So?

Anyone figured out where we are going yet?

Puffies' grand adventure

650kms, 5 weeks, 2 states and possibly a territory... anyone still reading... get a life :-)

Mike and Zan's European adventure in a nutshell.

Portuguese bull fighting Arena, Lisbon


Portuguese fishermen, Lisbon.


Mike and Zan Champ de Mars, Paris.


A Sunday afternoon in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris.


The White Cliffs of Dover from the Channel ferry.


Lord Nelson's ship HMS Victory, Portsmouth, UK.


View from Thor's Cave, The Peak District, UK.


Mike dress to impress under the direction of Danann.


Zan, Danann and David outside Buckingham Palace, London.

Here's what you've been waiting for (White mountains to mt Katahdin)

Mt Lafayette, White Mountains NH
Fiddlehead, Treehugger, Bean, Rip, Orc, Mike and Zan


Hot Springs Contemplating Mt Katahdin. The first view - 47.7 Miles to go!


Mike and Zan, Daicey Pond Campground. 7.6 Miles to go!


Looking up at jellybean Jellybean "You mean we have to climb up there??" 3 miles to go.


First view of the summit. 0.1 Miles to go!


Baxter Peak, Mt Katahdin, ME Northern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail!!!
Zan and Mike "Is it real?"


Mike and Zan "So... I hear it's only another 300 Miles to Quebec City..."


8th of September Thru-hiker summit group
Mike, Zan, Donkey, Jersey Boy #1, Mouse, Baro, Jellybean, Hot Springs, Lifesaver, H-Bomb, Jangles, Shasta, Jersey Boy #2, Jersey Boy #3, Cash



Knife's Edge, the view from the summit

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, Home again, home again, jiggety jig.

Many of you said we couldn't do it... A number of you said that we were all talk... But here it is; the last and final blog post!

When we last left our intrepid travellers, they were waiting for a flight out of Heathrow Airport. After an uneventful flight from Heathrow to Lisbon, we exited the terminal, followed the signs to the taxi rank and found a driver leaning against his taxi. It was about this time that we realised neither of us spoke a word of Portuguese. After much consideration, we pulled out a piece of paper and pointed to the address. This did not achieve the desired effect. Within seconds, the drivers from about twenty other taxis gathered round and began talking animatedly. Giving him the benefit of the doubt we decided that he must be new. 10 minutes later as we passed the Sousa Marins Statue for the fifth time, we had to concede that they must have been discussing the longest possible route to our hostel and knew that there wasn't a thing we could do about it.

We spent five fantastically relaxing days in Lisbon. We did the touristy thing and jumped on a double-decker tour bus with grand plans of hopping off to visit museums and historic landmarks. We highly recommend that if you visit another country, to find out a bit about it first. We were so caught up with plans for the Appalachian Trail that we didn't think we'd actually make it this far. Despite not having a really touristy time in Lisbon, it's still great just to absorb a foreign city. Walking along the foreshore, we felt like locals as we sat and watched the fisherman, interrupted only by the occasional whispered offer by passers by of "hashish, hashish!"

We hopped a train from Lisbon to Madrid and enjoyed being able to finally understand a little of what was being said. We even worked out how to order a 'numero quatro' from burger king, and in a push we could order a 'numero seis'.

On our fourth morning in Madrid, we awoke to the sound of fighter planes and military looking helicopters flying circles over the city centre. Using the only Spanish we knew, we walked to burger king and ordered a 'numero seis' (desperate times call for desperate measures) and sent a message to Mike's mum asking if the world was ending. It turned out to be a practice for the following day's national holiday.

Our tour of Madrid's fast food restaurants was over before we knew it and we found ourselves in Paris. What can we say about Paris except, "le plume de ma tante est sur la table".

We knew we were in Paris as soon as we saw the skyline with the Eiffel Tower. It was much more impressive that we'd expected and didn't even slightly resemble the giant television towers that you see in North Sydney. Even though this wasn't the first time that we'd seen the Eiffel tower on our trip (refer back to the entry of Las Vegas), it's pretty impressive walking through the Champ De Mars towards the tower. We went to the top the next day and the view was, as the French say, "le bloody unreal".

Lines at the Louvre were not nearly as long as we'd been told and we were soon standing in front of the Mona Lisa. We walked down the Champs-Élysées and stood under the Arc de Triomphe. Notre Dame was spectacular and we spent quite some time sitting, staring up at the roof. We'd had a restaurant recommended to us where the owner happily spoke English and we enjoyed a lovely meal of venison, Pâté, a cheese platter and Crème Brûlée. We had drinks at a street-side cafe on the Bastille with some family friends of Zan who are living in Paris for two years.

We were soon staring at the 'White Cliffs of Dover' from the decks of the P&O channel ferry. It felt great to be back in a country where you didn't have to get out the phrase book every time you looked at a menu. We caught a bus back to London and to Zan's uncle's house (henceforth known as the 'London townhouse').

