No more.

Obviously there will be no more posts on this blog from the 2007 trip.
However we do both have personal blogs which are;
www.razork.blogspot.com
www.simplysonic.blogspot.com

We do have more travel coming up this year although obviosly not going away for so long or so far, so maybe we will crank this blog up again for that.

Hopefully we will also see our Italian friends in NZ soon!!!

Thanks

Thanks to all who of you who have been reading our travel blog and the feedback you have given us. I know that several of you have had some trouble trying to comment on site, I'm not sure why that is, but we knew you were reading anyway.
We have decided to keep the blog going over the next few weeks, or until Xmas anyway so that some of the pics and video can be loaded up.
We'll also try and tell you some of the cool stories that haven't been told because of our technical issues such as Larry the Price Waterhouse partner we met in the Amsterdam casino who agreed that his expense account could afford to buy us happy "honeymooners" a drink. To our surprise he then bought us not one, but two bottles of Dom Perignon at 189 euro each. (heh heh, very nice thank you!
Or how we met an American guy in the smallest village in Cinque Terre who spends 6 months of his year working in Napier at the doctors Rachel used to go to when she lived there; she remembered his name!!!
Lots of people have been amazed at how much seems to happen to us when we travel; we thought it was luck for a start but we now realise that it's because we go looking for it.
The whole time we were away we ate "in house" only twice and had junk food once (McDonalds) as we were travelling late at night. Every other time we hit the town looking for somewhere cool to dine inevitably a) only going in if it looked cool and b) being the last ones to leave. In general if something looked strange, interesting, fun etc we gave it a crack.
Do that and you can't help but stumble across fantastic memories or at least a good conversation piece like how on our second to last night we hung out with a real live super model.
No pictures sorry to say, but we didn't actually know she was a famous person until afterwards...Doh!

We're home!

Yay, it's nice to be home and the sun is shining.
After 36 hours in transit we arrived back in Chch at 8.30am Friday morning.
We decided to upgrade to Business class on our San Fran/Auckland flight which was fantastic with the new bed/seats allowing us to sleep most of the way.
Then it's been all about catching up with the kids who were happy to see us and lots of laundry!

Today we hit the garden and cleaned up the pool which is already at 24C
Still sleepy but feeling much better than we thought we would be.

Homeward bound

We're now on our way home but only just.
After another few days in Cunio we were having a leaving lunch again at Danilo's place complete with another masterpiece meal from Momma and Rach was talking to Michela and Paola about our travel dates. "We fly on Thursday morning and get home Friday" Rachel tells them.
"How can that be they ask, it doesn't work with the time differance?"
A quick check of the tickets shows we actually fly out of Frankfurt on wednesday morning to get home Friday AM NZ time.
Phew, we wouldn't have checked otherwise.....

Just what language?

Last night in Geneva (Swiss) we were sitting in an Indian restaurant ordering in French and Rachel asks me in Italian how to say "excuse me lady" in French.
What's funnier is that I knew and answered her in half Italian and half French without remembering that I could also speak English.

Back in Baden

We have made another great call.For our last real (not packing) night in Europe we decided to call back in to Baden Baden for a night.
And it just happens to be the first night of the Xmas festival. Very cool and just another highlight!

Photos

We have taken thousands of photos on this trip and I had wanted to post some of the very good and funny ones. But things have conspired against us. Last night our camera gave up and it looks to be stuffed. The whole laptop thing has been an issue and this weekend Danilo is going to take the monitor off my hands.
So any remaining posts will be from cafes and won't have any pics. I will post some after we get home however.

