Back Home!

We arrived to the US, New York City to be exact, on August 27th where my(Kelly's) mom and brother were at the gate awaiting our arrival. We had booked an apartment for 3 nights in East Village to do some shopping, unwinding and eating. It was so nice all of being together again. We also saw Lauren in Brooklyn, where she is planning her next move. The NYC trip was a nice transition back into the US lifestyle after 10 months abroad.


Me with my mom and brother Joe in NYC!

While bored on long train rides, we often calculated some stats about our trip.
Here are some of them:

Time gone from US total: 9 months and 20 days approx.

Countries visited: 20

Languages: 18

Currencies: 11

*Sleeping Arrangements*

Beds/Places we have slept while traveling: 53 different spots

CS Hosts/Friends in other countries we have stayed with: 23

Hostels: 12

Boat: 1 for a week(Croatia)

Campsites: 3

Budget Hotels: 8

Overnight trains taken: 3

Overnight Ferries taken: 2

Sleeping in Airport: 1

Camper Van: 1
*Locations*
Farthest South: Santorini, Greece

Farthest West: Lisbon, Portugal

Farthest North: Bergen, Norway

Farthest East: Santorini, Greece

*Bodies of Water*

Seas/Oceans we have seen: Baltic, North, Adriatic, Ionian, Aegean, Atlantic, Mediterrean

Time Zones: 3

Methods of Transportation: 9

Unesco World Heritage Sites visited: 29

*Update- We are now both back in Key West, Fl, living with Kel's mom, waitressing on Duval Street and preparing for Fantasy Fest to make some money. Ellie lived in St. Augustine for a month to spend time with her family before we made a Florida road trip together and ended up back on the island.

Ellie with Papa Chuck

Ellie enjoyed getting to be part of regular life like hanging out with her little sister and getting to go to her track meets.


Ellie with Rachel, our engaged friend who's wedding we will be in in December. It was so nice to see our friends on the road trip.

This is Sophia, Kelly's baby niece who she hasn't seen in 10 months. Sophia has really grown into a cute little toddler now.


Our daily life in Key West consists of swimming in pools, riding our bikes, working very hard, drinking beer, going to Drag Queen bingo and eyeing the map feverishly to plan our next trip.




Swimming at the Southnermost House in Key West.


With Gena and Merlin on their visit to this side of the ocean!

Back home with our drag queens where we belong for now.


Keep checking back for more details as we plan to drive across the US and fly to Hawaii and move to Melbourne, Australia next May with a one year work visa and travel Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Japan and take the trans-siberian train through Siberia to Moscow, flying home 15 months later from Europe.

Thanks to everyone who has kept up faithfully with this blog and to everyone who supported us while we lived out this dream adventure. Let us know what you think and remember keep checking back as we will sporadically post blurbs and some photos of our island life. We miss Europe every day and everyone we met who made this trip a living dream. Until next time on the Kelly and Ellie show....

Last Stop: Dublin!

From San Sebastian, we took a train to Biarritz, France which only took about 1/2 hour. We waited around that airport for a long time, eating our last pain au chocolate before boarding. Once, we arrived in Dublin, we got on a bus, heading to Vinnie's house who allowed us to surf his couch. It felt so weird to be in an English speaking country again after 4 months. I kept having the instinct to speak bad Spanish to everyone and said Si instead of yes more than a few times that afternoon. Once we met Vinnie, we knew we were going to have a great time in Dublin.

Vinnie is a little older, maybe in his 50's was our guess. He had such a great sense of humor and was such a typical Irish fellow that we instantly felt at ease.

We ordered in take-out and he picked up some beers and we spent the evening in, staying up until 4 in the morning, laughing with Vinnie and telling him our tales about Fantasy Fest and key West and he told us a lot about Dublin since he lived in the same neighborhood since he was a kid. The next day, Vinnie had to pull himself out of bed to get to work and we slept in, did some laundry and walked around Dublin, taking in the major sites like Dublin castle and the Temple Bar area.

Walking around Temple Bar

The colorful Dublin Castle.



We checked out the Irish film institute and had an Irish pint at a little pub.

That evening, Vinnie had said he would take us on a little excursion to Howth, a fishing village right outside of Dublin.





