And so we face...the final curtain...

Well, okay, that's a bit dramatic but our beautiful year out is now over. We are back in the bosom of Kara's parents (endless cups of tea, free phone calls, and glorious, glorious ale) for a night before a mental August. August will consist of:

• job interviews (Martin will be attending these in a pair of borrowed shoes upon finding his are in the back of a large storage container)
• football tournament in Yorkshire - COME ON YOU COWGIRLS! - Kara playing, Martin getting his poms poms out (that's not a euphemism)
• helping with Eloise's wedding eg practising making her wedding cakes and then actually making them (nervous noises to be heard)
• sorting out our flat in Bristol (low level maintenace to be done, tenants staying on another year - yay!)
• visiting parents (equal visiting rights for both - gotta share the love)
• showing Maltese relatives highlights of our beautiful country
• eating curry
• drinking more ale
• our favourite one...going through our storage container and attempting to add more stuff to it while reducing the size of the container by half...then attending a carboot sale to flog our gear...
• finding somewhere to live temporarily...
• attending Eloise's wedding
• maybe, just maybe, doing some work and earning some money again...

So, we do have a plan for our lives (yay!) but we need to tell various people in person first. Clue: bonjour. If you're interested, send us an email and we'll fill you in.

Oscar style

Like every good film, at the end there are credits. Here are some of our awards and thanks.

Awards

Best food:

Kara: sushi eaten at fish market Tokyo. Blew my mind. Made me realise I had never eaten fish before.

Martin: Steak in Buenos Aires.

Best place:

Martin: Ummm. 3 way split between Patagonia, Tokyo and Northern Queensland, Australia. What this tells you is that I am a well rounded individual with a broad spectrum of tastes and interests, and also a chronic inability to make decisions.

Kara: Tricky. Think it has to be the Torres Del Paine, Chile. Stunning. All of it.

Best city:

Kara: Tokyo, closely followed by Melbourne.

Martin: Tokyo, then Salamanca, Spain.

Best experience:

Both of us: diving in the Great Barrier Reef; hiking the W route in the Torres Del Paine; 6 nights on the Milford Road, New Zealand; eating endless crazy food in Japan and S.Korea

The "Fatos"* award for craziest foreigner encounter:

Martin: Trauko, the eco-warrior with his own recycling in his back yard in Chile

Kara: the random S.Korean dude who got us drunk and made us take photos of ourselves wearing his glasses and holding his dog

*Fatos is one of our good friends who knows a lot about crazy and a fair bit about foreign

Most unexpected pleasure:

Kara: couchsurfing and hanging out with new pals Karin and Richard in NZ

Martin: Salamanca. Thought I was going to a dull town full of museums to keep the missus happy, turned out to be spectacularly beautiful party central. Can't wait to go back.

Thanks

So many people...here goes:

• all the friendly, kind, interesting fellow travellers, hostel owners and randoms we met who are the people that make a year out fun and great
• Chile - Peter Bauer for giving 2 randoms a lift across half the country then letting us hang out with him for a few days.
• Chile - Celiane and Fabian for giving us a great couchsurfing experience and ensuring we didn't get mugged in Valparaiso
• Chile - Trauko for being obsessively, kindly mad but also supplying us with the only blizzard proof tent in the Torres
• New Zealand - Karin and Richard for giving us a place to stay, making us laugh and providing dog therapy.
• Tasmania - Glen and Masumi for providing an AWESOME road trip. Guys, we owe you one...
• Tasmaina - the crew we met on our tour. They were great
• Australia, Melbourne - Elisa and Josh for sharing their home and city with us. And some strong cocktails.
• Australia, Wollongong - the Chambers family. Guys, you were great. A warm welcome, a cold beer and a fast internet connection... can't wait to see you when you are back in the correct hemisphere (we'll make do with Kit in the meantime)
• Australia, Brisbane - Vince for letting us couchsurf and buying us BurgerKing...Riley for not killing us on his driving lessons...
• Australia, Cairns - Mal and Sarah for letting us stay, for helping us out with the whole "rail pass" saga, and for making us part of their family
• Japan - Jo and Nate for MAKING our stay out there. We loved being shown round, we loved finding out what we were actually eating, we loved hanging out with you guys...see you and DeWitt Junior in October...
• S.Korea - Matt and Sophia. THANK YOU! You shared your (small) home with us for such a long period of time (we know it stressed you and you probably thoroughly cleaned the flat when we left!), showed us the full range of S.Korean food, and took us for the most hard-core foreign eating experience of our trip
• France - Rob, Em and Jenny in total 2 weeks of us on your sofa, eating your food, talking crap to your guests, tormenting your cats, and amusing your child. Loved every minute of it.
• Italy - Justine and Fatos for arranging for us to stay in that beautiful home and being consummate hosts. Great to spend time with you.
• Spain - Marisol for being the perfect host family, the teachers at ISLA, and all the Salamanca crew for being such fun (except crazy Irish girl)