Misty ole Milan

Hi folks we have been in Milan for the last day or 2 and the credit card has been severely whipped! For the first time in Europe we have found clothes that a) we like, b) are a fair price and c) actually fit.
Seriously most of the clothing shops seem to make adult clothes for 10yr olds!
The weather is now completely crap and we are over rain; I personally am blaming the Pope.
Milan is a pretty cool city, a city of the future is the claim. Very different to the rest of Italy that we have seen anyway. Last night we went to a Thanks giving party complete with pumpkin pie etc.
The first night here we met a guy in a local bar (Tricky's bar) who was a mate of Tricky that owned a Mexican restaurant we wanted to go to. This guy, Danny, then invites us to another bar, he has several, for the big thanksgiving party complete with the US embassy staff and a few Italian celebs. To be honest it was pretty crap and we spent most of the night drinking bud and watching the Dallas cowboys beat NY jets.
Today we are moving on again back to Cuneo for the weekend to hang out with Michela, Danilo etc before starting the journey north to Frankfurt where we fly from on Thursday.
We have flagged away Prague, it's too far, too cold and we really don't have any info on it.
So probably stops for a day in Zurich and somewhere in Germany, maybe back to Baden Baden.

Venice

Yup, we're in Venice.
We encountered snow and black ice getting here and it was with some trepidation that the decision to cross the water and stay here was made. We actually only booked in for 2 nights, but now that the weather has improved we've extended another 2 days and are here until Wednesday.
Here's some stuff I didn't know about Venice; if you know already,cool, if not I hope it's interesting for you.
Venice is not part of the Italian mainland, it is in fact a group of 118 islands 2 1/2 kms offshore. The famed canals are actually the sea between the islands, the crafty Venetians have concreted them up that's all. as most people know the place is sinking, in fact many of the buildings now do not use the ground floor at all. There is however an enormous amount of work being done on the canals and walls to keep the water out. The Italian govt are spending 4Billion Euro to build huge underwater gates to limit the height of extreme tides.
we did the gondola thing today; it was nice.
Everything is expensive here and it's easy to be caught out in Italy and Rome and Venice in particular. Most restaurants have a cover charge of which you first learn of when you get the bill. The waiter kindly places a basket of bread on your table which is common every where we have been, but they charge you for it whether you eat it or not.
Beer is about 4 or 5 Euro, but so is Coke, spite etc. Wine is basically the same price!!!! Not hard to guess what our staple liquid consumption has been. Without even trying you spend 100 -150 euro each day on food and that's even if you get breakfast included in your hotel bill....
Yesterday, lunch in a basic cafe was pizza for rach, me pasta. We shared a bottle of red wine and bread and a bottle of water. That was 55 Euro.
Then dinner was steak for me, spaghetti for rach and more wine and water; 80Euro.
After dinner we went to a concert, Vivaldi's four seasons which was beautiful, fantastic. On our way home, 2 espresso, 2 glasses of desert wine and a shared desert, 56 Euro. SO BRING LOTS OF MONEY!!!!!!
Venice has an incredible amount of glass blowing shops and we bought some gifts and jewellery today. It is of course also famous for it's masks, masquerade style, and we are buying some of those too.
Anyway, after Venice we are thinking Milan for 2 days then perhaps Turin to catch up with the mad lot from Cuneo again.
We'll keep you posted!

The Horns party (part 2)

Ok, so we had seen the posters and after talking to the locals my best interpretation was that there would be a parade when the men who had been horned and all the rest of the male followers would call on "women" to select the best one for them.

The dozen or so "horned" men would each carry a placard although we weren't sure whether the placards showed their attributes, was a wish list or contained disparaging comments regarding their wives..

Then there would be a street party and it was free to attend!

So we went out for dinner in a local restaurant and this was happening next door.

The boys were getting warmed up!

Then the parade started and of course there were chants and songs and I sang along heartily having no idea what we were singing, but it was all good fun.

Finally we arrived at a corner and 3 guys climbed up a ladder and the MC grabbed a big funnel and started speaking. He was very funny or so it seemed, but his speech went for almost 45 minutes.

You should note the big guy with the beard. He was the grand poohbah and the thing in his hand was a metre long bottle of "bulls blood", the good wine only to be drunk by the horned men and dignitaries.

