Chillin' in England

Sorry that we have taken so long to write this entry. As you may have noticed from our latest changes in map and calendar, our trip has had a minor overhaul. We have been in England for the past 3 weeks instead of heading to Morocco, Portugal, and Spain. We spent a few days with Nicole's cousin, Susanna (Nana), in London, two weeks with Nicole's aunt Felix in East Grinstead, and the past couple of days with Nicole's cousin, Catrina.

The trip was slightly interrupted because of a minor medical matter that needed to be attended to. As it sits, everything should be fine and we're continuing on a slightly different journey tomorrow. We have plans to meet up with friends of Nicole's in Greece on May 8th, so what we've decided to do is travel for a month to Madrid, Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece and then come back to London hitting Venice and Slovenia on the way. While in London we'll get our Russian visa stuff sorted and then head to Russia earlier than originally planned.

Being in England for so long, it has given us time to do some thinking. We've blown our travel budget already, we're itching to get back and we're thinking about buying a home, plus the lack of routine is really starting to get to us. Jason has been looking forward to Russia and Scandinavia the most so we're going to keep that segment of the trip, however, we're planning on postponing most of central and eastern Europe for now. Our current estimates get us home for mid July instead of September. We'll keep you posted if our plan continues to change. See our map and calendar for details.

While in East Grinstead, Nicole did lots of crocheting while Jason read and we both enjoyed many more walks with Felix and the dogs. We tried to help out and earn our keep by cooking almost every other evening for Felix, Stuart, and Jim. Jim has been spending most of his days building a new summer house for his parents. Jim also took us to Brighton on the shore of the English Channel for a weekend which was nice. We toured the city, saw the movie "21" and spent the Saturday night boozin' with Jim's friends Peter and Tim. It was a great time and nice to have a night out.

We're looking forward to getting back to our travels. We leave for Madrid early tomorrow morning. HUGE thanks to Felix, Stuart, Jim, Nana, and Catrina for putting up with us for so long and being better hosts than we could have asked for. We're happy that we've been able to become very close with Nicole's English family!! Cheers!

Here's some pics of what we've been up to lately:

Pics: London continued | Sussex continued