Au revoir! Adios! Ciao! Tschüss! Cheerio! Bye!

At Heathrow airport with ALL our bags. Thanks Mum and Dad for helping us get all 16 bags home!
We are home, safe, happy and sound. No regrets. Feeling very fulfilled and ready to start the next chapter of our lives. We've been home a month now. Life is very different here. No more going away to amazing places every weekend. It's all about the beach, friends, bbq's and enjoying Sydney life. Lachie already has a fantastic job at Macquarie Bank, a cool car and we are settled into the 'granny flat' above Lachie's mum's place in Beecroft. So we are sadly saying goodbye! What a journey we have had!

Thank you for reading this. We are going to sign off for the last time...

Lac and Sal

xx

Canal boat racing!

It was Sharon's 30th last week and to celebrate Paul and Sharon organised a fun weekend in Wales on two canal boats. We had hesitated about going because of funds but we decided to go in the end and SO happy we did! It was such a blast! The boats were 70foot long and tricky (but fun) to manoeuvre along the canals. We spent the whole weekend cruising, drag racing (not so successful as the boats are painfully slow and hard to steer) eating and drinking. Grey skies but no rain. It was a great way to finish up our time here in the UK. We fly home in two days! Lots of packing, re-packing and rearranging of bags, bike selling, goodbyes and good riddance! We can hardly wait to get home and see our families and friends again, live a more permanent life, save up some money, buy a house (in the next few years) and soak up some much missed sun rays. Pulling out of the marina at Chirk, Wales
70ft boats

Cruising along the canals, about to head into a long dark tunnel
Going over a aqueduct. Pretty cool! This one was over 70ft high.

Lachie making sure he doesn't fall off the edge of the aqueduct
Dad having a blast!
At night we'd light a big fire on the side of the canal. Happy 30th birthday to Sharon!
Fun times and tons of laughs
The water...

Yay!
Looking out at the rapids, misty hills and pretty flowers in Llangollen, Wales
Cruising over another aqueduct looking at greeeeeen rolling hills and sheep
Pauly coming through a bridge
coming out of a loch, a very slow but interesting process, letting water out to get to the next level of the canal.

Fun times!

Sensory overload

Ahh Marrakesh! We LOVE this place! It was a total blast to bring Mum and Dad along. From the moment we stepped off the Easyjet flight to the moment we stepped back on it three days later our senses were in total overload. The smells - spices, meat, leather, wool, tajines. The sounds - call to prayer, horns, yelling, haggling, arabic music, drums, laughing, kids running through the narrow streets. The visual - rainbows of slippers, rugs, blankets, beads, painted walls, burkas, skies, tiles, people walking, riding, running past, horses, asses. The taste buds - Chicken and lemon tajine, beef and pear tajine, mint tea, fresh orange juice, nuts.
Amazing! The first two days we spent wandering around in a bit of a daze, shopping, site seeing and the last day we hired a guide (Rashid) to drive us into the Atlas mountains for a bit of country life site seeing. It was a very chilled out (and chilly) good way to see a bit more of Morocco. We had mint tea with a Burba in his village, lunch in the mountains and a flat tyre.

Mum and Dad thoroughly enjoyed themselves as did we! I hope we'll be back again one day! In the souq's...
The wool production area is fascinating
Dad getting swallowed up in the souq crowds
Lachie chilling out on the roof terrace of our Riad
The riad dog, watching the world go by...
Inside an old Arabic school
Mum in a doorway of the school

Having a crazy fun dinner in the main square
Getting in on the action
Visiting a woman's refuge where they produce oil
With Mum and Dad in a little village heading into the mountains
A local style sauna

How many men to change a tyre?
A pool in Richard Bronson's Kasbah (the most amazing hotel!)
A view down the mountains
In the Palm grove back on the edge of Marrakesh
Looking over the roof tops of Marrakesh at sunset...

Till next time...

Last days...

You think it's hard to keep up with our travels? So do we!

After Edam we stayed a night in Delft and cruised around on our bikes. Then another night spent on the coast of The Hague, Netherlands. It was the last warm day we had and we spent it lying on the beach and daring each other to go for dips in the freezing cold Atlantic Ocean. After the Netherlands we headed to Belgium for a week. The weather, as usual, wasn't amazing but in between the thunderstorms and huge down pours a few patches of sunshine and blue sky came out. We lay low in Antwerp for 5 days visiting beautiful Ghent one day and spent the rest, organising the van, building up our beer stamina and chilling in Antwerp. Then off to Brussels for our last hurrah with all our mates at the Belgium Beer Festival. It rained on and off the whole weekend but we pushed through. It was so fun to see friends, familiar faces and English speaking people! Early Sunday morning we drove to the Dunkirk ferry and headed back into London where we unpacked The Van and sold it! Within 4 hours! and attempted to sleep for a few hours before flying off to Marrakesh...We drove 17541kms!!

