CRFS

Well, it's actually been 2 WHOLE MONTHS since we got back so I guess it's time for an update!

Life as we've known it has changed a lot and at the same time stayed the same - and I'm not just talking about our personal circumstances. We landed back into UK life just as the credit crunch really took hold ('Global Crisis' with dramatic graphics if you watch the BBC), and although I'm sure we'll feel the effects in due course, right now it appears that the best training for frugal living is a year of travel! We just spent the last 12 months looking carefully at everything in the shops thinking 'do I need it, or just really, really want it?' closely followed by 'How much does it weigh?' The latter is now not so important, but we have yet to unpack quite a few boxes thus proving we didn't need all that stuff in the first place! We have had some necessary expenses such as school uniforms (and Brownie uniform - £40!!! That's a night in a Singapore hotel...), insurances, car trouble, phone bill to Honduras (see below), but for the most part the groceries etc seem manageable right now and thankfully petrol prices peaked while we were away. Getting back to running a house again is proving irritating - the things that seemed outrageously difficult to sort out when we left - council tax and child benefit - appear to have been just as difficult to restart now we're back, I have new respect for people who move around all the time!

So Chris lasted an amazing 23 days at home before the mer-people called to him - he is currently in Honduras, on the island of Utila, where the fish are pretty and tourists happy to learn. He's there for a few more weeks, doing more courses and getting some teaching practice before I send him back to the workplace (I feel this is a fair comment, as so many people obviously think I am some kind of warder, having been asked why I 'let him go' I've tried to pitch it as a topic we discussed and agreed on, but it always seems to be taken as my being OK with abandonment!) We talked about going 'en famille' but decided that the children (and actually me) would prefer more social interaction than that of divers and backpackers! You can catch up with 'The Adventures of Chris and Lawrence' on their blog

The girls have gone back to school - they are currently on their mid-term/half term break - and have really enjoyed mixing with their peer groups again. It's a different school to the one Fin left, but smaller and seems very friendly. Sadie of course has never been to school before and was amazed to discover that all of the children in her class were 5 years old too! Six weeks in they seem to be coping well and certainly keeping up - their teachers are very understanding (and in fact jealous) of their year away - Fin's teacher seems to spend more time discussing how one goes about taking a year out than how she's doing!! He does stop to verify her more outlandish statements e.g. 'My Daddy is in Honduras for a few weeks...' 'The Taj Mahal is really very dull...' etc etc. While they're out 6 hours a day I'm catching up with the girls for coffee, sorting photos and the stuff we posted home and actually now working 3 half days a week.

Last weekend we went down to South Devon (about an hour from us) to see the Bowlers - the family we met in Thailand all those months ago. It was wonderful to see them - they are excellent hosts, the children got on just as well as they had for the month of December, and gave me a much needed link with our travels. We also got out to see the wonderful autumn countryside, which reminded us we live in a pretty special part of England.

Sidmouth Beach, Devon:

So that's about it, we're doing OK and missing Chris like mad, wishing he was here, but most of all wishing we were all somewhere else, still traveling, still living it and loving it, still Four Go RTW.

See ya

All love C (in absentia!) RFS xxxx

We are back! Our house is as we left it (thank you John!) and the girls are delighted to be reunited with all their old toys! It’s utterly weird, and before we can think about what to do next, we need to think about what we’ve just done.

No. of miles travelled: 39189 (63068 kms)

No. of photographs taken: 10,651

No. of days on the road: 345

No. of countries visited: 12

No. of different beds slept in: 90

No. of the four who got seriously ill: 0

No. of things stolen from us: 0

10 things we have learned in our year together:

1. Chris is a mer-man. As long as he gets dunked in warm salty water every few days he’s a happy bunny.

2. The girls are also water babies, but are equally at home in confined water with tiles on the bottom.

3. Rachel is a lizard. If the ambient temperature is lower than 20 degrees Celsius, she is very grumpy and lethargic.

4. Bearing in mind the above statements we perhaps need to live somewhere else!

5. The world is surprisingly good value for money! We have spent less in the last 12 months than we would in a ‘normal’ year in the UK, and would have spent even less if we had stayed longer in the cheaper countries, and done less of the expensive once-in-a-lifetime things. The amount we spent made it an amazing, fun, happy trip rather than an endurance test.

