Getting ready for Europe

First of all, our big news is that we’re flying to Europe on the 31st of May. We’ll be in Ireland for about a week, then Denmark for a few days, where we’ll be just in time to see the fullsize Lego Technic Bugatti Chironat at Lego House. After the Viking Museum in Roskilde we fly from Copenhagen to Helsinki. We have no idea what we’ll be doing in Helsinki. In fact we don’t even have anywhere to stay yet. The biggest part of our trip comes after that, in the middle of June, when we arrive in St. Petersburg. We’ll be spending a week or so there, then pushing on to Moscow for another week. We’re both deadly serious about this trip: we’ve been learning Russian on Memrise. And as is our wont, we’ll be finishing off our European trip in Zakynthos. Altogether, we’ll be out of Australia for six weeks.

Tina and Eoin walking on Tangolooma with our friend Lex.

Since our big road trip down to Sydney (and beyond) over New Year’s we’ve been the very acme of parsimony. Helsinki won’t be cheap, Denmark won’t be much better, and since we plan to buy a small amount of Russian merch we’ve had to rein in our usual tendency to get away for Easter. But we did have an Australian Day break at Moreton, where we saw, among other things, the nighttime feeding of the dolphins. We also had day trips out to Canungra and Dayboro, towns within the all-important ninety-minute radius of where we live.

Canungra Creek

My other big news is that I’ve finished a very rough first draft of my second book, which (until I think of a better name) I’m calling European Odyssey. My first book, On a Greek Island, is about the magical and weird time we spent in Zakynthos on our big trip back to Europe four years ago. This new book is about the entire trip. Anyway, check it out, and please give me any feedback. (The eagle-eyed among you will notice that the web address of the book is the same as the site we were developing to try to create a Couchsurfing/Help Exchange community: in the end, that just proved too much work for both of us, and we had to pull the plug. But I’m retaining the domain name and Tina’s original design, which I love.)

Brisbane from the top of the Emporium Hotel

And finally – if you know us, you may well know our great friends Karl & Kara. They’re a bit more adventurous than us – so much so that they recently set sail on their boat, the Gráinne Mhaol, on a long-planned round-the-world trip. Readers of this blog may remember that two years ago (and briefly again last year) they let us stay on the Gráinne up in Mooloolaba while they were bothering the penguins in the Antarctic. You can follow their progress on the Marine Traffic site, as long as they remembered to switch on the thingie on their boat that does something with some satellite computer stuff. Their blog is at Karl & Kara Go Sailing.