The Time Has Come

 No walrus in this, but we thought that we’d finish with a bit of a summary for future reference. We did this blog to save time on emailing family members and friends over the 8 week stint ….yeah right. It has taken lots of time but we’ve enjoyed recording the trip and getting the feedback. You quickly come to realise that you forget details and confuse cities, cathedrals, and lots of the experiences on these long hauls. Would we have left any of it out? No, it's all been great. But we have missed out on quite a few events back in NZ, so maybe 6 weeks next time.

We depart Jerez in the morning after today spent strolling around enjoying the sights and the shops and doing all the finishing off stuff. In our travels we’ve studiously avoided anything that looked touristy (menus with pictures, locations on crowded plazas and places with lots of people who like us have map in hand. We’ve been in some lovely atmospheric bars for coffee and tapas and down some pretty small alleys.

We have enjoyed meeting a lot of lovely people. We have also developed a great working relationship with TomTom, don’t leave home without her!

We’ve had lots of highlights.  In fact the way we’ve done the trip in several “chunks” Douro, Northern coastal Spain, canal boating (again) then Dordogne, and the South of Spain: Seville, Cordoba, Granada and Jerez, has been really great. Ann did a fantastic job of putting it all together and the logistics have worked well. (Thanks TripAdvisor and Booking.com says Ann, and of course Lonely Planet and Rick Steve’s guided walks) We did say jokingly that the trip was all about the wines/alcohol ie Port, Armagnac, Rioja reds, Bordeaux reds and whites, sherry  (we now realize that it’s really the Pedro Ximenez we came for), but it has been great to learn as we have travelled along about pre-history, medieval Europe, Catholics, Muslims and Jews and the history of these places. And we’ve really appreciated how the architecture reflects the history of the places.

We’ve been struck by just how cheap (and good) food is, and you have to notice the pain from high unemployment and the various other ailments of Europe. But it just staggers me that as we walked around this small centre today there are 21 different banks. We complain about our four “big Aussies” who dominate our market in NZ. But I’m happy to have the big four rather than spin the wheel and pick one of the many options here. Yes I do realise there are lots of people here in Europe, but I’ve counted banks in a short walk in a small provincial centre, there must be hundreds of them across Europe.

Anyway we’ve had eight great weeks, and established a monetary benchmark for any future activities. Interestingly Choco and Vikki put their all-inclusive Europe costs at about $A2500 per week, pretty much same for us on an NZD/AUD conversion.