After 5 months of living in Vancouver, it was sad to say goodbye to the people and places and food that we had come to love. We both finished up work. Tom spent the following day back at work DJing as part of the shop’s first birthday celebrations.

After packing up our things and cleaning the apartment it was off to the airport to sit around until we could board our flight to Heathrow so we could sit around for some more before arriving in Rome. We had spent 24 hours travelling. Tom watched The Godfather parts I & II and then slept for maybe 2 hours. Karen slept for 4 hours and tried to sleep for the rest of the time.

Allan and Unity (Karen’s parents) met us at the airport, which was great. Since then we’ve spent most days sleeping in, eating pizza and seeing the sights of Rome- possibly the most unapologetically ancient, populated city in the world. The apartment that Allan found for us is great. Very comfortable and a stone’s throw away from the Vatican wall.

On Saturday we catch the train north to the Cinque Terre which is a group of small coastal towns which are sposed to be very picturesque.

Well this is beginning to sound like a postcard so we’ll stop there.

Vancouver Island was very relaxing but I guess it'd wanna be really given it was a holiday within a holiday. Victoria is a beautiful city- quite similar to Adelaide in terms of its size and atmosphere. We did touristy stuff which served as a handy reminder that we are not touristy people. The trip also served as a good reminder of what it will be like to travel again. Handy.

Some other stuff that's happened:

-Today we sent home 35kg of stuff home with Nath

-Karen has the flu

-Thanks to Nick & Linda we are uncle and aunt (again) to a new little nephew- Kurtis James Hunt

-We have strawberry cheesecake icecream

-Tom bought another pair of shoes 

For now, the end.

Wow 197 days is a long time. Kinda hard to believe that it's been that long but I guess we have done a fair bit.

After being here for 5 months we really do feel like we're two Australian's living in Canada. We feel very settled here but in a bit over two weeks time, we'll be back on holidays and off to Europe for the second leg of our trip. We're pretty excited especially as it means not working any more.

We've had another visitor since the last post. Nathan Humphris was here on his way to a Heli-boarding trip. His visit was a lot of fun. Tom took a day off work to go impulse shopping with him, we went to the local hockey one night (yes there was a fight), and we even went out for a night on the town- lots of dancing, drinking and then some donuts from the 7-Eleven on the way home. 

Tomorrow we catch the ferry over to Vancouver Island so watch this space for a few photos and a short, slightly sarcastic account of what happened.

No, this blog isn't broken, it's just that we haven't updated it for freakin ages. Well here's a special double dose for yawl. Let's go right back to the end of the last blog.

Our New Years Eve was nice. Quiet but hey, we've already seen well over 25 years come and go. You can't expect every year to feel like you're living a Prince song. Anyways, we had a nice dinner and wine and watched everyone else's fireworks from our balcony. 

2008 has seen us working full time but this has been punctuated by visits from various members of the Hutchinson family. Emma (Adelaide) for a few days in mid January, Mark and Mandy (Adelaide/Boulder, Colorado) for the Australia Day weekend and Drew (Auckland) on his way home from a skiing holiday in Whistler. It was a pleasure having all of these people. Our Vancouver tour generally revolves around food but we did manage to show our guests some of the other features of the city as well (our different modes of public transport, homeless people, trees and rain).

Whilst we're on the weather, it feels like it's been getting better. We had another lot of snow but we've also enjoyed some sunny days (I took a photo to prove it). Great for skateboarding so long as your board doesn't fly off the park into the snow.

Last night we went to the monster trucks. Now we know what white people do on the weekends. We're white, so we had fun. 

Merry Christmas everyone! I know we're late with this post but Tom wasn't gonna spend his one day off work putting this up. Better late than never.

What did we do for Christmas? Well we went to a church service in the city on the 24th (a good family service with abridged carols (excellent for Tom who doesn't really enjoy carols, and excellent for Karen who loves carols as it meant that we sang more of them). Christmas eve for us also saw a couple of skype sessions with people back home which was nice. Christmas day had a food focus and another lot of skype chats. Overall a really nice day.

Tom was back at work at 7am boxing day- the people crushing sales day here in Canada. It was crazy but he was out of there by 3pm. Karen had the day off.

Other than that we have been both been well. Karen has been making the most of her library membership and Tom has been busy making things (mainly words and letters) out of plasticine that he bought from the dollar shop (for one dollar of course).

Tom now has 10 pairs of shoes. Karen bought a pair of brown gum boots. She looks like she owns a horse but they keep her feet dry. Tom's shoes are far less practical but they look good and really that's a practical thing... isn't it?

Today we finally got around to putting up our Christmas tree. Thanks so much to the Hunt Haus for sending over some decorations and some pressies to grace the foot of our three foot, plastic evergreen. 

This week saw Tom get promoted at work to Shipper/Receiver which is great as it means a pay rise as well as weekends off and regular hours (7am-3pm). Nice.

Last night we went into the city to see a movie. We caught the train half way home to the bus transfer but the bus didn't come so we walked home. When we got home we found out that it was -4˚ outside. 

Last weekend it snowed. It snowed all day and a lot of the night for both days. It began as a quite light fall but soon built up so that everything was covered by at least 2 or three inches of it. We're pretty lucky. It's not supposed to snow that much in Vancouver.

Now it's back to the rain. Lots of rain. Everything is wet and shiny again.

The latest development on our blog is video. Here is a video of our home. Please note the beginning of the mural on our bedroom wall above the bed. When finished it will be 2 metres high and two metres wide. It's made up of orange post-it notes- 400 of them. Watch this space for progress photos.