It was a beautiful drive and we all went out to dinner to a very fancy seafood restaurant. Vinnie was so kind to us that he offered to pay for our incredibly expensive meal and we had such a gorgeous dinner with a nice bottle of wine. We laughed throughout dinner and Vinnie told us more about himself. He runs the main internet company used in Dublin and he also owns a beer distribution company that distributes beer to all of the main music festivals throughout Europe. He is such a great guy that we felt like we had known him forever. Celebrating our last night of traveling with a fancy dinner and good company will be something we always remember. After dinner, we went out for a small pint since we were all stuffed and then came home and went to bed. Vinnie drove us to the airport the next day and we very sorry to have to say good-bye to Uncle Vinnie, but he did promise us to visit for Fantasy Fest sometime in the future.

We flew on August 23rd to London and enjoyed our last weekend there. We went to Borough Market, Edinboro castle, out for Vietnamese and did some last minute shopping and tying loose ends together. We then went to Northampton to get our stuff from Gena and Merlin and visit with them. Gena came back into London the next day with us and helped us bring our stuff on the bus. We had thai food and some beers before saying good-bye to Merlin and Gena and crying hysterically.

We were very overwhelmed and entirely unprepared to be heading back to the US the next day. After 4 months of traveling and 6 months of being official Londoners, we couldn't believe the adventure was ending. I kept thinking back to when this was all just a silly idea or plan that we never thought we could pull off and at the end of the year, we did everything we had come to Europe for and so much more. Flying out from Heathrow the next afternoon was so sad, but regardless of our anxiety about leaving the UK, we were excited to see our family on the other side of the ocean in NYC.

Lisbon and San Sebastian!

We took a night train to Lisbon from Madrid and arrived very early in the morning and were in a dangerous looking neighborhood until we finally just jumped in a cab after stubbornly looking for our guesthouse for a 1/2 hour. Once there, the guesthouse was nice and we had our own room which was great. We took a nap and then set out to see all Lisbon had to offer. We headed to Barrio Alto and had some drinks in this cute bar where the lamps were made out of bok choy and they played cheesy 60's porn on the wall.

We ate some Indian food and after a few drinks returned home.

Beautiful tile work on the front.
The next few days were filled with taking a day trip to Cascais to go to the beach, visiting the oceanarium that we had heard was first-class and one of the largest in the world, relaxing in our guest house room and going out for a few drinks with a couple we met at the guesthouse.

The metro stations were awesome and each had really cool artwork. This is the metro stop for the oceanarium.

This is a freaky sculpture of this fake kid near the oceanarium.

We were obsessed with this sun fish at the oceanarium.


I loved this volcano sculpture that erupted every five minutes.

Cascais



This man had a dog that sang along with him. It was incredible and so cute.

Oh yes, the pastries in Portugal are so amazing. Some of the best pastries ever!

Lisbon had great fashion, great night-life and a great underground music scene. Portugal was beautiful and the tiled fronts of buildings were different, giving the whole city an artsy feeling.

They also have these awesome trams that take you up the steep hills in Lisbon and really cool lifts everywhere.



One of the lifts.
We will definitely see more of it next time, including Porto and some other Southern towns.

*Sorry if our pictures seem a little lackluster or infrequent for this post and the last but this was in our last 10 days of backpacking and we were exhausted and just wanted to soak things up rather than photograph them all the time.

From Portugal, we headed to San Sebastian.

The ride between Lisbon and San Sebastian.
San Seb was going to be our last stop on the continent of Europe. We planned it this way so that way we could lay around on the beach, drinking sangria with any money we had left before flying to Ireland for a few days and then back to England. San Sebastian had the best surfing beaches ever. The waves were massive and the beaches so blue. The waves must have been about 8 ft. We met Jack, a Londoner and we hung around with him for the majority of our stay.


The view from the beach at night

The beach!

Church near our hostel

We drank a lot of tinto veranas (lemonade and red wine) and went to the beach every day.

Andalusia!

From Valencia, we headed to Granada and after a long day of train rides, ended up in Granada with elusive directions to the Rambutan hostel. We couldn't find the bus we needed and were so exhausted so we decided to just grab a cab to take us and once we were dropped off, we were still confused about where we needed to be but eventually after climbing and walking around the Albazin district, we stumbled upon our hostel. Rambutan is so much more than a hostel though. It's a lot more like a home. People who stay there sometimes get roped into staying in Granada forever because Rambutan is so awesome and the people so fun with such good parties. Rambutan even gives you the option of sleeping on their roof for only 10 euros a night and the location is amazing since the whole house overlooks the Alhambra. We knew we were going to be obsessed with this quirky place and quickly canceled our hostel stay in Sevilla to stay in Granada an extra night.