This picture needs no caption.

So we had some roasted chestnuts and drank some of their home brew wine for 1Euro a cup. Frankly it was bloody awful, think raspberry janola!

But the chief took a shine to someone...

Then Rachel made her move!

The bull's blood was about 1000 times better than the other brew.

But after a big night we had to run and catch our train back to Riomaggiore or walk the 10km or so home.

It was all good fun with only a couple of casualties....

Moving on...

Rome has been cool, but the journey continues.
We're keen to spend some of our time in Venice over the weekend rather than midweek so we're going to bypass Florence even though it's apparently quite nice.
So tomorrow we are probably going back up the road north this time to a small thermal town called Montecatini for a night before zooming up to Venice for 3 or 4 days.
Hopefully Montecatini is as good as Baden Baden was in Germany.
Today we went back to the Vatican city, in particular the Vatican museum and the famous Sistine Chapel. Words and pictures cannot start to describe this place. I won't try.
After that we took the subway back for our 3rd go at the Colosseum and it rained again. But we did it anyway and feel we've seen enough in Rome to justify moving on.

When in Rome.......

Well we decided that while in Rome we must of course visit the Vatican City. Well we read up on it in our trusty Frommers book and it mentioned that when the pope is in town he holds an audience at his place. So like good kiwis we invited our selves along.

It was a little chilly and was looking bleak 20 mins before the big man arrived. It started to rain so we had to bring out the trusty red plastic poncho's.












However if there is one man on this earth who should be able to stop the rain it's the Pope, right? Well thankfully he did stop the rain and we sat through a pleasant one and a half hour speech from the pope and his faithful servants. There were thousands of people there and all were as excited as we were.

The Pope is a very impressive man, he gave great blessings and addressed the crowds and groups with passion and thought. He spoke all 7 languages perfectly and fluently! Amazing!

And as Kevin proposed he was expecting us and gave Kevin the wave and the nod. Needless to say Kev was pretty stoked with that!

The Pope also addressed the fact that he had heard about Kevin walking on water a few weeks ago so has asked that we share this miracle with the world!

It rained today!

It rained today and we got soaked, like really really wet.
No complaints though, believe it or not, it's the first rain we have had on the entire trip.
There was drizzle in Paris one day, and maybe it's rained at night, not sure, but today was the first proper rain.
Oh, and it was Hokitika rain too which is always pretty neat.
The street hawkers doubled their prices and for the bargain price of only 9 Euros we bought 2 Chinese made umbrellas. Mine wasn't very big although one arm did kind of stay dry!

We have just been checking the weather forecasts for the next couple of weeks, it's snowing in Prague today and is minus 4C! Yikes!!!!!

Polizia

One thing about Rome is the incredable prescence of the police here. Just before we arrived there were some pretty full on riots and a soccer fan was killed by the police, so we were a bit cautious when we got here. But no worries!

At any given time I reckon there is a Polizia car or squad within 100 metres of us and we have never felt safer!

It was a bit the same in Paris particular around the tourist spots.

One funny thing was when we happened upon a protest sit-in with about 100 students wearing white coats and the riot squad of about 120 and over 30 vans!

Things were going pretty quietly, so I stood up on the wall behind the protest and yelled in my best "Allo Allo" voice that we must all "fight for zee freedom" and tried to get a bit of a chant going

This seemed to help liven things up a bit anyway before Rachel dragged me away!

Technical issues

Here's the set up I need to use my laptop! The picture doesn't really show it but the monitor is twice the size of the laptop.

See the cool bottle of Limoncetto which helps me put up with the "stress"

You know we read a lot about how poor Internet access NZ has and how slow our broadband is, but we have had all sorts of issues on this trip.

Wireless is either slow or unaffordable and it drops out every ten minutes anyway. Broadband is a joke and the best connection we've had in a month is here in Rome on dial up through the telephone line!

