A Year at a Glance

A big and busy year to say the least.

We travelled through Munich in Germany and watched a lovely wedding in Austria. We played in the snow and explored the area in southern Austria. What a beautiful place.

We can back to England and found a house. We then threw ourselves into work, Drew into Managing a hotel and me into temping which was easy. By May we realised if we didn't make an effort it would all get away from us and we wouldn't have done anything. We headed up to Richmond in northern England for Helen's birthday. It was lovely to catch up with old friends again. At this point I started temping in a switchboard, which I found surprisingly fun.

For my birthday we headed to France to spend a week in the city of Love. We walked ourselves everywhere, spending my birthday at Disney Land Paris and then exploring the city. The Mona Lisa was actually pretty cool. I didn't actually think it was tiny. It was rather outshone by all the other wonderful pieces though. We got to see Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower at night, it's defiantly the city of lights.

We then came back and threw ourselves back into saving. We found out our landlord had been dodgy. Turns out he wasn't the real landlord at all. After Drew did some fast talking we managed to stay in our place at a highly reduced rate. Thanks Drew. We went out to catch up with Alex and Kieran in the countryside outside London. You don't need to go far out to discover what the UK you dream about is like. We made sure we got out to explore London and got ourselves together for our adventure to Spain.

We headed to Spain with magical images in our heads. Sadly I don't think we gave it enough time at the start. Yes it was wildly built up and our adventure sans GPS trying to find our hotel in the middle of the night when we flew in may have swayed us. We did a big loop. If you look at a map we started at Malaga and went all the way down to Gibraltar. We then headed up via Seville to Cordoba. Cordoba has won my heart and my favourite place, it seamlessly blends new and startlingly old. We stayed in the cutest old Spanish hostel in a house. It was the Spain I had been looking for. We then headed in a circle back round to the coast to Alicante and then up via Valencia to Barcelona. Spain was a country of lovely tucked away cheap outside eating between beautiful old buildings. The wine was cheap and plentiful and the food was always lovely...mostly.

We made time to head up to the lake district to catch up with Juliet's for a long weekend. What a beautiful area. I wish we had more time and maybe fingers crossed we'll get back there before we go. We got to finally go horse riding here. It was a dream and the night life was fun too.

We started to look forward to Christmas and I entered a competition to win 6 months kickboxing for Drew and I. I WON!! Seriously, now I had to do kickboxing. Talk about new year resolution. It's been on it's Christmas break so we've only had one class. But after we get back from the snow we'll be back in it!! I plan to rock a bathing suit by summer...well not really if I'm in England it doesn't get that warm.

Our lead up to Christmas included Snow!!! Real snow, it's piles up and is beautiful and lovely when it falls. In the city it turns to slush though. It's not pretty when it turns brown and gets icy. We made the best of it though. We always dreamed of a white Christmas.

The snow melted before Christmas though. I made a huge meal for Drew and I and two of our Housemates. The others are from countries that celebrate on different days. The food was amazing and yes, goose fat potato's are the best!! We partied into the night with the neighbours down the street and then relaxed for the rest of our long weekend.

After a lazy week at work we got ourselves together and headed into the freezing city night with a small bottle of whiskey and a determination to see the fireworks in central London even if we headed out late. We made our way and after being turned back several times we found ourselves in the square between Westminster Abbey and Big Ben with Winston Churchill in front of us. The fireworks went off with a bang and we were surprised by how amazing it was, it felt like we were in the centre of the world.

We have an amazing year ahead of us and no real idea of what we might do. We have some ideas and we'll see how they go. First up we are heading off to ski if France for a week next week. Hopefully we'll keep you updated more often.

We've done lots more than is listed here of course. But these are some of the bigger events in our year to date. Thank you if you're still reading this. We don't get any comments so we are never really sure if anyone is.