The beer is better when backpacking

London, let me see…
Hot English Mustard - Never again!
Chips & curry sauce - Omg yum!
English Breakfast - When in Rome!
Brick Lane - Every city should have one!
Booze sold in every deli - Now that's convenient!
Red post boxes & double decker buses - What's not to love really!

We're having a great time in the Don! Been here just on a month now and the days are finally starting to become longer, sunny and warm… well at least they were last week, this week it's been back to overcast days with a threat of rain, oh England! Before I report back on anything else I have to say big thank you to my Grandma and Grandad for the english pounds you sent my way before we left - as promised we made sure our very first London grub was a traditional english feed and a pint on you :-) Thank you again.

We spent our first week in a hostel in Paddington which cost us $60 a night (for an 8 bed dorm), and was pretty awful. We had originally booked a week at the hostel thinking this would be long enough for us to find a casual pub job and a room to rent and settle in. We were dreaming! Lucky for us, Joel's aunty lives in a lovely part of London surrounded by beautifully manicured gardens, the River Thames and plenty of wildlife (like squirrels and deer!) and offered for us to stay with her until we got on our feet.

We've been eating SO much since we got here, (actually to be perfectly honest we've been indulging in far to much food since we left home - how can you not when international delicacies are so inviting to try)! As you all know, we love our indian food and I am in heaven with the number of Indian restaurants here - the english sure do like their curry's! I'm pretty sure we managed to eat out for indian something like 4 times in our first week alone, (oops!) and if we weren't there you could probably find us at one of the corner pubs for lunch, mmm! Now, before you all start to panic over the size we may return home, I assure you it's okay..! We've started on a health kick, (for the 2nd time already…) and are well on our way to amazing bather bods, if we ignore the indian feast & 2 bottles of wine we enjoyed down the famous Brick Lane on Thursday night with Fee!

Other than stuffing our faces with the delicious array of food, we've done a bit of sight seeing, visited a few markets and painted the town red a couple times with our trusty sidekicks ;-)

We've had a slight change of plans since arriving. We had originally planned to arrive in London and work here for 3-4 months, soaking up the London way of life, before purchasing a campervan and driving throughout Europe over the summer. During our first couple weeks here we spent hours in front of our computers tidying up ye ol' resume and applying for job after job but the unfortunate truth was that most the jobs were either weeks old or posted by scammers. The situation seemed the same for the housing market.

With the lack of potential job prospects, we started throwing around our options… Should we stay in London and continue trying to find a job? Do we search for work in the broader UK? Or could we enjoy our hard earned money by buying a van and cruising around UK and Europe for the next 6 months instead?
The responsible choice would probably be to work and replenish some funds but 1) the job market is sadly very stagnant at the moment, and 2) lets face it, the latter sounds far more spontaneous and exciting! We decided we would buy a van and continue traveling till the cash flow runs out!

We hired a car for a week and drove all across the UK, as far north as the border of Scotland and across into Wales, in search of the perfect camper, and we found it! An old school VW T25 original German Westfalia Club Joker. Now I'm guessing most of you wouldn't have the foggiest of who Westfalia are, so to put it simply, in the 80's theses guys produced the Rolls Royce of camper vans. The original drive away price for one of these bad boys was in the vicinity of 50,000 German Deutsche marks, which was around $36,000 AUD.
The van comes fully kitted out with a rock and roll double bed (a bed thats a couch during the day and bed at night), double bed in the high top area, fridge, gas cooker, electric running water, porta potti, curtains, cupboards and lots of other cool bits and pieces.
The perfect hippie van!

Having added a few homely touches and some retro red shagpile, we'd like to introduce our newest travel companion, Jasper!

We plan to spend the next 2 or so months exploring the UK countryside; visiting well known castles, breweries and cideries along the way before crossing the channel into Europe! Before we can embark on this epic adventure, we have a prior arrangement with a music & snowboarding festival in the Austrian alps for a week… we'll be spending the next week rocking out to the likes of Fatboy Slim, Stanton Warriors, Plump DJ's, Dizzee Rascal, Booka Shade and Example to name a few, while carving up the mountain and busting out 1080's! Btw - I've never been snowboarding in my life so my ability to pull off the previous aforementioned tricks may or may not be true!

We fly out tomorrow morning so we'll see you all in a week!

Renee x