It's a party!!!!!!

So you're wandering along the beach and you see a poster on a wall promoting an event happening that day in the small town you are in (Monterosso) that exact day.

It looks "interesting" and you wander down to the town square to check it out and find another poster.

It's mostly in Italian....

And "Liberty" is wearing interesting head gear.

Then you find an English translation and things become as clear as mud.

It's a party.

What do you do?

Or more specifically, what do you think we did???

Credit card woes.

Crikey, it does happen!
Someone has kept a credit card receipt (or something like that) from one of Rachel's transactions in France and has been using it to buy up large on the Internet.

Big ups to the fraud team at the National bank who discovered it and stopped Rachel's card before things went mad.
Oh, and they also credited back all the illegal spend.
Good on them!!!!!

Rome

Here we are in Rome.
Man there's a lot of old stuff here, a good property developer could make a fortune!!!!

Today we checked out the Pantheon (awesome), the Spanish steps (so-so), Trevli fountain (pretty cool) and stood on top of the big white monstrosity that houses the tomb of the unknown soldier and was built for the first King of Italy. From there we could see right across ancient Rome (as pictured) which we will check out more closely later on.

Tomorrow it's Vatican city.
Every Wednesday (if he's in town) the Pope speaks to the masses at 10.30, so hopefully we might see him. (If I hadn't lost my phone I could text him and check, but maybe he'll read this blog and give us a wave anyway?)

"The family"

Our Italian family!



Angelo, Danilo and Clelia (the world famous Mamma)








Danilo and girlfriend Paola in a very cool local restaurant in rural Cuneo.





Michela and I watching Danilo not play soccer.


She looks happy, I look like the kiwi Godfather.

Cinque Terre

Okay a quick post we are in an internet cafe and must go to catch a train....soon!
Cinque Terre (Five Lands) is a group of 5 villages along the coast that are seperated by hills and cliffs but are connected by walking tracks or trains! Very cool little place and although the whole place wouldn't be more than 10kms long each village has it's own dialect (different types of italian!) very confusing!

More later, sorry can't post pics at the moment, due to the terrorism act of 2005!
Seriously.........

Mi Amore ITALY!

Hi there everyone, well alot has been happening so far in Italy and it has all been pretty excellent. I will start from the beginning, arriving in Italy.
As Kevin mentioned earlier our friend Danilo that we met at Oktoberfest had been texting us and asking us to visit him at his home in Cuneo. So we decided to go, not knowing what to expect, he had to meet us at a little town so we could follow him to his house as it was out in the middle of nowhere. When we arrived he informs us that his brother, sister-in-love (yes love) and their children are joining us, we think this is great. Then he says and also my Mother and Father are here, we say great, then he says that all the others from Oktoberfest will be here a little later on for supper! So we walk in and two of them speak broken english and everyone else speaks Italian. Well after the home cooked feast of a life time and all the homemade wine we are in heaven and of course speaking Italian like fluent mexicans!! But it was great.
The next day our freinds all took the day off work to spend with us driving around their home town and surrounding districts!!
I could ramble on more but all there is to really say is that these people are probably the most generous and welcoming people we have met on this trip! Lovely, lovely people!
Before driving to Cinque Terra we called into Danilo's house for a coffee and to say goodbye and "Mama" had cooked us another 5 course lunch!! Needless to say we spent another couple of hours there!!

Italy

Hi folks we are in Italy with our mad Italian friends.

Rachel will update in the next few days if we can, but internet access and the time to do it is difficult.
We are actually in Cuneo, which is in northern Italy having probably the best time of our holiday so far. Last night we had dinner with a whole Italian family in their house enjoying the most incredible home cooked meal ever. Lots of wine, i mean lots, and unbelievable food and laughter.

Tomorrow we head to Riomaggiore in the Cinque Terre and i doubt we will ahve any internet at all until we get to Rome in 4 or 5 days.