Hello from London, where we’re housesitting for a couple of weeks before we start the next chapter of our adventure: we’re moving to the Algarve! After a hectic year of travel in the Americas, our plan was always to move to Portugal in the autumn, but we had our sights firmly set on Porto until Andrew was offered a great teaching job in the Algarve.
After an incredible year of adventures in South America and the USA, we touched down in London in July for our annual UK summer visit. As usual, we’ve been hopping around the country visiting friends and family, but this year we also drove up north for a work trip that involved exciting adventure activities Scotland including canyoning, tubing and our first white water rafting experience. 
Hello from Oregon, USA! I’m writing this from a caravan overlooking the red outcrops of Smith Rock State Park, with a cup of Earl Grey beside me, reflecting on how long it’s been since I blogged. In fact, my last post was back in Lake Titicaca, which now feels like years ago. Since then, we’ve travelled through Peru, visited Machu Picchu and spent three idyllic weeks road tripping in California. Somewhere along the way, amongst dealing with a ton of freelance work and a house-sitting disaster, I just had to let blogging go, but now I’m back.
Ever wanted to move to Prague in the Czech Republic? We fell in love with the city when we visited in summer 2016, so we decided to return, this time for a month in winter 2017. Our month was filled with tours and family visits, trips to the stunning Christmas market and hours spent wandering Prague's famous cobbled streets. We had a great time, but how much did it cost us? From accommodation to food, activities and transport, here's our cost of living in Prague breakdown.
Last week we celebrated five years of travel, can you believe that? I still vividly remember waving goodbye to our families at Heathrow in 2013, clutching our brand-new backpacks and one-way tickets to New Zealand, heading off on what we thought would be a two-year trip around the world. Yet, here we are in Colombia five years later, reflecting on both the amazing and tough aspects of this nomadic lifestyle we’ve managed to carve for ourselves.
How much does it cost to travel Europe? It's true that the continent definitely isn't the cheapest in the world, but here's the good news: it can be done on a modest budget. We spent three-months road tripping around Europe in late 2017, heading from Amsterdam to Portugal, through Slovenia and Germany to Prague. Here's how much our Europe trip cost, including a breakdown of transport, food, activity and accommodation prices.
January isn’t the best time for a seaside break in the UK, but when The Cumberland Hotel invited us to stay with them in Bournemouth, we couldn’t resist the chance to visit our former home, which has also been voted the top seaside town in the UK. After a low-key New Year’s Eve, it was great to kick off 2018 with a serene break on the coast before we head to South America.
Despite having just booked one-way tickets to Colombia, Andrew and I have been talking a lot lately about finding a future base in Europe. As much as we love our freedom, we know that after our South American adventures we’ll need to find a base in Europe where we can hang up our backpacks, work and save for the years ahead, but where could that base possibly be? Well, I think we found our answer when we rocked up in Porto.
As the year draws to a close and we prepare to leave for South America in January, it’s time to take a look at our 2017 travel roundup. I feel incredibly blessed to have enjoyed yet another year full of new experiences, adventures and travel. In 2017, we managed to live in Thailand, trek to Everest Base Camp, explore Sri Lanka and road-trip around Europe. We got married, went vegan, continued to earn a living remotely and, of course, blogged about it all.