Other thanks:

Kit and Nicky for giving us a home before we left and then coming out to meet us in Australia.

Graham, Kate, Luke and Owen for enduring the worst weather northern Spain has seen in decades with us.

George for letting us stay in her home (that we didn't even know where it was as she'd moved) for our week in Bristol.

Our friends and family who have fed us, let us stay with them, sent us emails, kept in touch and been supportive about it all.

Finally...BIG THANKS to our lovely parents, who have been supportive, kind, flew to the other side of the world to meet up with us, keep giving us places to stay and food to eat, taking us out for meals, being the best parents and parent in laws, and generally giving us more than supposedly independent 30 somethings have any right to expect... THANK YOU. xxxx

Triumphs great and small

So, we are in the final week of our almost year out.

Basically, due to bad exchange rates, bank charges on withdrawing money, and Australia and New Zealand being pricier than we thought, we ran out of our year out cash 2 weeks ago... so it officially ends on Monday when we see the white cliffs of Dover and once again will set foot on Blighty.

We're still with Rob and Emma (www.mountainbug.com) and had a few triumphs:

• this time Martin went with an 18 year old lad and cycled up the very Col Du Tourmalet that was in last week's Tour De France. It's 18km long with an ascent of 1500m. Nasty. Luckily Rob lent him some vaseline.
• Kara has proven to be babysitter extraordinaire, looking after Jenny with a hint of panache. Successes here include: getting her to drink formula milk (a first); getting her to have 2 naps a day with minimum fuss (a first); Kara managing to change awful nappies and not vomiting (came close - the poor child looked very startled when Kara made retching noises over her); remembering to feed the child and not accidentally injure her (Kara has past form in these things).
• Martin replaced a guest yesterday and went canyoning. This involves jumping in a river, abseiling into a river, swimming down a river, and just titting around on a river.
  
• unfortunately one of Rob and Em's chalet staff has had to fly home for a family emergency. Team Stanford have manfully stepped in, cleaning, looking after guests and cooking. Our Mexican effort last night got TONNES of compliments.

It's also been pretty cool to just step outside for a quick "walk" which involves those beautiful mountains in the photos. We've got out every other day (with Jenny - she loves it) and it's been bliss.

Last post to come soon... might even do a round up of the year out... sob sob sob. if anyone wants to fund us for another month, we'll wear a t.shirt with your photo on it saying "Sponsored by..."

Merkin and Martin having a face off.

The dining room in Italy

Really cute village we went to with cute couple posing (Justine and Fatos)

The pool. Check out the setting.

Can you see why we called him Merkin?


To France... those are camper vans lining the Tour De France route up the Col Du Tourmalet. The rainbow is over the village Rob and Em live in.

