Somewhere back in Europe ...

We have proved that indeed the World is round, and travelling eastwards for the last 8 months, in a journey starting at the end of December, a cold windy day in Frankfurt, Germany, we have ended up back in Europe, in a much sunnier Portugal, a fitting final as a tribute to the first world traveller Ferdinand Magellan (or Fernão de Magalhães) who set this trend which we have now followed!

And what eight months we had, so many countries we have seen, cultures we have encountered and people we have met and made friends with! Oh and how we already miss the Thai street food, the Angkor ruins, the Mallaccan "Portuguis", the Singaporean tidyness, the Australian beaches, the New Zealand scenery, the Macau and Hong Kong skylines, the Chinese temples, the Korean barbeques, the Japanese trains, the Hawaiian sunset, the Canadian Tim Horton's coffee and the US beautiful scenic drives! So much we have done and seen, we come back with a wealth of experiences that is so rich it will take a long time to digest it all, review it and remember - when we are back home to Strasbourg in early October we will need to organise a long party just to go through all the hundreds of photos and fill back our famously empty bar!!

It is impressive how seeing something new and amazing every day and moving from one place to another can be so tiring, but thankfully during our journey we were so lucky to find so many amazing people all over the world who were so happy to take us in to their homes and allow us to set down our heavy backbags and relax our weary feet, and share in their lives if for just a little while, to all of you - you know who you are - a very big thank you!

And it is with mixed feelings that our last day in our travel reached an end, a party in the lovely town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania a perfect finale, after having visited the wonderfully free and museum-ridden capital city of Washington. We packed for the last time the few belongings we took during these 8 months (packing is certainly a skill we have perfected in this time!), bid farewell to our last hosts Matt, Lisa, Maddie and Moby and took our final plane back to Europe. But in all this time we never felt alone and the 4,000 visitors to this blog have kept us company all throughout with their reading and comments, and it has been great for us to be able to share what we saw and did with you, it never felt like we were too far away!

Eight months of travelling takes its toll and we reach the end tired and happy to be back with family and friends, with homecooked food and familiar places, the bar which has not changed a bit and the friend whose conversation resumes where it left off. This is the end of our round the world trip, and what a fantastic trip it was, but it certainly will not be the end of our travels, once the travel bug bites, you can never get rid of it, and we have been very badly bitten! We will probably go back to many of the wonderful places we have been to, and visit many new places that remain unseen, and we will try to continue sharing our stories in this blog, but until that happens, it is time for us to take a small rest, regain our energy back and watch the World go round ...