For the next two weeks we did a whirlwind tour of England. We started off in Southampton visiting Jill, Harry, Dominic and Julia S (Family friends of Zan). We saw Lord Nelson's ship The Victory in Portsmouth, The Roman Baths in Bath, Shakespeare’s Birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, had dinner with Zan's Aunt and her family in Burton, visited the Peak district and went exploring with Tim and Laura and painted the town pink with David and Danann in London.

We want to thank everyone who made us feel so welcome when we visited them throughout this trip. And to those of you who have posted comments we really enjoyed seeing them. And we would like to apologise to those of you who were distracted from their university studies, work, housework, television, exercise and life in general over the last eight months.

And just to keep up the suspense... there maybe another post.

We are now in Paris. We'll try to do a full update some time soon.

Also, we both have phones on global roaming, so you can send text messages to our old Australian mobile numbers. The American ones no longer work.

A series of unfortunate events and a psycho.

That describes our final night in a New York hostel, although we had a wonderful experience despite that and we still like New York.

We arrived in London extremly jet lagged after very little sleep and several hundred games of Tetris(damn those little tv´s). We managed to make it to where we were staying and after a $10 can of soup for lunch, slept the rest of the day only waking long enough to eat another $10 can of soup for dinner before heading back to bed.

We awoke at midday the next day and hurridly packed our bags worried that we might miss our flight to Lisbon, Portugal. We arrived at the airport a recommended 3 hours before our flight, and after waiting in the check-in queue for over half an hour, were advised by the British airways agent that it was against regulations to check-in luggage so long before the aircrft´s departure time. She kindly pointed us in the direction of the 'quick' baggage drop queue. We finally got to the front of that queue only to be informed we would have to move to anohter queue. After waiting in this line for a large portion of our already reduced duty free shopping time, we were pointed in the direction of the 'oversized baggage' check-in, the only one permitted take backpacks. Fortunately no one else seemed to be lining up to drop oversized baggage (they had not yet been sent on from the previous line) and within minutes we were putting our shoes back on after going through airport security. We´d read in our Lonely Planet book on England that Brits loved to queue, and so far our experience of London had done nothing but confirm this.

New York, New York.

We arrived in New York with a long list of things we wanted to see and a very definite schedule. We find ourselves sitting at this computer still with a very long list of things to see. We both love New York and highly recommend that you all come and visit.

We were lucky enough to be welcomed into the home of Mrs J. in Brooklyn, right next to an F line subway station. Thank you to both Mrs J. and Michael J. for organising this for us. It was great to have space in an apartment to ourselves and the local knowledge from Mrs J. She seems to know every single street and subway station in the city.

We spent the first two days riding the big red bus around the city, taking in sights like the empire state building, Wall st, ground zero, south st pier, Harlem, Chinatown, Little Italy, SOHO and everything else you've ever heard of. Our tickets included a night tour of Manhattan. It was impressive to see the skyline and Times Square at night.

We spent Wednesday wandering the streets before going to see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. We had dinner at Red Lobster near Times Square.

We decided to duck out of US territory for lunch on Thursday and headed to UN plaza which is officially international territory. We saw the security council chamber as well as the general assembly. The UN even has its own postage system complete with international postage stamps.

Today is Friday and we've just visited the Guggenheim museum and the metropolitan museum of art. They are both huge and impressive. We capped off our day with a stroll through Central Park and dinner in a restaurant where none of the staff spoke English.

Tomorrow we fly to London. We'll only be there for a day before we head to Portugal.

Washington D.C. (again)

After four nights in Millinocket, it was time to join the real world again and head to Boston. We traded our zipoff pants for jeans and jumped on a bus heading south. No more hiker discounts. No more hitch-hiking. No more eating out of eskies (coolers) left on the side of the road. No more pints of ice cream. Needless to say, we were going to have a hard time adjusting.

We spent three nights in Boston and saw... nothing. We basically just relaxed in the hostel before heading to Washington to do the tourist thing.

One thing we discover in Boston was that it was possible to get to Washington for only $35 (greyhound was about $80). One of our fellow hikers told us about the Chinatown buses, a group of bus lines that travel between major cities on the East cost for a fraction of the price of the more major lines. The only difference is that these buses stop in the Chinatown district. We arrived at the address from where the bus was supposed to leave, but it was deserted. There was not a bus in sight. We rounded the next corner to be ambushed by a group of street vendors from different bus companies. They were all yelling, "twenty dollar! twenty dollar!" but even when we asked would not tell us where the bus was going. We eventually handed over $40 and again asked where the bus was heading. "This way!" and we were shoved on a bus none the wiser as to its destination.

Six hours later we arrived in DC and we were quite proud of the success of our budget traveling. We made our way to the hostel and were surprised to find that our room had been upgraded from a 12 person dorm to a 4 person dorm. Things were shaping up well for Washington. We headed across the road to the nearest pub and ate the money that we'd saved on busses.

We saw all the essential tourist attractions that we'd missed on our first visit to Washington; Arlington cemetery (Kennedy graves, tomb of the unknowns and Gen. Robert E Lee's house.), the presidential memorials, various war memorials, the Holocaust museum and the spy museum.

