Well, we've gone and bought a small piece of Australia! We are locked into our rental for 12 months, they are really strict here with tenancy laws - so unless we find someone to take over our lease, we are committed to staying here for the duration of the tenancy. Whilst we are happy to rent at the moment, we wanted to get a foot on the Ozzie ladder as soon as possible, as land and house prices are going crazy here at the moment. Some areas rose 40% in the last 12 months! and there is no sign of a slowdown. We can’t get a mortgage until Emma is working, so we thought we'd look at some land as it is obviously cheaper than land and a house. We thought we could put our deposit ... read more

Well, here we are - just over a week in and already feels like we've been here ages. We arrived on Monday 22nd October and took a taxi to our friends warehouse apartment in Brunswick, we got there about 17:30. The apartment is awesome, it is in a huge old warehouse that was split into apartments about ten years ago. David & Stephanie bought this one earlier this year and gutted it, remodelling it into an open plan 'New York' style apartment. Hardwood floors, granite worktops and high ceilings. Very nice. We spent Monday evening settling in and catching up. Tuesday we hit the ground running. We headed into the city to activate our bank accounts that we had opened from the UK, they ordered our bank cards and cheque books. We arranged a hire car ... read more

Tuesday October 9th - Hell-A We arrived in LA early in the morning, after another perfectly smooth LAN Peru flight. It was an 1 ½ taxi ride to the Best Western on Sunset Boulevard, and luckily they let us check in early, ( we arrived at the hotel at 9am ). They even let us go for breakfast that morning. The hotel is actually really nice, the room is spacious and there is free wi-fi. The pool area is in a nice courtyard at the rear. We dropped our bags, had some breakfast and set off toward Hollywood. LA is a sprawling mass. Absolutely no-one walks anywhere, the car is defiantly king here. In some place it is actually impossible to walk as there are no pavements or crossings - and you really dont want to ... read more

Sunday 30th September - The Inca Trail. We were all in high spirits at the 6am breakfast, even though nobody got much sleep thanks to our noisy neighbours late into the night. We were picked up by a mini bus and driven to KM 82 - the official start of the trail. We had to check in and show our passports and tickets as there are only 500 people per day allowed on the trail, ( including porters and guides ). Our group of 8 has one guide and 14 porters! There was a group of 4 people in front of us that were turned away as they did not bring their passports with them - they were gutted as your places need to be booked way in advance due to the limited numbers, so it’s ... read more

San Francisco - Friday 21st September to Wednesday 26th September. We left Yosemite after another HUGE buffet breakfast, the old waistlines are starting to expand a little now - we’re ready for some more street pounding in the cities to keep in trim. The road out of the valley was closed due to a huge landslide. The whole hillside had collapsed, completely covering the road for about 200 yards, and pretty much damming the whole river as well. Rather than try and clear it up and shore up the hillside, they built a bridge either side of the blockage, and a new road on the other side of the valley bank to go around it. It was a pretty easy, uneventful drive of about 200 miles. We left the cold mountains of Yosemite and drove through ... read more