A Welcome Return

We're back in Scotland, land of the heelin coos! Woo-hoo!!! Here's how we got here...

We had one week aboard the Queen Mary 2 boat from NYC to Southampton. It was better than expected. We attended some cool lectures, ate a bit too much food (but not as much as last time), and met some really cool people. We shared our dinner table with two other couples. The English couple were lovely, and the American couple included one of the lecturers on the boat. We had to miss three of the dinners because we didn't have formal enough clothing, but we really enjoyed the three dinners we did get to attend. During the three formal nights, we roughed it in the buffet upstairs. The Queen Elizabeth 2 boat was making the same journey as us simultaneously (the last transatlantic sailing for the QE2), and they made a huge deal of it on our boat.

Then it was time to set foot on British soil once again. We got out at Southampton and were amazed at all the sunshine! Once all the shops opened, we ran a few errands, grabbed some very tasty cheese and onion pasties, and then got a bus to Cambridge. We spent the night there with Lib, James, Scoobs, Demetri, and the wee sheepie. It was about time we got to see their lovely new house!

In the morning, we got more buses to Manchester, where we made our way to Mary's house. We hung out for a while until Iff's mum showed up. She didn't know we were there, so it was a big surprise for her. We had a lovely dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant, and then it was time for Shelagh, Iff, and me to head to Garstang. We got to Garstang late and crept into Iff's grandmother's house. We spent the night there but unfortunately didn't manage to see Nanny (aka Iff's grandma). We were happy to spend a few minutes with Iff's cousin Damian while we were there, though. We hope to get back down to Garstang soon for a proper visit.

We left Garstang at 6:30am the next morning for Scotland. Except for a brief pit stop, we got to Aberdeen in a oner in very good time and found Dave waiting at the gate to greet us. It's been so lovely to be back in the Noden household. Plus in honour of Shelagh's birthday, both Lib and Mary came up for the weekend. Nick and Tom, Iff's brothers, were doing a 10km run in London on her birthday, but we at least got to see Tom before he caught his flight down there. Discounting the annoying cold I've had and unfortunately passed on to some of the Nodens, it's been a fabulous time for all up in Aberdeen.

Chris's parents were amazingly helpful to us while we've been travelling. We've already been through all the mail they received for us during our two years away (a lot of mail!) and been to Edinburgh and back to fetch all of our stuff out of storage. Now it's time to find employment and a rental flat in Aberdeen. Fingers crossed!

No matter, it's great to be back. And it's snowing in Aberdeen! I've heard of a white Christmas; we might wind up with a white Halloween this year...

Can you Digget?

Just before we left the US for the last time in a while, we stopped by Allentown, home of the Butlers (that's the Butler family - not a refuge for domestic servants).

Although we didn't stop for long and managed to miss uncle Chris and only catch glimpses of Wills & Alice we did have a great time chatting with auntie Dig, playing with Bart the dog and getting all the essential things taken care of before we left (email, laundry, figuring out what we're going to be doing when we get to the UK).

Anyhow, we're now in New York, trying to figure out how to get the few remaining miles to the cruise ship terminal without paying the rest of our life savings in taxi fares. The way the economy's headed here the fare is most likely to be internal organs, solid European currency or Rolex watches - internal organs being our only option in that case and quite frankly I've grown quite attached to my liver...

So if all goes to plan and we don't repeat our San Luis Obispo Amtrak experience and get left behind, we'll be on a ship for the next week or so - meaning no blog updates, emails or facebook hilarity. I'm sure you'll all struggle through somehow...

Aimless meanderings

So it's almost time to draw our global wanderings to a close - at least for the time being. In a couple of days we'll board our ship back to good old Blighty and this leg of our journey will be well and truly over. It will have been two years since we last set foot in the British Isles and I'm sure a lot will have changed - but then so will we.