If you're going to climb to the top of a mountain on a foggy, rainy day to be at the finish line of a race, take a tent, some wine and a chair. You can see one of Rob and Em's guests and Martin in there. Then show pity on an Aussie cyclist (all the hobbyists cycle the route before the race begins) who looks like he'll die of hyperthermia and let him come in.

View from the Col Du Tourmalet across the mountains.

So, they finished the Tour in this weather. This is just coming up the finish line. You can JUST see a cyclist in there, behind the car.

Better weather for our walk yesterday!

Jenny the mountain baby, enjoying being carried by uncle Martin.

A kitten called Merkin

Well, in case you were wondering, it is a LONG way from the heel of Italy to the bit near the French border... we left the dry arid land of Puglia, went through the rolling hills near the Adriatic, and ended up for the night in a town called Reggio della Emilia.

We almost came unstuck as the first 3 hotels we tried all charged E100 per night... then we found a little family run albergo for E60 and they recommended a great pizza place too.

We met our friends Justine and Fatos at a place called Taggia Di Arma. Fatos's "English" mother (long story just go with it) owns a little house in the hills, overlooking the Ligurian Sea. Fatos and J have restored the olive groves and now produce extra virgin olive oil (available to buy). Ah, it's lovely. You go up a windy, bendy dirt track of a road, which had hair pin twists and tested our clutch (some say clutch, others say driving ability) to the limit. Kara looked sceptical when Martin informed her that burning the clutch out every now and again is good for a car.

Then you come to the house. It's a one bedroom house with a shady veranda, shaded by kiwi vines growing over it. Kiwis grow like grapes do! The land has many terraces and two of the terraces were thoughtfully combined so that a gorgeous swimming pool could be put in. Ah. Bliss.

As well as the pleasure of two of our good friends being there, the house is also blessed by two feral cats; the pregnant one and the kitten. Tragically the kitten's mother got killed the other week, so this little 8 week old tyke is making his own way in the world. He had a habit of curling up in your crotch for a sleep. Merkin was the obvious name. (look it up, we're not making it that easy for you).

So we passed a lazy week in blazing heat, swimming in the pool, going to the beach, to a tiny hill side village, eating lovely food, watching a kitten, and finding novelty ways to drink vodka.

Things we learnt:

• being half Maltese does not improve your ability to cope in the heat. Kara almost died. It was too hot for her.
• Martin can tan! He is now a lovely brown colour and even has obvious white bits. The lesson is that if you spend a year slowly building up your sun exposure, even "pale and interesting" people can end up looking less sickly.
• we're suckers for a cute kitten. it had us eating out the palms of its paws.
• Fatos does nothing by halves. A drink of vodka lemonade means he gets the lemons from a neighbour, juices them up, makes his own lemon juice, then adds the vodka that has been in the freezer for two days until is is "perfect".
• If you look up "hot, sweaty work" in the dictionary, you may well find a picture of Martin and Fatos scrubbing down a (dry) swimming pool with sulphuric acid. Fun. But worth it for the beautiful blue pool glory that followed.
• Getting woken up in the middle of the night by a purring cat head-butting you is not adorable. It then loses it's appeal on subsequent repetitions.

Onwards to France

"The Tour De France is passing by our front door on Thursday" so we felt we had to get back to Rob and Em's earlier than planned to see it. In fact, we did the 7.5 hour drive from J and Fatos' to Rob and Em's in one day. It was pretty cool to drive along and see the mountains looming up. it was even better when we realised it was a good 10 degrees cooler than italy and Kara gained some energy back. We never thought we'd be so pleased to be back in a cooler climate!

Tomorrow is the Tour final... photos to come....

Mission accomplished!

We did it. After over 3000 miles of driving we have made it to Lecce, capital city of Puglia, which is the "heel" of the "boot" of Italy. And very nice it is too.

