The Farewell Party

This past weekend, we gathered to say farewell to our friends here in Germany.  They say time flies when you're having fun and HH (Hansestadt Hamburg) has been no exception.  For Jo, it's been over six years here, for Nick, almost nine months - so there were lots of friends to catch up with and explain our mad plan.

A Few Laps Around the Hockenheim Ring

Our departure from Germany is fast approaching, but before we left, we thought it would be fun to head down to Baden-Württemberg and take a few laps around the Hockenheim Ring - the German Grand Prix track. Last year, for my birthday, my wonderful girlfriend (now fiancé) gave me a gift certificate for a few laps around the Ring with a professional driver in a Porsche GT3.

We spent a night in Stuttgart and visited the Mercedes museum then drove up to Heidelberg the next day, a quant little town on the Neckar river near Hockenheim. The next morning we headed over to the track. It was raining pretty hard and we were a little worried that we would get rained out, but apparently, they don't have any qualms going 200 km/h around a soaking wet track with tourists in the passenger seat.

Moving Day

The movers came this morning to pack up Jo's stuff to put it in storage.  We had done a pretty good job up this point of sorting through everything and piling all of the stuff to be stored in one place.  As a result, it only took them about an hour to box everything up and catalogue the contents!  In the end, 150 cubic feet is headed to storage for the next 6 months.



Over the last month or so, we've also been working on selling the furniture that was old or would be inefficient to store, like a sofa.  Unfortunately, this means that Jo's apartment is now fairly furnitureless....  For example, this is the couch -------->

...two sun loungers tied together with a duvet on top.  Not the most comfortable living room seating in the world but we're making due. Funny, we're watching a lot less TV lately.

Our Itinerary

Our departure is almost upon us and we thought you might like a preview of where we are currently planning on visiting.  At the moment, we have a basic idea of what regions of the world we were going to be visiting and when - a necessity brought on by the reality of booking long haul air travel at a reasonable price.  However, within those regions, we are almost totally flexible.  If you have any great idea on where we should go or what we should do, let us know!

So, the trip basically beaks down into five segments:

Welcome!

Welcome to the Adventures of Nick and Jo, our new blog!  Over the next six months, this will be the best place for you to keep up with, you guessed it, the adventures of Nick and Jo (or "Jo and Nick," depending on who you ask).

As I'm sure you know, starting in a little over one week, we will be homeless.  Both of us will have packed up our apartments and put them in storage.  And we will be heading around the world with nothing but our backpacks and our cameras.