Well first the bad...

As many of you know our car was broken in to on our 4th day out of a 1o day trip to Spain and Portugal. We had stopped south of Lisbon on our way to Lagos at a very public beach with tons of tourists and open surroundings. After about 15 minutes on the beach I realized that we might not be at the one I wanted to be at so we decided to keep moving south. Got back to car to discover the little side window broken out. So my work laptop, phone, keys, various other work things, Nikki's purse + numerous items in it, passport, money, and her makeup and toiletries back were all stolen from the trunk. To sum it up, they left our clothes, travel guides, and my toiletries bag.

Yes, it was frustrating (and still is) as you can imagine, but we persevered. I cannot thank the lifeguards, vacationers, police and hotel staff that offered help or helped us along the way. Hearing family's voices and concern at times like this also comforted us a bunch. We took a breath and decided to keep going. So we missed out on a beach day and a sea trip, and headed back to Lisbon to get Nikki a new passport. I can't think of much else we let the incident make us miss.

The next part was getting back into the studio. I had left messages with my boss/landlord about the keys, but he had mistaken my message thinking that we had found a set. So when we landed at 11.45 Saturday the real fun began. He had arranged for spare keys to be left outside his house. The next 7 hours were almost comical. First, after talking the border people through Nikki's lack of visa for school, we took our pre-booked bus trip back to Central London. Next, we tried to get a cab to my boss' house. Well that was going to be anywhere between $120-230, so we opted for the bus trip. After a stop to our storage shed in our garden to drop off luggage, we ventured on to Nick's house. A total of 4 buses, a lot of partyers, 45 minutes of walking and a lot colder weather than Spain/Portugal we made it to his house at 3.45 am. Turns out the keys were for the wrong Studio. We woke up his wife to see if she had a spare, I think I forgot to say Nick was in France on a holiday himself. All she had were office keys, in which I thought there may be a set. So we start the return. Another interesting point was that the buses switch schedules at 5, so our bus route didn't exist anymore, but we found another to the office. We made it to the office about 5.30 or so and low and behold 2 sets of keys that resembled ours. Back to the studio and we were in the studio by around 6.30, just in time for daybreak.

What an ordeal. A couple things to keep in mind. We left the Mediterranean Sea (Malaga) at around 8 BST. The whole path after between Central London and Nick's house is probably under 10 miles. Waiting for buses, walking to other stations and such took a lot of time. I told Nikki that we might have fallen to sleep and road a loop of the route the way it seemed.

After all of that 'fun' we managed to rest today and start to repair other things that were lost. Probably the worst bit is that I figure we lost between 11,000-12,000 pictures of all of travels, along with personal work things and emails. The advice for today kiddies, make sure to keep a separate drive of those things you really care about, even if you are roughing it in a foreign land for a year.

But next up all the fun we had...