Two drifters off to see the world. . .

Well as some of you already know and for those who don’t, we are now back on Canadian soil! We arrived back in Toronto last Friday evening. We had a busy weekend with the wedding of Sarah’s good friends Amelia and Clarke on Saturday, and then a busy week trying to sort through our mail, get our taxes started and get the car re-registered. I think we are over the jet lag now. Eero didn’t waste any time leaving the country again. He headed out to New Hampshire on Wednesday night with our friend Mike to do some hiking and skiing on Mount Washington until Sunday. Next week the job hunt officially begins. We are staying in Hamilton for the time being until we get our life sorted. If anyone wants to hang out shoot us an email eero.teene@gmail.com or sarah.teene@gmail.com or give a call on our new cell number 289-339-0120.

While in Melbourne we were lucky enough to stay with Kim and Jim and their 2 Border Collies, Mellon and Brock, who live in Rosanna, a suburb of Melbourne. Kim is Eero’s godfather Dave’s cousin. We had a nice dinner with them on the first night we arrived.
On our first day in Melbourne we went downtown and to the Queen Victoria Market, then took the tourist shuttle for a ride. The tourist shuttle took us past the Shrine of Rembrance, the Botanic Gardens, Federation square, the Sports precinct which has about 9 sports venues (including Olympic Park), the 88-floor residential Eureka tower amongst other sights of the city.
Kim and Jim took us to see an AFL game (Aussie Rules Football) between the St Kilda Saints and Essendon Bombers. We picked up on the rules of the game pretty quick and we both really enjoyed watching the game. The final score was 123-87 for St Kilda. They should bring the sport to Canada!
The next day we took the train back downtown and went back to the market to get some crocodile sausages for supper. They were pretty good. We also went out to St Kilda Beach and walked out the pier where there is a protected little penguin colony as well as a water rat colony.
On our last day in the Melbourne area, Kim and Jim took us for a scenic drive through the Yarra Valley. We stopped at two (Warramate Wines and Domaine Chandon) of the many wineries in the Yarra Valley and sampled some good wines. On the drive back we stopped in Healesville for some delicious meat pies at the Beechworth bakery.

After arriving at the Avalon airport outside of Melbourne around lunchtime, we picked up our rental car, and set out to drive the Great Ocean Road. The 273km Great Ocean Road was built by 3000 returned servicemen as a war ... [Continue reading this entry]

We've been having such a great time playing with the kids, that Sarah and I decided to start our own family right away. So we adopted an Australian. It's a big step, but we've already bought our first house (Vanna ... [Continue reading this entry]

Flying into Sydney, we were picked up by Eero's relatives on his father's side, Peter and June Raengel. We were driven down to their city of Wollongong, and met their son Peter, and grandchildren Peter and Bonnie for a delicious meal. The next day ... [Continue reading this entry]

After the Whitsundays we flew back to Brisbane on April 6th where we were picked up by Liz, Eero's second cousin-in-law, and taken to their place in Dayboro on the outskirts of Brisbane.  On our 1st day in Dayboro, Rick and Liz took ... [Continue reading this entry]

We left Auckland on March 13th for Nadi, Fiji, and arrived there around midnight. Once we finally made it to our hostel we were welcomed with a kava ceremony. We drank some Kava, learned about the customs of the ceremony ... [Continue reading this entry]

... is a van down by the river! We picked up a 1988 Toyota Hiace van, with only 601,000km on it in Cambridge, NZ which is right next to Hamilton. It was a deal, and looks like its only seen 300k ... [Continue reading this entry]

Well we just spent the past 4 days exploring Estonia's capital city, Tallinn. We spent most of our time in vanalinn (Old Town) which is a two-tiered medieval town with part of it's defensive wall still intact and is a UNESCO world ... [Continue reading this entry]

After recharging our batteries in Saku, we decided to make another large road trip through Eesti. This time though, we headed east instead of west. We drove from Saku to Kiiu Torn (Tower) which has an estonian liquor named after ... [Continue reading this entry]