MISSION COMPLETE

I did it! I went around the world without flying, travelling from London via New York from East to West. On 27th March I met up with 22 "Oz-Bus" fellow travellers at the start of an amazing journey through Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, China, across the Pacific to Alaska, then through Canada to USA and New York where I said farewell to my friends to undertake the last leg of my journey alone on a Cruise Liner across the North Atlantic, arriving home on 13th July.

If you are interested to read about it just click on the logo on the side bar at “R&C epic adventure - READ BLOG NOW" button. What this travel log will not and cannot say is the “warts and all” inside story of the trip which, I know, everyone is waiting for me to tell. Well that’s for me to know and you to find out! What takes place on the Oz-Bus stays on the Oz-Bus. Suffice to say we did have our moments of “high drama”!

However, I will say that the whole experience was challenging, exhilarating and sometimes exhausting but one that I’ll be forever grateful that I experienced. I was sometimes elated, angry, tired but never, never bored. What is more important is that I met some fantastic people, some of whom I would like to consider as my friends.

I am always being asked what the “highlights” of the trip were. Strangely enough not the obvious things like Red Square, Siberian Express, Great Wall of China, Terracotta Warriors, Beijing Olympic Stadium, Niagara Falls, Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone, Woodstock, Sleepy Hollow etc, etc . All stunning but, strangely enough, many of the highlights were quite ordinary things like:

Jono holding my hand to stop me falling when we walked back across very, very thin, and very, very slippery ice from Olkhon Island on Lake Biakal;

laughing with Jonny, Sirin, Jono while playing bingo on the Diamond Princess;

the strangely comfortable feeling that I felt re-joining my Green Tortoise companions after a day out in Seattle with Jack & Betsy;

the surreal feeling of going to a blues club in Chicago, a thing that I had never expected to do;

Sirin and I drinking a bottle of wine on an empty stomach at the revolving cocktail bar on the 48th floor of the Marriott on Times Square and bouncing off the walls on the way out, laughing all the way;

going up to Connecticut to spend the day with Margaret at her lovely home in Greenwich and going over to the island to meet her friends and enjoy the jazz band;

meeting up with Georgina and Kimberley, after such a long time apart, in New York and doing “touristy” things

Many, many memories and every one a treasure. You can’t buy that.