As you drive south the climate gets steadily drier, the countryside gets dustier, and the roads feature less angry men driving 10 tonne trucks. Then you get to Lecce, where the first impression is that it's kinda run-down. Lots of pot-holes, graffitti, cars out of the 80's, the full range of human degredation. But once you have checked into your B&B (bed, air-con, fridge, yay) and taken a stroll into the historic heart of the city it starts to work it's charm upon you...

• Endless ancient alleys and side streets, that don't look like they were designed for carts to get down, never mind cars (who thinks that stops the Italians?). Perfect for getting happily lost in.
• One of the best meals of the year out so far - home-made pasta, tender meat, loads of chick-peas (local speciality), washed down with the local wine Negromare. Very, very drinkable.
• More beautiful old churches than you can shake a Catholically inclined stick at.
• Ice cream worth selling family members for. [Martin rant begin] "Why is it that in Italy every local cornershop can produce ice-cream good enough to make you weep, then only charge you about 27p for it? Why can't we do this in Britain? How hard can it be? It's not like the milk comes out the cow any different just because you say "ciao bella" to it. [Martin rant end]

Today we have also visited a local beach. Well, local-ish. The local beach had a 6 mile queue heading to it from one direction, and a policeman closing down the other way in. Important point: If you see a cop closing off a road, and you see an Italian car pulling out into the oncoming carriageway to get round the blockage, this trick only works for you if you time it for when the cop's back is turned. Much Italian shouting and a hasty 3-point turn later and it was time to find a new beach.

Having finally found a beach, a parking spot, and a spare 20cm of sand, we went for a brief swim, we came out and err, we left again. Just too damn hot and crowded. We think Australia may have spoilt us a bit for beaches.

Tonight we are off into the old city again for food and the cup final. Altogether now: "Yo Soy Espanol, Espanol, Espanol" and repeat.

Having driven all this way, what next? We drive back again of course. So that's tomorrow taken care of. We really wish we had more time here, but Genoa, old friends and a vat of olive oil are calling to us.

Photos

Our lovely campsite. Note - camping chair and billy can still in tact. Note: photos have no sound. The 20.30 to Lecce was whizzing past.






The Piazza in Ascoli Picena.








Kara in Carcassone. We were disappointed to discover that much of Carcassone is a 19th century reconstruction. My wife on the other hand is the genuine article.






My husband claims that the local women "like a bit of pale blonde action". You can be the judge...hot or not?











We treated ourselves to dinner out in France. This was what we ate. Cassoulet. A lot of good ducks died to bring you this photograph.










Our peasant lunch on our walk.

Note: Martin is holding a carton of fruit juice in his hand. Kara should be so lucky otherwise.








Alet Les Bains, where we stayed.








Beautiful mountains, shopping mall and McDonalds...we must be in Andorra...







Martin's travelling companions, left to right in order of intelligence, on the French side of the Pyrenees to McDonalds.

Travels through hot lands

Au revoir France

So we headed for our trip to Carcassone which was beautiful, random, and very hot.
The next day we did part of our mega drive from near Carcassone to almost Genoa (Italy). Kara was less than impressed by the motorway going past Nice, Cannes, Monaco, the Cote D'Azure etc and said she didn't understand why so many people went there for hoilday. Martin pointed out this was a bit like judging Bristol by the Almondsbury interchange (the delightful bit where M4 meets M5).

Spaghetti Western
So what you get when you get tired and tell Sat Nav to take you to the nearest hotel is...a campsite. Kind of random. Strange little Italian town, industrial on the outside, then you arrive at a hotel that costs 80 Euros a night so you find a campsite that costs 29.

Campsite comes complete with outdoor toilet block, small pitch, English speaking young male assistant (woohoo!), a sun-lounger, umbrella and chair on the beach, and a VERY friendly Swedish middle aged man, desperate to discuss the highs and lows of West Ham united. Why do no foreigners believe us when we tell them we have no interest in the Premier League?

The Good...