Our view from Rambutan

Our time in Granada was great because we quickly made friends with all the kids staying at Rambutan and after partying together that night at Rambutan, we all went in search of this river that someone had heard someone else saying who had heard someone else saying that it existed. We took a bus to this other small town near Granada and set off on our walk through the desert and climbed down a near death experience of a hill to get to this tiny little stream until we found the river.
We also got to try authentic churros for breakfast and an authentic tortilla espanol bocadilla.

A house in the small town.


This crazy little guy who was so excited for us to tell ask him about his donkey whose name was Chico apparently. Then I asked the man what his name was and he looked at me like he was so surprised that I wanted to know, like he's use to people only wanting to know about his donkey and he says, "Mi Nombre is Jose" like duh! everyone's name is Jose.It was so funny.

The beautiful desert

All of us, Rambutan kids next to the freezing cold stream

Jumping into the river



Can you spot the bull sculpture? In Spain, these bull sculptures are everywhere.
It was such a good day though. We also stopped and got our tapas and sangria at a little bar after swimming. The beautiful thing about Granada is the whole time we were there we never paid to eat because every time you order a drink, even a soda or juice, you get a free tapa. The tapas are pretty big and you never know what you are going to get. The more drinks you buy from one place, the better the tapas gets. So the element of surprise is excellent and so is the free factor.

After swimming, we also went to see this famous grafitti artist's house. The artist is known as El Nino and the art around his block was so good.

El Nino!




The Alhambra at night from Rambutan

The rest of our days in Rambutan were spent partying around the hostel, walking around town doing some souvenir shopping for our families and hitting a club at night and walking around the Albazin.

The other cool thing we did was go to a water park one afternoon and it was so much fun because it's basically in the desert as well so while you should be sweating, you are nice and chill on a water slide. It was a very authentic experience as well to be at a Spanish theme park with a whole bunch of families and kids from our hostel.

On our last day, we finally went to to see the Alhambra. The Alhambra is a moorish palace and one of the wonders of the world. Once the residence of the Muslim rulers of Granada and their court, the Alhambra is now one of Spain's major tourist attractions exhibiting the country's most famous Islamic architecture, together with Christian 16th century and later interventions in buildings and gardens that marked its image as it can be seen today. Within the Alhambra, the Palace of Charles V was erected by Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor in 1527. You basically have to wake up at 4 in the morning to get in line to see it though considering it was tourist season. It was really beautiful though and the Islamic architecture was so unique to any we had previously seen in Europe.

At the Alhambra








An example of the tile work throughout.


After the Alhambra and a nap, we bid Granada good-bye and it was for sure one of our favorite places. I think we are both interested in taking Spanish courses and working at the Rambutan for a summer in the future sometime because both Granada and Rambutan made such an impression on us and on our trip in general.

Our next stop in Andalusia was Sevilla.

En route to Sevilla!
We were only going to be in Sevilla for one night though because of our extension in Granada. We both knew that we wanted to walk around and then take in a Flamenco dance later in the evening because Sevilla is the birthplace of Flamenco. Apparently, my brother claims that my family is from Sevilla as well so that was exciting. Sevilla is super beautiful. We took a bus ride around town and saw such gorgeous architecture.


Mass at night!



After making dinner in the hostel, we gathered a bunch of people from the hostel and went to check out an authentic Flamenco dance. It was so unique. The dancer looks almost possessed and sad when she dances. The throaty music was really different as well.


It was something that was so moving to see and the dancer's face has stuck with me for so long. She was so sorrowful and serious.

From Sevilla, we headed to Madrid for two nights where we really enjoyed the neighborhood our hostel was in.

This incredibly cool/freaky sculpture in the Madrid train station.

Ellie in the hostel in Madrid

The mascot of Madrid is this bear.


Madrid was much cooler than the negaive reviews it had received from our fellow travelers along the way. The neighborhood we stayed in was very hipster oriented with cute boutiques and salons and really good restaurants. I wish we could have spent longer in Madrid but since it was August, most things were closed for holidays.