We jumped on the train to Pennsylvania and met up with Mark and Karen. It was great to see them again and we spent three relaxing days in their home and exploring Downingtown. Mike even got a haircut!

Finally it was off to New York.

Katahdin, Baxter State Park

You know you're a thru-hiker when... You've just walked 2174.6 miles in just under 5 1/2 months and stood on top of Mt Katahdin

We got out of the car back at the trailhead after three nights in Bethel just as Donkey (love) and Hot Springs came wandering across the road. They were the first other hikers that we'd seen in a couple of weeks. We could almost smell Mt Katahdin in the distance, but every time we were promised a view of Katahdin over the next few weeks it was raining, cold and we could barely see our hands in front of our faces.

Between Bethel and Andover (the last 220 miles of the trail) we managed to stop in every town along the way; hamburgers in Caratunk, shoe shopping in Rangely and sleeping on the floor in an overcrowded hostel in Stratton. We finally made it to Monson, the last town-stop before the 100 mile wilderness (114.5 miles to go).

We'd been warned that there was not much in Monson - just a general store and a few places to eat. What it lacked in size, it made up for in small town charm. Within a few minutes the general store owner knew us on a first name basis and was inviting us over for breakfast the next morning (home farmed eggs). He also invited us to his store after hours for a bluegrass jam session. We stopped by that evening and the store was crowded. The music was fantastic. Basically anyone who could play was invited to have a go. They do it every Friday night, so if you're ever in Monson don't be afraid to drop by.

After an enormous Breakfast, we hit the trail with the aim of summiting Katahdin seven days later. We'd always intended to run through the 100 mile wilderness but we also spent lots of time relaxing next to lakes looking for that elusive moose. We'd heard that there were lots of hikers walking around us and planning to summit on the same day.

The 100 mile wilderness is not quite as wild as it used to be. There were numerous road crossings every day and you could frequently hear large trucks in the background and motor boats on the lakes, although we have to admit that it was still very beautiful.

Our first view of Katahdin came two days before we were due to summit. There were about thirty trail miles left to go, but it looked like we could reach out and touch it.

We met up with Baro, Jangles, H-Bomb, Shasta, Mouse, Hot Springs, Donkey, Cash, Lifesaver , Snuffy, Jellybean and the Jersey Boys. (3 of them) just as we left the 100 mile wilderness. They were all planning to summit the same day as us.

At the ranger station at Katahdin Stream campground, we were given a number for the thru-hiker we were that year. We were numbers 210 and 211, but we still had 5.2 miles to go until the Katahdin summit. We'd heard of several people who'd injured themselves between here and the end. That night we had a spaghetti cookup hosted by Mouse's parents who'd driven all the way from Alabama.

We summited on the 8th of September at 10:44 am, which makes Cat the winner of our little competition with a guess of 10:43 am. Half way up the mountain we joked that it would be funny if someone guessed the exact time. It wasn't until we got into town that we realised just how close Cat's guess was. We thought she'd guessed 10:40 (sorry Cat, that's what the postcard says).

It was Friday evening when we arrived in Millinocket, the closest town to the end of the trail. We were eager to pick up our real town clothes (jeans etc) from the Post office, but we arrived 10 minutes after the post office closed:-( It was like the night before Christmas. We were trying to go to sleep so that the morning would arrive sooner. Unfortunately we were still on hiker time and woke at 6 the next morning, 3 hours before the post office opened.

We got there just as they unlocked the door and handed our ID to the clerk and smiled apologetically and told him we had a few boxes waiting. We wondered why he muttered under his breath, "just a few, huh?!?" He turned to the letter pigeon hole behind him and began counting as he pulled them out... 1... 2... 3... 4... Next he came out with our clothes boxes. We thanked him and began to leave as he was turning his back again. He came back with two more boxes and again we tried to leave. This time he said, "you'd better make yourselves comfortable." Eventually we ended up leaving the post office with 9 boxes and 4 letters.

Our parents had sent us the usual supply of Tim-tams, vegemite, stuffed toys and miscellaneous newspaper clippings. Thanks for keeping us refueled throughout the hike and giving us a way to mess with American tastebuds (see photo of Cash trying Vegemite earlier in this blog).

The next one was a pleasant surprise. We'd jokingly said to our friends, "We'll be here in about a month. Send us a package if you want." Bel, Cat, Pete, Im and Will sent us birthday and congratulatory presents. Thanks guys Zan says, "It's great to wear real pj's for a change." Mike says, "I've been helping old ladies cross the road." Zan says, "I really have to stop Mike from running down the street in his Superman underwear!"

We finally got to the last letter and read...

Dear Michael and Roseanne,

Congratulations. By now you should be in Millinocket, Maine...

Yours Sincerely,

(insert signature here)

John Howard MP
Member for Bennelong
Prime Minister of Australia

We're now kickin' back in the thriving metropolis of Millinocket deciding where we want to go next...