Hello Everyone!!


It's been a long time... we apologise but now we have been on the road again for a month and it seemed about time to fill you in on all that we've been up to! Brace yourselves cos it's a bit of a long one! (Click on the above piccie for link to flickr)

Where to begin? Well let's go back to NZ for a minute, our last week there was a real whirlwind, marathons... (Seb full marathon in 4h17m, Katie half mara in 2h07m)... knackered us both completely and left us with sore knees and old lady status for a few days. Then we had to pack up our flat and move all our stuff to kind friends who unwittingly agreed to keeping our stuff for us while we're away (sorry Hannah and Katie and David... hope it's not causing you too much inconvenience!! :)) Then of course there was much partying and goodbyeing to be done we managed a pretty god shin dig at the bar where I used to work and surprised ourselves that we had actually accumulated a few mates while we'd been in NZ!

So after this frantic week of non-stop-ness we arrived in Sydney on the 1st of July with our busy heads on and it took us a while to switch off and adjust the the complete lack of deadlines and time restraints that now stretched ahead of us... well it took us about half a day at least!


Sydney greeted us with it's wonderful Opera House and Harbour Bridge standing in suitably resplendent glory. The sun came out to greet us with a balmy 20 degrees and it was with pleasure that we stripped off a couple of layers of thermal underwear that had become our uniform in NZ over the last few weeks. After a few days floating about aimlessly we jumped in our "Wicked" camper van covered in heavily anti Bush slogans and headed up the coast. We had 2 weeks in this knackered old van with the doors hanging off and the wind whistling through the large holes in the floor and dashboard, but it surprisingly started up reliable as clock work each morning, except the 2 occasions where we left the lights on and had to push start the bloody thing... imagine "Little Miss Sunshine" only there was just me and seb and a couple of kangaroos trying to jump start the bloody great thing...

Anyway, our trip took us up the East coast, north of Sydney for a couple of days. On our first morning we went for a walk along the coast to stretch our legs and were greeted with the wonderful site of 4 humpback whales cruising up the coast on their migration journey north for the winter. Pretty awesome for a first day we thought, even if they were miles away... they were definitely there and blowing their spouts and stuff... very cool. Our next stop of any significance was in Tamworth "the country music capital of Australia, maybe even the world" and as luck would have it we arrived just in time for "The Hats Off Winter Country Music Festival". GOOD LORD we couldn't believe our luck!! Live country music was pouring our of every pub, bar and hotel in the town and after a few beers too many, we ending up doing some serious toe-tapping-thigh-slapping-hat-tipping-shin-digging dancing til the small hours. I'm not sure the incredibly serious country music fans around the room appreciated our cynicism but there was no-one in the place who joined in with more gusto than us 2!!

Next we headed west into outback territory good and proper (from Tamworth through Dubbo and on to Broken Hill for those of you who have a map handy!) and did some amazingly long drives across absolute nothingness, surrounded by the red earth and sparse shrub land you see in all the calendars... pretty cool though... and it wasn't too long before we saw our first kangaroos followed swiftly by about another 100 million... there were tonnes of them out there and they are massive and very bouncy! We spent a couple of nights out here in the complete wilderness, sometimes deceived by recent maps and brochures into thinking we would find beautiful lakes and oasis type places full of birds and wildlife, but they had long since dried up and we were surrounded only by dry shrub land and lots of knarly dead trees... awesome stuff all the same though. It was in one such place (Kinchega National Park) that Seb proposed to me under the starriest sky either of us had ever seen in our lives (but that's a story most of you have heard so I won't go into it again!) :)



A quick stop at Mungo National Park to see the stunning Walls of China - a massive crescent-shaped sand dune plonked in the middle of the otherwise completely flat desert, covered in amazing sand formations whipped up by 100s of 1000s of years of wind and rain. Then we decided to miss out Adelaide and head south to the coast and the Great Ocean Road, which as the name suggests is a great road that runs along the ocean... Seb and I are a bit spoilt though and had seen quite similar coastal ruggedness, if not better, in New Zealand so we took a few pictures and of course had a quick stop in Bells Beach (Q Point Break quotes... "knew you wouldn't miss a 50-year storm Bodie"... etc) and cruised on through to Melbourne where we spent about 4 days in the end. A really fun city with loads of incredible shops, museums, exhibitions, and quirky little suburbs to explore. We liked it here!

After this we flew to Hobart in Tasmania and had to hit the brakes quite hard as things run at a slightly slower pace in Tassie! We explored and conquered Hobart in about 3 hours with a rather unusual and lucky sighting of 3 dolphins and an enormous fat seal playing about in the harbour and then discovered there wasn't a lot else to do here so we caught the bus up to Launceston where we stayed with some old friends of my mum's (thanks Gilly). A quick day's tour around the city revealed another cute city without a huge amount to do! But the next day was brilliant cos we managed a day's skiing up Mt Ben Lomond. Fairly amateur stuff for Seb, but for me it was perfect as this was my first time on skis. Seb very patiently took me through the basics, but I picked it up quite quickly and was zooming down the slopes in no time, wiping out innocent bystanders in all directions! Brilliant fun!

The next day we hired a car (as there is NO public transport here at all) and drove over to the east coast to Freycinet Nat Pk where we had a stunning afternoon's hiking over a steep rocky pass to beautiful beaches and coves along the coast and even managed a paddle in the sea. Skiing to beach paddling in one day - awesome! Then it was back to Hobart with a quick stop to see where all the convicts had originally landed in Port Arthur Historical site - loads of old buildings with lots of convicty type stories attached to them.

So the story so far ends here and we are back in Sydney now, staying with my cousin (thanks Maz and Arron) and we are finally able to sit and do this massive blog up date! It's Seb's 29th birthday tomorrow which we are going to celebrate by watching the Simpsons movie, eating lasagna and possible drinking a couple of beers... I dunno!

Loads of love to you all and thanks for all your lovely messages and e-mails, we were really bowled over by all the kind words and wishes and congratulations being sent to us from all over the globe.

Katie and Seb