6. The best things in life are not things. We have so many more things since we got back, and frankly it’s a pain finding a place for them all. We’ve found out how much we can live without, and even scaling life down to 2 large backpacks means we’ve had a lot more things than many other people, but not necessarily the best things.

7. Our children are amazingly good company. We suspected this was the case and it’s wonderful that it has been so for 345 days in a row. This year it has been sobering to be in so many places where children are just children; not Bugaboo babes, little Dior darlings or will-they-get-into-the-right-school wannabees.

8. We are fourgortw, we are CRFS, we are a family unit of 4. Home is wherever the four of us are. As Sadie says ’home’ is where we are sleeping tonight, ‘home home’ is where our UK house is.

9. The love, support, constant email, postal and Skype contact of our wonderful family and many friends has given us the confidence to do this incredible journey – thank you all so much.

10. We will never get the last 12 months back, and we cannot think of a better way to have spent them. We would do it all over again (and hopefully will one day :- P) without a second thought.

More soon when we know which way is up,

See ya

CRFS xxxx

(Sorry for the delay in posting – I can’t do it on dial-up!!)

We left Las Vegas on a long drive west to Southern California. We have a few more days before we want to be in LA so decided we would head to Sequoia National Park, home of the BIG Californian Redwood trees. The drive up to Tulare (where we were staying near the park) took about 4 hours, and we had to go the long way around as it’s too hot to cut through Death Valley at this time of year (DV has been consistent holder of the domestic ‘highest temperature’ stat since we arrived in the US at around 120 degrees Fahrenheit/50 Celsius.) Sad to say that on arrival in Tulare we found it lovely to be in a little 3 storey motel rather than a 25 floor casino. Even lovelier was that right behind the hotel was an outlet mall!

Next day we got up early and drove into the National Park, which we got into for free with our ‘America the Beautiful’ Annual Parks Pass (covers entry into all US National Parks for 1 year). These trees are quite unique in that they only grow at altitudes of 5000 – 9000ft and they are stunning. We went to see General Sherman – the largest living tree on the planet. On the ground nearby is an outline of the tree’s ‘trunk print’ – 15 paces/metres (about 45ft) in diameter.

General Sherman:

A bit further on we came to an upended tree – Sequoia’s quite often just ‘lose their balance’ without warning as their shallow root systems are weakened by fire, erosion or very wet soil – the base diameter of this one is a mere 20ft, still nearly 4 times taller than me! Maybe it’s that big as it was an estimated 2300 yrs old…

Buttress Tree:

Another toppled tree fell across the road in 1937, but instead of slicing it up for logs or re-routeing the road, it now has a big hole in it so you can drive through:

Tunnel Log:

The park was quiet visitor wise, and so we had quite a few trees to ourselves (there’s plenty to go around!). Another utterly photogenic US American park:

We could see the smoky haze hanging around when we climbed Moro Rock (in fact they currently have air quality reports at the visitor centre for asthmatics etc to check), but even so the views of the Sierra Nevada mountains were pretty spectacular:

After a day of outlet mall shopping we headed to Los Angeles, our last US stop. Here we took the chance to meet up with a big family who’ve recently returned and recovered from a RTW year themselves. They are the Andrus family of www.sixintheworld.com now famous thanks to an interview with Oprah no less! They have helped us out with route ideas and hotel recommendations via their blog as they left about a year before we did, and have spent the last 11 months relocating to another city, finding new jobs, schools etc. They treated us to Thai food for dinner, the kids raced around their great house up in Malibu and we chatted about the months away, re-entry worries and whether the ‘Family RTW Trip’ club was only open to current travellers or afforded you lifelong membership!! Of course we all think the latter, and I think Club Rule #1 should be an annual picnic somewhere exotic! Thanks for a great evening Tom, Anne, Dax, McKane, Kieran and Asher, hope we all keep in touch.

