After seeing the Mudd's off we headed down to the Mornington Peninsular to catch up with an old school friend of Sasha's. Approximately 15 years after last seeing each other, we met up with Lucie at her house, and were treated to a BBQ in our honour from her lovely husband Rob, and got watermelon dribble and cuddles from their son Finlay! A fab day!!

Then it was time to head on to The Great Ocean Road! Which, was amazing!! It is just as beautiful as everyone says it is, and 100% more beautiful than the photos could ever show! The towns of Lorne and Apollo Bay were very lovely, but our best experience of the short road trip came from seeing the wild koalas at Cape Otway. But all good things must come to an end and we had to head back to Melbourne to get the van serviced before we could head back to Sydney to sell it!! A nail biting day! Awaiting a call from the garage to list all that was wrong with Tiffany, turned out to be a great surprise, in that she passed with flying-ish colours, and no major work needed! A check up that only cost up $29 thanks to a Scoopon voucher we had purchased!!

The plan from here was to take a slow two week drive back up to Sydney, but that all changed pretty quickly when Ollie received an e-mail from a couple of old colleagues asking him to do some freelance work! So then it was a mad 3-4 hour drive to Albury, a dash to the shops in Albury to buy him a new laptop, and then a 6 hour drive the following day all the way to Sydney where we camped up on Hayley and Gary's couch again for a week, before moving into a shared house in Marrickville.

Our time back in Sydney was a strange one, as we felt a little in limbo, just kind of waiting to move onto South East Asia, and also knowing that it meant that our trip was starting to come to an end, with the whole feeling that you don't want to think about the end just in case it comes too quickly!!

But within our time there we had a fab time, relaxing (after Ol had finished the freelance work), seeing Hayley and Gary become Australian Citizens, taking part in the crazy Warrior Dash, selling the van (whoo hoo!!), and researching for our trip to SE Asia.

The Warrior Dash was absolutely hilarious! It is basically a 5km mud assault course, where you start off in your nice clean running gear and end covered head to toe in mud!! Having to swim across rivers, through muddy bogs, over wooden walls (Sasha ran around these), up rope cargo nets (Sasha ran around these too!) and under barbed wire through another mud pit! At one river crossing Hayley stopped as a girl was a little concerned as to how she was going to cross, not being a good swimmer, and only being approx. 4ft 11" in height, the river was too deep for her to walk across. So instead she jumped upon Ollie's back and he carried her across the river!!

As the end of February came, so did the arriving of Sasha's mum and step dad, with us greeting them at their hotel, with the only way we knew how, with a box of goon!!

Again with parentals in the Country, we were truly spoilt, with plenty of meals out, as well as trips to Katoomba, Taronga Zoo, Manly, the Aquarium and the Sydney Fish Market. Ollie missed out on a couple of these trips due to the fact that he received a call from a Sydney agency asking him to do a week's work at a warehouse on the outskirts of Sydney. An agency that he never signed up to himself, but one that it seems Sasha had seen one day while looking on the internet and just "thought" she would send them his CV!! Whoops!! :0)

We also fit in a lovely weekend to Jervis Bay for Hayley's birthday, where we all had a fabulous meal, lots of wine, and just generally enjoying each other's company.

But all too soon Dee and Ian had to return to the UK, which also signaled that we only had a week left in Oz ourselves!! And so our final days were spent, washing, packing, unpacking, repacking, throwing away anything that wouldn't fit in the bag, unpacking and more repacking until Saturday came with a goodbye lunch with Hayley and Gary, before we hopped onto the night train down to Melbourne, followed by 16 hours in Melbourne airport waiting for our flight to Kuala Lumpur!! And then that was it!! We had left Australia!!!