The end was always a few months away, a few weeks, a few days and now it's OVER! We really had the most incredible time of our lives and so grateful that everything worked out and we are back in London in one piece. Yay! Thanks for sharing our adventure with us!

The square in Delft

The world heritage windmills of Kinderdijk in the Netherlands. There are about 18 of them in one area. The day we were there they were all in action. They only turn them on a few days a year so it was pretty special to see!

Beautiful Ghent in Belgium

Graffiti in Brussels

The Belgium Beer festival

Lachie and Ollie at the festival

Middle name 'Tourist'

Ahhh the Netherlands! Can’t camp with them but can definitely visit their homeland! We LOVE it here! We are in Edam at the moment. One of the most beautiful towns we’ve ever been to! About 20kms away from Amsterdam, where we spent the past three nights drinking tea, beer, eating good food and cycling to our hearts content, among other things…
But BEFORE The Netherlands we drove from Jenny’s house to Potsdam, 20mins outside Berlin, where we visited a fabulous old park with some amazing ‘Prussian’ palaces, gardens and a 300year old brewery (of course) beside a lake.
On to Berlin where we had HUGE expectations and were slightly disappointed by what we saw. BUT not letting that stop us, we rented a beautiful apartment for 2 nights and lived like the locals. A nice change from the van! Berlin has a pretty interesting recent history and we really appreciated that, what we didn’t like was that it was all so NEW! New buildings, streets, people. Everyone we met wasn’t from Berlin or Germany for that matter. No quirky winding streets, or 1000year old buildings, but understandably considering it has been bombed to pieces!
Next stop after Berlin was a random little campsite…somewhere between Hanover and Hamburg to break up the 7hour drive to the North Sea, on the coast of Germany, for a few days of ‘nature’. It’s a whole different world up there in the Frisian Country. They speak a different language, they look more Dutch, REALLY friendly and the scenery is beautiful, in a mellow way. It hadn’t really stopped raining since Switzerland and we were getting a bit of van fever by this stage, so we organised a walk out to one of the Frisian Islands at low tide (they have 5km tides). Oh it was fun! We were told to walk in our socks as the mud is deep and sticky in places and bare feet could get cut on the shells in the mud. So we trekked out to this island, wading through waist deep water in the pouring rain in our clothes and socks, looking at shells and crabs and worms. Once at the island we washed our feet and had a yummy lunch at a café and lay in the sun for a few hours before catching a ferry back to our car at high tide. FUN day! The next morning we headed for our beloved Amsterdam. Jenny stayed with us one night before heading back to Mainz and we stayed on to dream that maybe we will live there one day.
Time to move on! Only 7 more sleeps in the van! We can’t believe how far we’ve come (over 14,000kms so far…)! So the next 6 days we plan on stopping into Rotterdam, Antwerp, and a few Belgium breweries and meeting friends in Brussels for the Belgium Beer festival. The last HURRAH. But not to be so hasty as to head home - after that we are heading to Morocco for three nights with Sally’s Mum and Dad (TO CELEBRATE OUR 6YEAR ANNIVERSARY!) and then a canal boat trip for Sharon’s 30th birthday AND THEN heading home! Flying back to Sydney on the 18th September.

Proust! Beers at the Brewery in Potsdam
One of the palaces in Potsdam
Jen and Lac 'hanging'
Photo booth fun!

A really cool church, it was blown up and they kept it as it is. In the middle of Berlin.
Part of the Berlin wall Pariser Platz, Berlin
Jenny, Sally and Lac in Pariser Platz with the famous gate behind us.A memorial area for the people killed in the HolocaustSally contemplating the ducklife. In the campsite between Hanover and Hamburg. It was pretty cold! Lachie watching Jenny fly our kite on the North Sea, Germany
Jenny and Sal sitting in a 'basket' seat at a cafe. The seats are famous for the Frisian area
Walking out to the Frisian island at low tide...
eek! It was pretty muddy!

A colourful Dandelion on the island
The 'baskets' on the beach
Sunset at our campsite over the North Sea.
Graffiti at our favourite bar in Amsterdam 'Belgium Cafe'
Jimny Cricket, the Dam

Life in Dam square
A native in Volendam. NL
Volendam
Cruising back to our campsite in Edam, this afternoon with our dinner in the basket.
A confusing picture? We flipped it the wrong way but thought it looked better. A classic boat for the Netherlands.