From Malibu we went south down to Anaheim where familiar faces were waiting for us – Dani and James from Australia! The conversation back in June had gone something like: R; ’blah, blah, blah and then a few days in LA leaving on the 21st.’ Dan; ‘No way, WE’LL be in LA leaving on the 22nd!’ So the next day we got up very early (made worse as we had all had a nightcap and gone to bed very late) to visit the home of the biggest mouse in the world – Disneyland. We were there just after it opened at 8am and raced straight to the back of the park, thereby ensuring we had about 3 hours on the big rides with 10 minute queues! In the end we were there for an incredible 14 hours (well you need to get value for money from your 1 day pass) although CRFS all went back to the hotel for a couple of hours siesta mid afternoon. We returned refreshed for the parade and the amazing evening show and fireworks after dark.

Call me a theme park snob but it’s still the original and best. Disneyland in Anaheim is now 53 years old and looks like it was finished last week. We had a great day, made even better by having Dani and James with us, and it was the perfect end to our US adventure.

The world's most famous rodent:

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

So, on to Las Vegas – again a bit of a shocker after the quiet back roads and parks of lovely Utah! This is our 4th visit to Vegas but the first for 8 years and the first time we’ve been with the girls so it was pretty exciting to be there with them. Las Vegas is hurting a lot from the US economic slowdown - bad news for the town, but great news for us! We stayed at the Stratosphere – about halfway down the Strip, in the newer tower, in August high season for $60 a night! We also got Tower passes to the Observation decks and half price show tickets thrown in too.

Anyone who says Las Vegas isn’t child-friendly hasn’t been there with kids. The first evening we headed uptown to the Fremont Street Experience, which is the rebrand of the original Vegas downtown area. This part of town started to slide downhill as the newer flashier hotels down the Strip took over, and has now come full circle as a place to visit. The whole of Fremont St is now pedestrianised and covered, and every hour a music and light show is screened on the underside of the roof! Very cool. Sadie said ‘I wish my bedroom was like this…’ The lights in the downtown hotels are the most concentrated, the drinks and food are cheaper and – allegedly- the slot returns are better too, all good reasons to spend an evening up there!

Fremont Street:

The days quickly developed a typical LV pattern – sleeping in and going out for brunch, back to the hotel for a swim and siesta and then heading out around 5pm for an early tea and exploring. Temperature wise, Las Vegas is hot, hot, hot in summer – we had 107+ degrees (over 40 celcius) every day we were there. Nights were a little bit cooler (80’s), but bizarrely we ended up taking fleeces out with us, as it proved impossible to dress appropriately for both night-time outdoor sightseeing, and indoor air conditioned eating! Vegas is famous for it’s all-you-can-eat buffets, they’re not as cheap as they used to be, but still great value, and brilliant for the girls as they were able to eat an unlimited amount of pasta (plain with cheese), this week’s favourite veggie and lots of sticky puddings and ice-cream!

On our second night in town we went downstairs in the Stratosphere to see the ‘American Superstars’ show – a bunch of tribute artists – the girls thought Elvis was amazing and also loved Michael Jackson and the dancers. After the show the stars hung out to have their pictures taken.

Elvis leaves the building:

Next day we used our free passes to zoom up the 350m Stratosphere Tower to look out over the ever-changing building site of Las Vegas. It’s amazing how many hotels have been leveled and new ones built since our last visit 8 years ago. It’s up there that you realise what a night-time spectacle it is, and the Strip has some big gaps in it at the moment. Construction continues apace though despite the 6 continuous months of lower-than-average visitor/revenue figures, so no doubt there’ll still be cheap rooms for a few years to come. We had a coffee at the highest Starbucks (what else?) in the world and then headed out to the Strip at dusk, and the age old free pirate ship show at Treasure Island – still very good, but the girls now seem to have lost their clothes in previous conflicts! Predictably our girls stood amazed as the life sized galleons took each other on with pyrotechnics attached.

