We were sad to say goodbye to Australia but not so sad to say goodbye to Frank the van. I’m not sure it is possible for us to appreciate Peggy more but we will certainly try after living in that thing for a week! We were also sad to have to throw away…yes, I said, THROW AWAY our opened but by no means finished box of wine!!! We had felt so rubbish that we hadn’t even had half of the 5 litre box! I suppose we made up for it in free wine at the tastings though!
We packed up our clothes and forced the newly acquired bottles of wonderful Australian wine, wrapped securely in socks into the bulging mass of our one bag. It was splitting at the seams and almost impossible to lift without puncturing a lung with all of its protrusions but it was all in there! We had a bottle for the Rubios (the family who had housed Peggy for us), a bottle for Megan and Aaron (who we were popping in on on route back to Colombia), a bottle of homebrew and the ‘gone wrong’ reisling for us. We just couldn’t leave any behind!
We waved a happy goodbye to Frank and dubiously placed our bag into a taxi to the airport. We were due to fly at 6.30am and had to check in at 3.30am so after seeing that the airport accomodation cost around $600 we decided to rough it in the airport for the night. We got there at 4pm as we had to have Frank back before 5 and settled in for the night. We watched Rambo, ate our packed lunch and cursed not bringing the rest of the box of wine with us to the airport. Once the bustling miniature city had closed down for the night we made a claim on a reasonably confortable long bench at Dunkin Donuts and tried to get some sleep. Of course the airport cleaning crew had decided to clean the cieling that night around where we laid and drove a cherry picker around us all night! We might as well have been in an R2-D2 demonstration with all the bleeps, bloops and toots the damn thing was making as the cleaner chose to do most of his work driving backwards!
After a long, noisy, restless few hours we trudged to the desk to wait for check in to free ourselves of our ten tonne tess bag. We sat close enough to see when the desk opened and were just beat to the front of the queue (thanks to bag) by a coach load of Japanese tourists wearing pyjamas and socks with toes in. We waited in the queue and were still early enough to get reasonably good seats.
We boarded our flight to New Zealand (connection) and took off at 6.30am. We changed in Auckland and flew directly to LA and landed at the same time and on the same day as we had taken off! Time travel at its best!

We were greeted by a sleepy Megan at LAX and we whizzed across town in her bright orange mini to one of our second homes. She dropped us at the door, ordered us to bed and we planned to make dinner that evening. We walked into LA Mum’s apartment and instantly felt at home! I flopped onto the beloved couch and dropped (carefuly) our bags and Alex turned on the shower. We showered, slept and drank some coffee and we were ready to start the day all over again by lunch time. I had it in my head to make meat pie so thats just what we did. We shopped, cooked, drank wine and caught up with Megan. She was about to embark upon a life changing challenge with Offbeat Home. She was to cook every meal for a whole week BY. HER. SELF! This is HUGE for Megan as she lives on pre-prepared salads, pizza’s, toast and pasta. Gotta love that girl, she as a complete none cook was facing starvation, amputation and certain doom, all in the face of a challenge! She watched as we chopped, seasoned, washed, and prepped.

Alex decided to get her going early on her challenge and gave Megan the task of making the goddamn truffles! Just what you want your introduction to cooking to be…a nightmare! We failed at giving her an easy task and as the chocolate and cream seperated and turned into a gooey mess, so did Megan. We plied her with wine and she pulled it back from the brink just in time and Megan had made her very own truffles!
By the time we had finished cooking, Megan and I had polished off a bottle of wine between 3 glasses…as we moved around the kitchen we just reached for the nearest glass…poor Alex didn’t get a look in! By the time it came to eating dinner (11pm) and finishing it (1am) we had yet again drank the place dry. A bottle of cheap red, a welcome ‘home’ bottle of Vampire (to reminisce about our last visit), the ‘thanks for having us’ bottle from Australia AND the homebrew…gone! Not to mention the further 2 bottles of Vueve Cliquot kindly brought home by Aaron of course to celebrate our return! Our 7 turned to ‘us 4’ and we laughed the night away and again dragged ourselves to bed at 4am…this was no way to cure jetlag but it was a great night. Its so amazing to have friends who you can just drop in on any time and it be like you never left. We love our LA peeps lots!

Anyway, you can imagine how we spent our ‘weekend in LA to get over the jetlag’…we cooked, ate, drank more, laughed, shopped and blogged. We did everything barring get over our jetlag! we even managed to catch up with Juan Felipe (from the Colombian wedding) as he was shooting a wedding in LA. He came round for a British dinner, we made roast beef and yorkshire puds and then jumped back on yet another flight back to Colombia via Fort Lauderdale.

As always LA was a blast and we had decided we could sleep on the flight instead of while we were there! The flights back to Colombia were non-eventful barring me getting some kind of vinegar poisening in LAX from getting a damn salad instead of a burger which may upset my stomach before the flight!!! How ironic! Then being sat in the wrong gate awaiting our connection and nearly missing our flight from FL to Bogota…but aside from that nothing to report.

We made it back to Bogota, hopped into a taxi and arrived back at the Rubio household. We snuck in the gate as there was no-one home, then we broke into Peggy and fell asleep on the bed for 5 hours. When we woke up Jaime was home and he made us move into the house for the night. We told him all about our adventure in Aus, our travels and he told us all about is music and his off roading adventures in South America.
It felt so strange that we had only days before been on the other side of the world and now we were back in Colombia to pick up where we left off. Its hard to keep up with ourselves…hope you guys are keeping up!!!

Find out what happens next on our travelling wedding adventure!