Even if we don't get to travel any more, we've certainly done a lot more than most people have - and although we didn't get to visit as many countries as we'd hoped to, we certainly covered those countries in some depth. We spent 6 months in Australia, 2 months in New Zealand and 6 months in Central America (including a whole month in Mexico and another in Guatemala). We looked after sick koalas, endangered kiwis and neglected Alaskan cats. We learned some Spanish while living with a Guatemalan family. We spotted moose, bears and folk singers in Alaska. We sailed the length of the Panama canal and the width of the Pacific. We trudged through ancient Mayan cities and modern shopping malls. We spent days (and days and days...) on buses, trains and... even more buses. We've met friendly locals, travelers and even border guards. We traveled to the other side of the world and back and never once left the surface of the Earth (unless you count Tracy's canyon swinging or my bridge jumping).

In a week or two we'll be back in Scotland and looking once again for gainful employment. Once again real life will intrude upon our existence. Hopefully it won't be for too long.

Texas!

Backing up a wee bit, we had a great time in Texas. We had a couple days in San Antonio with Ross and then five days in Houston with Ross and my parents. It was all quite hectic since we had lots of errands to run, including finding birthday and Xmas presents for my family. But it all got done, and we managed to have some quality family time in the bargain (as well as my meeting up with Nadine and Iff helping with an email server problem at my dad's office). We were especially happy to be there for Ross's and my mom's birthdays. Brilliant timing! Luckily Ross wanted to go to the Renaissance Festival for his birthday, which happened to be their opening day. It was cool to be back there, and the performers were in fine form, and Iff won a free DVD! A brilliant day was had by all.

Happy birthday again, Mom and Ross! And today, very happy anniversary wishes go out to Nick and Sarah!

Update

Hi folks.

Here's a quick update to let everyone know what's up. There haven't been many updates lately (sorry) and there may not be many more in the next fortnight, but we're about to leave Houston to catch the ship bak to good old blighty.

If all goes to plan and we on't get left behind by any more trains, we'll drop by Pennsylvania before hitting New York and boarding the ship.

At some point in the future, I'll fill in the gaps, but just for now, we're safe, well and everything is looking good.

Unexpected Road Trip

We had it all worked out: two days on a train from Seattle to Los Angeles, a hotel room booked and paid for in LA, then two days on another train from LA to San Antonio. Easy peasy. Ha! We were on the train to LA, and all was fine until we stopped in San Luis Obispo, just 300 miles from LA. The conductor announced that we'd be there for 10 minutes. Loads of time! We wandered into the station, checked out the vending machines, stretched our legs. I thought we still had plenty of time left, so I thought I'd use the lovely normal-sized bathroom in the station (rather than the tiny, cramped bathrooms on the train). The train decided to leave while I was in the bathroom.

I came out to find Chris with a very stressed way about him, shouting that the train had just left. Sure enough, I ran outside just in time to see the train disappear around the bend ahead. Of course, all of our stuff was on the train (except for the one bag we always keep with us, which luckily had our train tickets and mobile phone in it). Also luckily, I had my jacket and glasses on me. Chris had nothing but the clothes he was wearing and his wallet. He didn't have a jacket, so we were really lucky to be in warm California!

I was mortified to find that there was no way to stop the train. We could only try to catch up with it. The next stop was Santa Barbara, a couple hours away. Now, you'd think there'd be plenty of public transportation options. Wrong! To make a long story short, the wonderful Amtrak employee in the San Luis Obispo station wound up putting us on an Amtrak bus (for free) that happened to be leaving soon for Santa Barbara. The hope was that we'd arrrive before the train did and be able to get back on, reunite with our belongings and finish the journey to LA. Of course, by the time we got to Santa Barbara, we found out that our train had already been and gone.

We then had lots of phone calls to make. I spent a while on the phone with Amtrak, finally speaking to someone in the LA station who very kindly offered to get our stuff off the train for us to retrieve. Amtrak had nothing else going south that night, so I caved in and spoke to the dreaded Greyhound, who luckily had a bus going from Santa Barbara to LA at 10:45 that night. The delightful Greyhound employee assured me that it was fine that the Greyhound office there was closed; we could just pay the driver in cash rather than buy tickets beforehand. Cool! So we made our way to the Greyhound station and waited about an hour. During that time, it completely escaped our attention that there was a sign on the door informing passengers that Greyhound drivers no longer accept cash. The bus arrived, and we went to give the driver our money and were directed to that sign. ARSE!!! Damn you, Greyhound!

