In looking back at our photos, we've noticed that we haven't shared some of our best stories, for one reason or another. Enjoy these untold stories.
1) Hawaii - We slept in the car (and it was horrible). After learning that our campground accommodation had fallen through, we decided one night of sleeping in our Fiat rental car wouldn't kill us. Well, it almost did, but we are still laughing about it. PS: This happened on the second night of our five month journey, and we didn't share it earlier because we didn't want anyone worrying.
2) New Zealand - Upon our arrival at our second wwoof, The Cornerstone Cafe, Phillippa quickly informed us they were having an issue with snails eating their veggies. She said we would go ahead and kill them, as it was "not a snail sanctuary". In the first two hours I killed 32 snails, but who's counting! It was gross, but I got used to it. Kinda.
3) New Zealand - We picked up a hitchhiker, and boy was it a bad idea. Here's how it shook down. We were about an hour from Te Anau, and we cruised past this solo hitchhiker. We looked at each other, said "Seems pretty safe, we have plenty of room in the Jucy, and it would be a nice thing to do", so we peeled around and picked up Jamie from England. Turned out Jamie had been hiking from the north to the south of New Zealand over the last three months. He was an interesting cat, but man did he SMELL. Windows were lowered, fans were turned on, and we took three days to air out Jucy. Lesson: No more hitchhikers for us!
4) Nepal - Sarangkot Sunrise. For this to make sense, you need to know a little of our local geography. Our first volunteer homestay was located about 16 km from Pokhara, a fairly major city in Nepal. Overlooking Pokhara is a small "touristy" town called Sarangkot. The thing to do while here is to see sunrise over the Annapurna Mountain Range from Sarangkot. So our first weekend we jumped on the local bus, hiked two hours up nonstop stairs to Sarangkot, and stayed in a local hotel for $17, which included breakfast and hot showers! Sunday morning we got up at 5:45. We were not going to miss our sunrise view! Well, our perfect Himalayan mountain view was not to be. Locals called it cloudy, but we know it was smog that had infiltrated and settled in, clouding our mountain view. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a beautiful sunrise with a faint mountain backdrop.
5) Nepal - Rolling the Dice. Whenever we travel, we throw in a deck of cards and dice for some friendly, good natured competition. One evening after supper we brought out the dice at Hari and Maya's. Everyone got right into it. The kids were having so much fun that we found dice in Pokhara for them. A few nights, and several games later, Anush even made his own dice game for us to play. Even though it was just for fun, I won twice in a row! 😉
