Once upon a time, 6 years ago today, we kicked off a one year trip around the world - almost 3 dozen countries, 3 largest waterfalls, 3 hot air balloon excursions, the pyramids, safaris, skiing and scuba diving. When we returned from our year of ‘Not Being Grownups’, it became agonizingly clear that we just couldn’t go back to ‘normal’ and thus our current lifestyle, our ‘New Normal’, was born - housesitting - travelling and gallivanting about the w...

The time has come, the walrus said... to depart the Schengen Zone (3 months out of every six might have seemed reasonable when the borderless Schengen zone was five countries... now that it's 26 and the vast majority of Europe... 3 months seems miserly). But depart it we must, in order to have a month up our sleeve for our "Northern Lights etc" jaunt prior to returning to Australia. We did the last of the packing, cleaning, laundry, making up the house today. W...

The last few weeks in Fuengirola have flown past and we have been soaking up the sunshine and heat like solar panels getting ready for the iceage. We've been planning our jaunt to Romania (currently not in the Schengen zone) and keeping an eye on their weather. Since the last blog (when they were getting -23 overnight), we are happy to say Bucharest has warmed up considerably. Some days they reach 0 or even 3 degrees with sunshine. The overnight low when we get ...

We're fortunate that our mate has said we can stay here on the Costa del Sol until almost the end of January - so having a rest generally which is nice. James turned 52 on the 8th and we went for dinner to our 'expensive' local restaurant. Used to be 12 euro for 3 courses for dinner... gone up to 15 - holy moly - that's insane. And we've only been gone a bit over a year, patently rampant inflation. Our usual haunt for outings is a lunch joint that's 3 courses fo...

Truly it could be a four word blog to cover Christmas and New Year 2016 - Peace/Quiet/Food/Drink. But that would be a) just too short and b) boring. So to that we could obviously add pressies to each other (new watches and some jewellery), long walks on the beach which we love (though strictly speaking on the promenade next to the beach - so much better without sand in shoes). There are our usual outings too - the Saturday flea market and the Tuesday 'new' &...