Before the battle:

A lot of the casino hotels on the Strip are themed in some way - the Luxor is a big black pyramid with a statue of the Sphinx sat in front of it; New York, New York has managed to fit most of the Big Apple landmarks into a few square meters:

The Venetian has canals and stone bridges (and inside a fake ‘sky’ ceiling and piazza with air conditioned ‘al fresco’ dining!):

We stood in front of the half sized Eiffel Tower at Paris Hotel – Fin said ‘That’s in France!’:

The famous Bellagio has a very smart but fairly unremarkable frontage for a Vegas hotel, but it has a beautiful addition every evening – the fountains on the lake set to music which play every 15-30 mins. Also free - you just wander past and stop and look:

Of course behind all these amazing facades it’s all slots and tables, along a rabbit warren of corridors, designed to keep you in the casino as long as possible. The girls were a little peeved that they couldn’t play as they are pretty good at Poker after Lawrence’s babysitting entertainment and proficient at Blackjack and Patience after endless games on the road, but were still quite amazed at the endless games going on.

On our last night in town we took them to see Lance Burton, a magician/illusionist at the Monte Carlo. He came highly recommended as a good show to take children too (which always makes us highly sceptical) but it was very good. The tricks are amazing, he has a great banter with lots of little asides for the adults that pass over the children’s heads, lots of set changes, lots of costumes – he didn’t just stand there doing trick after trick. So we had a great last night, we didn’t gamble at all, we just ‘used’ Vegas for it’s cheap beds and eats and it’s free shows and had a fab time.

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx

What to do with 3 whole weeks in the USA? Yep, that’s it, all we’ve got left here after ‘poaching’ time to spend in other less accessible areas. We decided though that 3 weeks just in Los Angeles would probably send us around the bend so thought we’d head out across country to see some of what America does best – the National Parks. Yosemite National Park up near San Francisco was a top contender, until the recent wildfires, which have left it shrouded in a smoky haze for the summer; Chris and I have both seen it look so much better and didn’t want a disappointing return visit. This turned into a bit of a theme when looking at the map – we spent 3 months in the USA last time around, plus a southwest-side trip when I was expecting FIn and have great memories of it. Another consideration is the summer crowds, August is full on holiday season here but some of the lesser known parks are much quieter and just as pretty.

Arriving into LA we must admit to being shocked and stunned. Although the flight arrived at 12.30pm I had pretty much written off the rest of the day for getting through immigration and getting the luggage etc. Well can you believe it – the plane was on the gate at 12.20pm, we had all our luggage and were at the rental car desk by 1pm! Immigration was so well organised and they were segregating families to go through in another line – much faster. So we did spend the night in LA but only as I had pre-booked a hotel!

Next morning we were all a bit pale and couldn’t really work out why we weren’t hungry at 9am until we realised: 6am Cook Islands time! So jet lag be damned we decided we would just get on with it and knock over the big drive while we weren’t sure where or when we were = 8 hours in the car to Flagstaff, Arizona. We meandered along the old Route 66 (which is now a lot of the I-40) driving through some dusty little places. Flagstaff itself an attractive little town – we made a spare day to explore its low rise timber buildings and breathe in the clean pine air.

Road to everywhere else, Flagstaff:

From there the next day it was time to go see the Grand Canyon, still looking as stunning as ever. The girls have seen so many big mountains recently they were quite surprised to see a Big Ditch for a change! We saw it from a few angles, and walked down a little way into it, but the weather was against us – should you really be standing on the rim of a canyon (the highest place around) in an electrical storm? Made for impressive viewing though!

The stormy Big Ditch:

After a night-stop at the Cameron Trading Post in Navajo Nation Reservation we took off along Route 160 to Monument Valley. We haven’t been here before and now we know why – it’s a chuffing long way from anywhere! But oh wow – its incredible scenery. Just think of every Spaghetti Western you’ve ever seen, Butch and Sundance, Thelma and Louise. We spent ages just sitting and looking at it:

Monument Valley:

Monument Valley straddles the Arizona-Utah state border, and so we continued north into one of America’s most conservative states (we later saw a fridge magnet that said ‘Drink, party and be merry, because tomorrow you may be in Utah’) on towards a place called Blanding via a place called Mexican Hat. Why is it called Mexican Hat? I wonder if you can guess…

As mentioned above it is high season here, and although this doesn’t seem to mean a huge hike in prices, it does mean that motels are really busy – and as we planned this trip over a long black in the Muri Beach internet café 3 days before we arrived, we've found that pickings are slim in the busy spots. Which is how we ended up in Blanding for the night. The Rough Guide says ‘the eating in Blanding is indeed bland eating’ and they weren’t kidding – we now know there seems to be a policy in southern Utah towns of quietly encouraging you to move on!

