To get you up to speed

We left Ghost in Turkey back in late September. After a long couple of days getting her ready for winter we finished our Mediterranean summer with a swim, a nice dinner in the marina restaurant and a midnight taxi run to Dalaman airport for our 0130 charter flight to London Gatwick. However with the ensuing economic crisis, and the hardship being felt by airlines, not to mention it was cheap and nasty Thomas Cook we had a battle on our hands to get our 65kgs of checked in and carry on luggage on to the plane. At a charge rate of 8 quid per kg it was worth doing anything for! We played dumb, looked distressed, and argued but they wouldn't budge. Only one thing left...flirt! Kat was told to wander off with the ridiculous amount of carry on we had and 10 mins later I had the excess luggage bill down to just 5kgs (�40) and walked away with the check-in girls name, address and phone number!!!! Must be the beard as I've never had such luck - Kat couldn't complain as it was for a good cause.

65kgs... you might ask, what the hell are you carrying? Well with our loose plan for the next 8 months, a plan that is always subject to change (that one's for you Stu!!), involving a summer in Melbourne, mountain biking wherever we can, potentially some exploration of outback Australia, hiking in NZ followed by a couple of months boarding in Whistler we have a suite of camping and hiking kit, motor bike helmets, winter kit, summer clothes, and about 10kgs of electrical stuff including laptops, iPods, hard drives, cameras (SLR, Video and happy snap) and of course all the wires and cabling that goes with a modern dependence on IT infrastructure. Not to mention the snow boards and mountain bikes that we picked up in London!!
So we landed at Gatwick, after a 4hour delay sleeping on the floor at Dalaman, we were welcomed by an overcast and chilly UK morning, a shock to our recent life style considering we hadn't seen rain since Spain (when I lost my razor!) nor had we seen more than a handful of clouds in the past 4 months. We then spent 2 weeks rushing around London spending time with family and friends before flying out to Oz on the 29th.



So now it's life in Oz. Being home is weird, it was nearly 10 years ago I left Melbourne with not more than a backpack and $1000AUD, and even though this trip isn't intended to be our final stop we are both adjusting to being stationary in more ways than one. Not only are we looking at the same scenery every day, but there is no longer the perpetual motion of GHOST and we miss it terribly already.

Everyone asks what it's like to be back and the risk is we fall into the repetitive; we miss the sun and we miss the afternoon swims. But on a more positive note I thought it more interesting to highlight what we don't miss about sailing and the positives to being landlubbers - so here it goes!

We don't miss Sicily, they rip off sailors (I think I harped on this one before!), and we don't miss fending off sunsail skippers that can't park a boat to save their lives! We don't miss having to bear away from German charter boats on a port tack to windward that either have no knowledge of the international collision regs or perhaps just ignore them (we guess the latter!!).

BUT, we're loving being able to but paper in the toilet (that took a day to get used to, can you imagine the shock at Kat's folks place when the bins started to fill up!), we're loving spending time with family and friends. We're loving, the chance to have another summer, we're loving the prospect of embarking on some other adventures, reacquainting ourselves with our beloved mountain bikes and spending just a little bit of time away from the med. As they say absence makes the heart grow fonder and realise now more than ever how lucky we've been and can't wait to return next year (GHOST is due to touch the water again on the 12th of May) with a new drive and enthusiasm that will see us cross a couple of oceans and sail thru Sydney Heads and into the Harbour sometime late 2010, if all goes to plan... but as we know the plan is always subject to change!!!