Saturday, May 02, 2009

Time goes by..

It’s been almost 10 months since my niece passed away and about the same since I have blogged, partly due to time constraints, but more so due to not being in the right frame of mind to blog.

Over the last few months so much has happened I don’t where to start. The bad: my 27 year cousin has been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. A friends eight year old child with Marfan’s syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfan_syndrome ) passed away last week. She has suffered badly over the past six months and things like these just don’t make sense to me. It just seems so pointless and cruel to the parents and families.. What can you say to the parents to even attempt to console them?

The good: we have been assigned a case officer for our immigration into Australia and have completed our medicals. The only thing left is our police clearance certificate from the UK, so things after 9 months of waiting, things are finally moving along..

On a happy note my brother, his wife, my wife and I are off to Europe later tonight for a campervan holiday and I thought I'd use the opportunity to restart my blogging, so I will attempt to post a short blog and photo daily, for duration of the trip – i.e. the next two weeks. My brother will post some somewhat deeper, more meaningful blogs via his one at http://fromthetipofafrica.blogspot.com and I will try and take some half descent photo's.. Hopefully somewhat better than these old ones in this post taken with my old digital. My new baby is a Canon 450D :-).. We leave from Johannesburg tonight and arrive in Amsterdam tomorrow morning, we then drive to Calais, cross the channel via the Eurotunnel and head up to my wife’s family in Barton Le Clay. We then go from the UK -> Brussels -> Paris -> Lyon -> Rome -> Venice -> Zurich -> Munich -> Stuttgart and finally back to Amsterdam! We’re generally not people who rough it on holiday’s, so we begin this trip with some scepticism! It should be interesting staying in a campervan having to clean the chemical loo (still looking for volunteers ;-) )...I especially look forward to the German autobahns ..not

The one photo is a shot of Table Mountain from Robben Island taken in December and the other one is of Russ with our passports – one day I will explain his inclusion in the trip... it’s complicated ;-)

Today Johannesburg... tomorrow Amsterdam..