From Blanding we went east to Lake Powell which until the 1960’s looked a bit like a mini Grand Canyon with the mighty Colorado River blasting a trail through the bottom, and incredible rock buttes and mesas towering over the river. The Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 effectively drowning Glen Canyon and all its natural beauty. The hydro electric turbines of the dam provide power for Arizona and California and at the top end of the lake the water is diverted off to irrigate the inhabited deserts, but environmentalists are united in their wish to see Glen Canyon drained and the dam destroyed, in favour of the Hoover Dam further downstream. In 1980 David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, who had previously endorsed and argued for the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam before a Congressional Committee, described his previous support as ‘the greatest sin I have ever committed’. However, as Lake Powell is Utah’s #1 tourist attraction, and second only to the Grand Canyon in the southwest in the terms of summer visitors (4 million a year) is looks likely to stay. We drove to Hall’s Crossing where we put the car on a tiny ferry across to Bullfrog and then found a swimming area on the other side to spend the afternoon. It’s still a lovely spot.

Lake Powell: Hall’s Crossing – Bullfrog Ferry:

Having squelched in the lake silt and had a lazy time we grabbed a very late lunch and were all set to drive the Bullfrog – Escalante Burr Trail Road. Except that we couldn’t as the recent thunderstorms had washed out the creek bed section of the road. Hmmm. So we had to take the long way round which added about a 150 miles! The Rough Guide is equally complementary about the town of Escalante – ‘a screamingly dull place to spend the night’ but as we are also screamingly dull of an evening we found it very peaceful and great for star watching from the long wooden veranda on the front of the Circle D motel. So peaceful. The owners of the Circle D also had a great recommendation for breakfast with friendly hummingbirds flitting about.

Hummingbirds for breakfast:

A few miles down the road from Escalante is Bryce Canyon National Park and it’s ‘a doozie’ to quote a local saying. As you all so enjoyed last month’s geology lesson I shall press on with the topic for August: ‘Hoodoo formation - freeze-thaw action on upthrust sedimentary rocks’. Bryce Canyon is a perfect example of this erosion technique. The rocks that were uplifted have been stretched and fractured due to the mammoth stress forces involved (they also sit on various fault lines, causing further joints and fractures). Into these crevasses the tiny annual rainfall of 18 inches trickles where it goes through around 200 freeze-thaw cycles per year. This basically means that for most of the year night-time temperatures are sub-zero, while day-time highs are warm enough to melt the ice that forms. As water expands as it freezes the repeated stress placed on the rock causes it to crack and shatter at the weak points. As this happens the acidic rainwater itself slowly dissolves the softer parts of the rock, leaving smooth edges and washing off the debris. The result is absolutely stunning formations, made even more beautiful due to the vibrant colours of the original rocks.

Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon National Park:

We took a walk down into the canyon to see the Hoodoos up close:

So from Bryce we headed south towards the Utah-Arizona border, passing through Zion National Park on the way. Less ‘unique’ than Bryce but just as stunning, Zion is just a ‘regular’ canyon, formed by the Virgin River cutting down through the rock resulting in a height difference of over 1000m of sheer vertical rock faces towering over you from the valley floor.

The Virgin River quietly potters through Zion Canyon:

Although it looks quiet and unassuming that little river can turn into a raging torrent after the summer thunderstorms dump on the canyon rims, flash flooding is common, and the topography of the valley floor is constantly changing. We took a walk along the riverside and found one of these cute but viscious critters (they bite as people insist on feeding them)

See ya

All love CRFS xxxx