Posts from — April 2009

What a beautiful town Amiens is.  After the hustle and bustle of London and Paris, Amiens is very relaxed.  We walked past the cafes along the Somme and typically when visiting at this time of the year, the voices drifting out were not French but Aussie!

Mind you by this stage to get us here from Paris had involved a fair amount of French – which after a while I found quite tiring.  It’s amazing how much thinking in a foreign language constantly can take out of you.  It was almost a relief to hear G’day a couple of times. 

Two days in Paris – we met up with the girls and grandparents on the Eurostar from London and then practiced our (extremely inadequate) French at a variety of sights and cafes all over Paris.  What more can you say about Paris  – C’est tres belle!

Click on our Flickr link to see more pix of Paris.

It’s been 13 years since we were last in London and some things have changed a lot, some will never change.  The biggest thing is how clean the city is, particularly the tube. 

We guess this is mainly due to the bombings and possibly the upcoming Olympics.  The tube is absolutely spotless – not even gum on the ground!  The downside is you have to carry your rubbish with you everywhere because there are no bins!

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We started out travelling around on the weekends taking public transport – just to see what it was like to drag all these kids on buses etc.

Then we decided we needed to get more adventurous and took a 6 hour train from Perth to Kalgoorlie and stayed at the local backpackers.  The train was great – the backpackers was, well – interesting..

But we were convinced that some of the places we would probably stay in Asia would be worse.

Kalgoorlie as usual was HOT!  About 42C.  But we had fun.

Oh, did I mention the backpackers was directly across from the brothels?  Interestingly enough they all offered tours – one actually offers free coffee & cake on their 11am tour..

We then took on the adventure of long distance bus with a 4 hour ride to Esperance where we stayed for 2 days before taking the 10 hour bus back to Perth.  We loved every minute – the kids survived and we were rearing to go.

It’s true what they say about the Esperance beaches – they probably are the most beautiful in the world and the sand really is squeaky.