Suze and the Beard : Wagamamas And All Things Travel

The past few days have been eventful, from travel preparation curled up on the sofa in Cafe Nero, to car restoration that involved Beardy getting mugged by a bush, all will be explained, and finishing with some remanising over some noodles.

On Friday night we were getting the Jetta all ready to be sprayed on the Saturday which involved a load of shrink wrap, a thick jumper and a lot of patience.

It all started off so fun and light hearted, I mean how often do you get to wrap an entire car in what is basically big cling film? Very rarely in our case. So we were looping and swirling all round the car until it was all wrapped like a sandwich, but then it all kicked off.....beardy had lost the keys!

We searched everywhere, the garage, the lounge, the kitchen, the drive way floor, everywhere!!!

Pretty much retracing all the steps taken before the wrapping began.

By this time another layer of jumpers had to be applied as it was getting bitterly cold, and let's just say the fun and light hearted atmosphere had turned into anger and panic.

Crawling around on the floor and both looking at each other in such a way as if to say 'We better not have to cut the car open' was just a tiny bit heartbreaking.

The search for the keys must have gone on for a good thirty minutes and to be honest, we had both had enough so I headed to the kitchen to grab some scissors when all of a sudden I hear 'Suze!!! You are not going to believe this!'!

I ran out to find Beardy standing next to our neighbours shrub, and upon one of its twigs were the blumming keys!

That's right we were mugged by a bush! How this happened we will never know, and how we BOTH managed to miss them...well that's any bodies guess.

We laughed an awful lot about it though.

Saturday

Volkswagen Jetta GL 1989 gets a make over.

The most time consuming part of this was just wrapping every single door and window on the car so there was no risk of overspray inside.

The Jetta has been a bit of an ongoing project where I would just spend a couple of hours a night to remove a panel paint prep it, sort out any damage or rust due to its age, seeing as its older than I am.

With our leaving date approaching quickly and me not having the heart to sell my little project which I've been plodding along with for quite some time now, I badgered a friend at work to finally get our arses into gear and get it sprayed back to its original jade emerald green colour. So far due to a massive cock up on my behalf I forgot to ordered more thinners. Suze and myself raced around two towns trying to find the right type but annoyingly to no avail. So unfortunately process has been prolonged yet another week, but at least we have started, and it's looking a lot better than I thought it would. Might have to have a cheeky dip into travel savings just to ensure the car is completed and ready for storage before we head off on our adventure.....but shhh don't tell Suze.

Sunday (Today) has been pretty productive. Got up early and sorted through some old DVDs, grabbed the camera and notepad and headed to town.

We went straight to CEX to trade in a box full of unwanted films so we could add a little more cash to our savings jar. The poor lad behind the counter looked mortified at the amount we had plonked on his desk. Let's just say we didn't do too badly. Thanks CEX Man.

Next we headed for hot chocolate central Cafe Nero. Honestly if you haven't tried their Hot Chocolate Milano GO TRY IT! It's lushness in a mug.
Luckily for us we were able to nab the one and only sofa in there. So we set up our planning station and hit the web to look for accommodations.
We are finding reading lots of Blogs, trip advisor reviews and a couple of websites really helpful. Some of our favourites include:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com - Fantastic for finding accomedation and hearing reviews from other travellers who have had a first hand experience of the hotel/hostel in question.

http://www.worldofwanderlust.com - She has brilliant, easy to follow tips for pretty much everywhere, from how to pack, to save and to make the most of your adventure. Well worth the read.

http://tripplanner.airtreks.com - Now we have never used this site before, however we have only heard spectacular things. They are an American company who help you plan your travels. You pick all your locations and then they give you a rough price of how much it will cost, normally at a fantastic rate. RESULT!

You call them up when you are ready to move on to a new destination and they tell you the next avaliable flight. You turn up at the airport with your reference number and bobs your uncle (in suze's case this is true) and they hand you your ticket. It seems and sounds pretty straight forward, and we trust our reliable sources but we will obviously do a review when we have tried it for ourselves.

After writing nearly 10 pages of notepad we felt we needed a little treat so headed to good old Wagamamas.

If you have never been before its a great place for fast fresh pan-Asian style food.

This sounds bad but we actually have our 'usual', yes we have been so many times it's obvious what we are going to order.

Suze and the Beards Wagamama Favourites

Tori Kara Age - Deep fried chicken pieces with a chilli sauce
Duck Gyoza - Duck dumplings with how sin sauce
Chicken Kare Lomen - Chicken and noodles in a spicy coconut soup (Suze)