Alright, I give in. So many people  have complained that we have dared not update the blog [to London and then home] I have succumbed. So yes, we went to London and now we are home in Melbourne. Well, Jon and Jan are home. Jack starts work in Paris next week and is staying on in France for a while.

We drove from Paris to Normandy, stayed a few nights around Bayeux and caught the ferry from Caen. Driving on the right side of the road after five months of strenuous caution was a relief. Roundabouts posed a problem for a day or two as I continued to think I needed to keep my drivers door in the gutter and my passenger out in the middle of the road. Not appreciated by Jan or other drivers!

After a few nights in Devon, London was a quick trip away, via Stonehenge. We paraded around London for a day with the car, posing for snapshots at Westminister and Big Ben [allowed by the anti-terror police] and Buck Palace [not allowed by the police]. Then Ping the unstoppable was steam cleaned for Australian quarantine and handed over to the shipping people who have popped Ping in a box and sent him on his way to Melbourne.

Saying goodbye to Jack was extra hard, and now we are home we miss him even more.  Life - and work - resumes. The book contract says I am supposed to have a finished manuscript ready in an unrealistically short time. So no more on-line, energy and attention needed elsewhere.

Thank you all - and thank you again - for the amazing response we got to a blog that never expected to achieve a fraction of this notoriety or attention. It has been a blast from beginning to end and I pinch myself every day to make sure it was all real.

I would love to pop some photos of London or Paris online but there has been an unfortunate clash of software updates and it is not possible to just whack them on anymore. Sorry, I have spent hours trying to make it work and finding out the reason it does not.

2009 welcomed from Paris, where Jan and I are tucked away fighting a lergy of the most ferocious sort. So far Jack has been immune, thank goodness. We have managed a few little wanders out into the neighbourhood, as far a the pharmacy [!!!] and some local eateries. A miserable way to spend time in Paris, I assure you all. Jack is having a ball catching up with friends, local and tourists and polishing his francais.

Despite the flu, we enjoyed a magnificent Christmas dinner - dips, olives, prawns, snails, oysters, soup, turkey with veg, salads, puddings, ice creams, cheese, chocolates…. and those marzipan fruits that make your teeth hum. Didn’t eat again for days. Now we need to stop coughing long enough to get back into Ping the car and make it to London some time in the next week.

35 000 ks from Melbourne by road  is Thessaloniki in Greece. 25 000ks is Kashgar in Western China.

Jack has taken more than 8 000 photos

We have averaged 14 litres of diesel per 100ks, but can get it down to 12 if we go slower…

Cheapest diesel is Iran, where we paid Aust$3 for 165 litres. That is not a typo. $3 for 165 litres.

Most expensive has been Turkey at A$2.60 equivalent a litre

Two punctures, one in Mongolia and the other in No Mans Land on the Torugart Pass between China and Kyrgyzstan, in the snow.

No mechanical breakdowns or failures at all. Burglar alarm switches and the CD player have broken. One driving light bulb has blown. Two wheels buckled and repaired imperfectly, just as well we went for steel instead of alloy wheels which would have cracked or split ages ago. So we have a wonky spare and a slight front end wobble at speed until at least one wheel can be replaced.

To those who thought we chose the wrong car….  we didn’t. I could say a whole lot more about this but it could be misunderstood as marketing. To the nice people from the Land Rover Club who wrote on their chatroom that I was an idiot and knew nothing about cars and was heading for disaster, sorry to disappoint you.

Nothing has been stolen except Jacks notebook and sunglasses pickpocketed in Thailand. Nothing lost except two guidebooks I can not find which could still be buried deep in the car !!!!

The biggest waste of money was buying tickets for the plane to Dili and then two days later being offered a ride on the cargo ship. Not refundable.

Equipment not used includes the EPIRB [but good to have it, you do hope you never need it] and binoculars. Various and extensive tools carried and thankfully not used, but again you have to have them. Tyre repair kit not touched….  you can get tyres repaired everywhere we have been. So that well travelled kit will go onto eBay !

The budget… well, a work of fiction and I have not dared look at the totals and will not until we get home because that would spoil the last bit of the trip.

And more than  1,400 comments on this blog…. and well over 500 000 visitors to the site. We never thought we would get one tenth of that.

Last week in Pamukkale, Turkey, we met up with a Melbourne family driving around the world in the opposite direction to us.

Danny, Sandy and their kids Maddy and Raffy [see www.drivearoundtheworld.wordpress.com] have been through parts of south-east Asia, North America, the UK, Europe and then through Albania to Turkey. They have been on the road since April 2008.

We met up for a few days, lots of travel talk, nostalgia about home and comparing the rigours of border crossings in whacky places. A visit to the ancient site of Aphrodisias was a terrific way to see the kids nagging their parents about more old rocks. We gave them Vegemite, they gave Jack 800 new songs for his ipod [but he still plays the same stufff anyway]. The barter economy.

Just off the ferry between Igoumenitsis in Greece and Ancona, Italy. It seems we have forgotten to write for a little while. Ooops, sorry.

We have been in Turkey, Greece and now Italy. Greece was really just three days whipping through the north to get the ferry. It was amazing to be there just as Athens was in turmoil. We knew nothing of it. Trouble has followed us- from democracy protests in Bangkok, to the clashes between Cambodia and Thailand on their border, terrorism in western China and now riots in Greece!!!

Turkey is terrific, full of history [Troy, ancient ruins at Aphrodisias amongst others were highlights] and of course the pilgrimage to Gallipoli Peninsula. We were joined by two ABC mates from Melbourne, Serpil and James. They are taking a year out of the ratrace and living with Serpils parents in Bodrum. Wonderful family hospitality and then good company all the way to Eceabat, the town nearest ANZAC Cove. James has been reading Les Carlyons ‘Gallipoli’and was able to give us detailed explanations of the various sites. It is emotionally overwhelming, and to have the Turkish side explained by Serpils translations as well as the ANZAC history made it even more emotional. In the space of a bowling green, 6200 men died in three days at Lone Pine. At the Nek, three hundred died in a few hours fighting over a distance separated now by the wiidth of the tar on the road. The terrain is so harsh, the mistakes made now so clear. And the generosity and care taken by the Turks now all the more moving. It is all a national memorial park and the Turkish war graves and memorials impressively done.

We  are nearly finished. A few  days and we will be in France. I can not quite believe it. I regularly pinch myself. Our huge bull-barred car looks so odd amongst the little Euro hatchbacks. On the ferry several people  gasped as they saw our numberplates. I gasped when I saw the exchange rate and the price of diesel. We paid as much for one litre in Turkey as we paid for 165 litres in Iran. but Iranian fuel prices were never going to last…..