• We are in Italy! It's beautiful!
• Great local food at very reasonable prices. It does still exist in Europe.
• On Tueday we went swimming in the Med, taking advantage of our free deck chair etc combo. Yesterday and today we went swimming in the Adriatic.
• The sun doth shine. Team Stanford are resembling bronzed greek Gods. Not like Zeus or anyone important, but some of the lesser ones. The God of dinner plates or something.
• We are stocked up on p*ss cheap Andorran wine.
• Had lovely lunch in the Piazza of Ascoli Picena, apparently like Sienna (we've not been there so we don't know). Beautiful old town with twisting alleys, fountains, churches, piazzas and just the type of gorgeousness you expect from Italian towns / cities.
• Against the expectations of some of our friends, we find we are quite enjoying the whole camping thing.

The Bad...

• So it turns out that Lecce is actually a sod of a long way from the Spanish/Portugese border, and indeed from our stopping off point in southern France. 1250 miles down, 250 to go, and we had basically had enough. So we stopped off at a random Italian campsite in a town called Grottamare. This led to several of the good points described above.
• The chap we were hoping to meet up with in Lecce is now no longer going to be there... still, Kara will fulfil her dream of going to Puglia (that region). Shame we chose the same holiday to fulfil Kara's other dream of going to Extremadura...so far apart.
• A certain nameless member of Team Stanford kind of accidently managed to forget his* pin number. Three times. Result: the cash card for the account with all our money in has now been swallowed by an Italian ATM, somewhere on the autopista. Rest assured, funds have now been transferred to another account with another card, so we have cash again.
• There were a tense few moments as the other member of team Stanford tried not to make the unamed fool wear the panini they'd just bought with their remaining cash, while semi-shouting things like "we're on a motorway and we don't even know if we can pay the toll with credit card".
• You'll be glad to know our marriage survived this test and good humour was restored later that day.
• We managed to burn our dinner and destroy our lovely billy can. After breaking David and Marguerite's loaned camping chair. All in the space of 20 minutes.
  

*we mean "their" not his. Obviously. That would be giving it a way.

The Ugly...

• Driving in Italy. Amazingly a lot of the drivers seem to be quite old. Which begs the question: how?
• Basically in Italy if you are driving a 10 tonne truck and you want to pull out (even from a stand still), you pull out. God will move the other cars out the way.
• In Italy, if you are behind a lorry, overtaking another lorry on a dual carriageway, a car will undertake you pulling into the safety space you have left between you and the lorry.
• It's not that the Italians don't use their indicators, it's just they seem to be several maneouvres behind what they are indicating for.
• Distressingly, one of team Stanford is becoming more like their mother. The whole tunnels/ high edges/ bridges/ twisty road combo when we first hit Italy not only brought back childhood memories but made them do the maternal thing of: tensing in the seat; suggesting ways to drive; pointing out every other vehicle and what they are doing. I am so ashamed / pissed off (depending on who you think is writing this).
• Every night our campsite holds something called "Baby Dance". It starts at 21.30 and is for the under 5s, who dance with their parents to a whole array of sexual innuendo laden music.Rather depressingly the under 5s stay up later than we do (it finishes at 23.30!!!)
• Our beautiful campsite, on the edge of the Adriatic, with the olive and eucalypt trees providing shade for us is also RIGHT NEXT TO a main train line. The advantage of this is that we can now tell you with some accuracy the frequency of trains (freight, local and express) heading south along the Adriatic Coast. Turns out most of them run from early evening to dawn. Great.

So, tomorrow we press on to Lecce, Puglia. We have booked ourselves into a hostel/B&B as we have spent 13 of the last 14 nights camping and we've also trashed a lot of our camping equipment. Ooops.

UPDATE: tonight's Baby Dance is in fact a belly dancing show involving teenage bikini clad lovelies. Strangely lots of dads and teenage boys watching tonight. But it's okay - they have a group of under 5s holding hands, stood in a circle, dancing round. So that's all good.