took a photo because I wanted an example of how sick this society has become and carelessly ... read more

Now that I am writing about my travels I am beginning to see a pattern with my reaction when arriving in new city. I notice the similarity to my excitement when arriving here in Prague to when we arrived in London and in Kos Town. Emerging from the subway station which brought us from the airport and I was in awe. I was so looking forward to have 9 days here and such a big contrast to Greece! On arrival at the airport we had struggled with the ticket machines for the bus. Three out of four of the machines didn't work as busses that I had wanted to catch were passing. I had downloaded instructions of how to get to our accommodation. The good thing was that the busses were very regular but I was ... read more

Two days sitting by the pool reading and I was getting restless so we decided to do a day trip with a scooter and explore. Another warm day was ahead so the breeze on a scooter should be pleasant. Tomas had a bike licence so we took out a 125cc for 25 Euro. The smaller engines were 20 and little scooters 15. This is what was suggested considering we wanted to cover some distance and climb hills with the weight of the two of us. Our Dutch neighbours had mentioned that they had toured the Island with a quad bike the previous year so offered some suggestions of where to go. They circled locations on our crude map of the island which was the best I could find. The scooter dealer that opened earliest at 8.30am ... read more