Our Final Blog

Thursday 10th December

Well we are writing this our last blog with mixed emotions – excited we are going home and also sad that this trip has come to an end for us.

We have travelled to 25 different countries and still can speak only one language.
We have driven 27,170 kilometres – Rae has driven 5 of them – yes that is right 1,2,3,4 &5
We have had 477 hours of driving
We have left our carbon footprint with approx 3200 litres of fuel with fuel cost of over $8000NZD
We still have our wing mirrors on the camper – been some very very close calls
Fastest we have driven in camper is 131km and the fastest we went with Roy driving on German autobahn was 180km – nearly turned into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
Latest night we had was 4.15am in Castlefinn, Ireland – great Irish hospitality
Earliest morning we had was 4.15am – Running of the Bulls
Most beer we drunk in one day was at Octoberfest, lost count.
Two of our favourite places were West Coast of Italy and the South of Germany – will have to return!
We have 92kg of luggage to bring back with us tomorrow and lots of goodies left in camper which we will pick up late February from Tauranga.
Tans have faded in the last two months and the kilo’s have gone on – winter comfort food.

We have been away nearly 8 months and we think of the changes that have been happened for our family and friends whilst we have been away – new additions to families, loss of loved ones, loss of jobs, new jobs, new business ventures underway, new houses and many other changes.

We feel that we have really lived in each of the countries rather than just visited them, because we have the camper we have shopped in the same places as the locals rather than just staying in a hotel.

We have seen some incredible things and been to some amazing places, we have also meet wonderful people along the way that have all helped to make this dream of ours complete.

We feel very fortunate to have had this trip and we will look for jobs again approx April so we can work for a couple more years and do it all again. Next time we think we will concentrate on a few different places rather than travel all over and also next time we won’t be gone as long….just for the summer months. That is unless we can persuade “Lonely Planet” to employ us as researchers and writers for their books.

We are going to be at Motunau for at least 5 weeks when we get back, before we take off as gypsies again so feel free to visit. We arrive back in ChCh Sunday 13th.

We are away to bed shortly has we have a 11 ½ hour flight to LA and we then have 5 hours there before we have a 13 hour flight to Auckland.

Thank-you all who have read the blog and we will see you all soon.

Brent and Rae

The Lights of London

Monday 7th December

Well the camper is all fixed and ready for its journey back to New Zealand. Rae spent quite a bit of time on the internet looking for some sunshine – the best we could find was in Mooloolaba so we ended up in a small hotel (Faulty Towers?) in Feltham, London last week. The temperatures in Spain were only about 15 and the weather forecast was for rain! We also looked at Canary Islands but it also had a rain forecast so we got out the sunglasses and spent some more time in London – true we did wear our sunglasses, very cool but had a couple of fine days!

We caught up with a couple of friends/cousins in the last week which has been fun and had some awesome meals. We had a great Thai meal one night and we also had a fantastic Indian meal – apparently the Indian meals in London are the best - better than India itself, guess that the best cooks live here!!

We walked over London Bridge – and no it wasn’t falling down! Had a look at St Paul’s Cathedral and also Westminster Abbey – both beautiful buildings however we didn’t go right in inside as we balked at the price!

Rae had a lovely time LOOKING around Harrods, she was hoping to see all the Christmas displays but they didn’t open until Saturday and then you have to purchase a ticket online to go in and they are all sold out for the year – amazing! She did manage to find the Christmas decorations and spent some time and money there. What did a good husband do whilst his wife is shopping……go to the Harrods bar of course! Both happy people!

We also made the trip down Oxford Street about 4.00pm to look at the most spectacular Christmas lights – whilst the photos look great they don’t really do it justice.

We picked the camper up on Thursday morning and decided to stay in a camping ground quite close to London – to cut a long story short we ended up only 70km from where we started and it was 4 hours later – wrong GPS co-ordinates, tried to find supermarket, narrow streets where we had to do u-turns as we were too wide to fit through the barriers, drove through some very colourful parts of London – only got really worried once when we saw signs for London Bridge!

We left London on Friday morning after another interesting drive out of there and headed to Nottingham where we had tickets for a Championship Division game between Nottingham Forest and Leicester City for Saturday. Brooke’s partner Jono used to live in Nottingham so we met a couple of his friends and went with them – what an afternoon it was – Forest was 4th on the table and Leicester City were 3rd, Forest wasn’t really expected to win but they did 5 – 1. Never before had we seen such strong banter between the two supporting sides, it is no wonder they separate the different team supporters. You could almost believe that they really do hate each other. The chanting was also something not to be missed. We thought that Kiwi’s were passionate about their rugby but these people even more so! We had a great night wandering around some of the very, very old pubs in Nottingham.

Yesterday we came back down to St Albans (just out of London) to visit David, Helen and Annabelle. David is the son of a friend of ours. Annabelle is 7 months old and very cute. We had a wander around St Albans with them and we both really liked the town.

We have today driven to Oxford and we are waiting for the rain to abate a bit so we can go into the town for a look around. Tomorrow we are heading back into London as we need to pack everything up on Wednesday to be able to drop the camper off in Southampton on Thursday and for us to head to a hotel at Heathrow and then board our plane on Friday morning. We are both quite excited about coming home now and can’t wait to see our girls, grandson, family and friends.

We will update blog again before we fly out on Friday morning.