By this time, our only options were to try to rent a car and drive ourselves to LA or spend the night in Santa Barbara and get to LA the next morning. We decided not to spring $45 for a taxi to the airport (and who knows how much for a rental car, provided there was a car rental agency even open at that time). The hotel we'd booked and paid for in LA refused to refund our payment, which was annoying. But we were too tired and cheap to mess around with a rental car. Meanwhile, the incredibly helpful Amtrak guy at the LA station called to let us know he'd “got most if not all” of our stuff off the train, but the train employees had kicked him off because they needed to leave again. We were so anxious about getting all of our stuff back, but it turned out that the lost and found office at the LA station would be closed until 7am anyway. We fortunately found a hostel near the train station and grabbed a few hours of sleep. Luckily this hostel provided soap and towels since we didn't have ours!

After about three hours of sleep, we got up and dragged ourselves to the train station. We told our pitiful story and were very kindly allowed to take the 6:45am train to LA at no extra charge. It took three hours to get to LA, and my stomach was in knots by the time we got there. Would we find all of our stuff? If we didn't, what would we do? We practically ran to the lost and found office, and there to greet my suddenly teary eyes was all of our stuff lumped together – backpacks, food bags, our jackets, a sleeping bag out of its cover, various things usually in our backpacks but out loose because we'd spread out a lot during the train journey, even Chris's sunglasses and his cherished mini maglite – underneath a note that we'd pick it all up that morning. That wonderful Amtrak employee, Dave, managed to grab everything we'd stashed overhead, in our seats, at our feet and in the seat backs in front of us in the few minutes the train staff allowed him. It was a big, messy haul, and we were so relieved to see it. We packed up, thanked the lost and found employee profusely, and made our way back into the main terminal. Disaster averted! Thank you, thank you, Amtrak! I shall be writing a long letter of thanks.

Our Amtrak luck continued. The guy in the baggage claim, who also watches over stuff in day storage, knew about our train debacle, rather my train debacle. He sympathized and only charged us a quarter of the fee for us to leave all of our stuff in the storage area. Genius! We only had a few hours before our train was due to leave for San Antonio, but we were starving and wanted to visit the La Brea Tar Pits museum. The last couple times we were in LA, we tried to get to the museum but were thwarted each time. This time, we were determined! And we made it! After a quick fuel stop at IHOP, we got to visit the wonderful museum. It's full of bones and reconstructed skeletons of animals who wound up in the tar pits over many millenia. It's awesome. We're talking reconstructed skeletons of giant ground sloths, a huge Columbian mammoth, saber-tooth cats, and other cool animals that are now extinct. It was a thrill to see it all.

Then we rushed back to Union Station to retrieve our bags and get onto another train. I'm very happy to report that we got from LA to San Antonio with no hassles, and we were only 90 minutes late arriving in SA! Ross picked us up, and now we're here in his newly cleaned apartment. Life is good! Now I need to take about an hour to write that letter of thanks to Amtrak...

Seattle

We made it to shore, by which time Chris's mysterious welts disappeared. Phew! The highlight on the ferry was spotting a pod of at least five orcas (including one baby) pretty close to the boat. I'd been hoping to see them all throughout our time in Alaska, but it didn't happen until we were in Canadian waters on our way out. No matter, our boat was officially Alaskan (on Alaskan time), so we maintain that we saw killer whales in Alaska! Another ferry highlight was eating the veggie meatball sub sandwiches we were able to make on the boat. Thank you, Alaska Marine Highway, for providing microwaves!!!

Upon arriving in Bellingham, Washington we wound up getting the dreaded Greyhound back to Seattle. Boo-hiss! But luckily we arrived in Seattle uneventfully and got a local bus to Bart and Lauren's house. Then it was time to see our (still wee but frighteningly close to walking and talking) niece and walk the dogs! Woo-hoo!!!! We had a great time with the five of them as well as a lovely visit with Lauren's parents and grandfather. Plus, as usual, the food was outstanding. Lauren makes the best hummus ever, and don't even get me started about her roasted garlic yoghurt sauce! When it was time to leave five days later, we waddled out the door.