Last day in Germany

Well we are in Aachen near the border of Belgium and are hoping to have a swim in an ancient spa before heading up to The Netherlands, Amsterdam.
Germany has completely surprised us, it has surpassed any thought we might have had!

If you are looking for a mystical place lined with cobblestoned streets, unbelievable gothic cathedrals, castles, fortresses and lovely helpful people, you dont need to go past Germany, the experience has been amazing and we are sad to be leaving!

On we go however up to Amsterdam to see what the Dutch will bring us! Windmills!!??!!

Sorry no photo's just yet as we are on Internet Cafe Computers but we are going to look at some laptops today so hopefully in a few days we'll be able to post pics again.

Take care everyone,

Rach & Kev

p.s. Erika, Amy - Love u and miss u heaps xxx (Hi Margaret\Mum!)
pps sorry Amz havent found your rubix cube yet!!

Good times

The last 3 days have been fantastic in so many ways.
After we left Munich we decided to stop at a place called Augsburg which is about an hour NW out of Munich and check out their famous Rathaus (town hall) and have some lunch.

We wandered around the town a bit then found a nice spot for lunch in front of the Rathaus before going inside for a look.
The problem with being in a foreign country is that you can’t read the signs or have any idea or what things actually are so we just looked about at bugger all until I decided to explore up a couple of flights of stairs and found the most unbelievable room you could ever imagine.

The room itself is about 30m X 20M and about 10m high.
This is the gold leaf ceiling.

Some of the gold leaf artwork.

Although not really old this place has heaps of historic significance with Napolean meeting here several times between 1805 and 1809.
We were spellbound by it and unfortunately the pics can never capture it’s incredible beauty but it set us up nicely for things to come....

More Oktoberfest

Disaster.

I have broken my lap top and can only see the left 25% of the screen!

The best day

Monday was the best day on tour so far and after the last couple of down days it was just what we needed to get things back on track.
The night before I did an interview with a ChCh radio station about what it was like to be on this side of the world following the rugby with the AB loss. I made the point that while the rugby was the reason we were here at this time, it wasn’t the actual reason why we were here.
So yesterday morning the first thing to do was pick up our car for the next 47 days.
We have a brand new (25kms) Peugeot 407 on a lease arrangement. It’s actually a French tax evasion scheme that has us buy the car now with Peugeot guaranteeing to buy it back when we are finished with it. Overall it will cost us NZ$67 a day with full insurance and unlimited kms.
And so we set off towards Strasbourg, our next anticipated destination.
The car has the latest version GPS on board, you simply enter a town name and/or street address and it tells you (in an English woman’s voice) exactly how to get there, eg turn left in 200 metres.
It also tells us where petrol stations and toll gates are and unbelievable gives you reports of accidents ahead and offers to find you a quicker alternative.
We love the GPS so much we have named her Jeanie (Genie)

And man they drive fast here.All you have heard is true. I was doing 150km yesterday in a slow lane and the cars in the fast lane made us seem like we were doing about 80kms. We all of course had to slow down for road works….. to 120km!
Anyway as I say the day turned out to be a fantastic one and I’ll post some pics and tell you where we went later.

Oktoberfest

Ali and the Beatles

How's this for cool?

I bought this signed original photo of Mohammed Ali meeting the Beatles before the Sonny Liston fight in 1964 where Ali said his famous "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee" phrase.

Hopefully UPS treat it well and it arrives in one piece!

This is not a very good photo of it if; you look closely you can see my reflection.

Perspective

Last week we got the news that a good friend was unwell and that she was likley to be in hospital for 6 weeks, then today I have heard that a very special friend who I love dearly has had a stroke and has lost sight in his left eye.
He is also due a long stay in hospital.
Feeling pretty bloody hopless at the moment to be honest.

San Francisco

Trying to catch up on the last few days which have been a bit of a blur. San Francisco was cool, actually it was bloody freezing and I even had to buy a jacket.

But we certainly enjoyed the city and our hotel was right on Fishermans whalf so we could walk around shopping and sight seeing all we liked.

The seals are all sitting on floating platforms right on the beach front at Pier 39 which is pretty much an entertainment centre with shops and restaurants.

On the second day we rode the famous cable cars and checked out downtown and on our last day we drove around and crossed the Golden gate bridge etc.

We have 3 days in San Francisco and 2 in the Napa Valley (which is 3o miles away) on our way home so we didn't panic about not doing much more than that.

Our current thinking however is that we might put our flight from Europe to San Francisco back 2 days to spend more time in Europe, probably Italy.

The most difficult part of San Francisco was sending the kids home.

They were great on this trip and Erika espcially did really well considering she was sick the whole time. We think she has a chest infection and it would have been easy for her to give up, but she refused to let it ruin her holiday.

I am very proud of them both and we miss them already!

The carnage.

While it's bad enough to be over here lamenting the loss, I think it would be worse at home.I actually picked England to beat Australia, but honestly thought we would win in Cardiff by 20 points.

I'll blog later on our experience watching the game and the aftermath, but as you can imagine it was pretty crazy.