Travel Insurance, Visa's, Money and necessitating the use of ropes

From the title you may wonder what the heck necessitating the use of ropes is.. well that was our same question a couple of nights ago as we were reading the lengthy policy wording for Southen Cross Travel Insurance. 

We had nearly decided on Southen Cross for our travel insurer but on reading the fine print it turns out we are not covered for the following:

• Extreme Sports
• hunting
• parachuting
• rodeo
• competitive downhill snowboarding
• bungy jumping
• mountaineering or rock climbing necessitating of the use of ropes

...and that is just a small portion of the long list. We could have worked around these exclusions, but then Jaz read "Any work (including volunteer work) undertaken, that involves manual activities or work". As we are planning to do mostly volunteering and HelpXchange to get around Europe, this is not really an exclusion that we can cope with!

So it's back to the drawing board with researching Travel Insurance fine print!

The next hurdle seems to be Visa's. We've just heard back from the Dutch Embassy that Jaz is unable to get her Dutch Passport, they seem to have pretty strict rules on dual passports.

Now we have to look at other ways of getting income and being able to settle in Europe. Without a EU passport, our other options that we know about are Working Holiday Visa's and volunteering in exchange for accomodation/ caretaking. We're thinking of trying for a Spanish 1 year Working Holiday Visa; where we can work for 6 months within a year. After that we'll look into a Working Holiday Visa for the Czech Republic as we can apply for it in either Paris or Berlin. Normally you have to be in your home country to apply, but we found the CR doesn't have this requirement! Yay!

Money... ahhhh! After our years of savings being halved into Euro's, we're freaking out. We're selling everything we can bear to part with and saving as much as we can until we leave. We're now researching the most economical way to take money over, whether it be Credit card/ Debit Card/ Travel Card or CashPassport.

All that, along with reading Lonely Planet guides and blogs at any spare moment! Any thoughts or comments about our worries would be choice!

-Rick and Jaz

June First Baby !!!

It's official.. Rick and Jaz will be leaving New Zealand June 1st.

Rick's first ever Passport

It was saturday evening when I (Rick) jumped into bed only to find a jet black, very shiny, very offical looking New Zealand passport sitting on my bedside table. It may suprise you but this is my FIRST ever passport.. as I have never left little old New Zealand.  So I was very excited.


Sunday was the day that we had been looking forward to for months.. it was time to book the tickets !!  A huge step for us in this adventure. 

So off to STA Travel we went, a little scared, a little worried and alot excited.  We plan to spend a month in South East Asia, then go onto Europe. 


We fly out of Auckland Airport at 12:45pm Wednesday June 1st  to Frankfurt via Bangkok.  We got a great deal on flights, however our bank account are now looking a bit sad.  It was all a tad overwhelming.

Its such a mixed bag of feelings, selling everything and going to the other side of the world with no return date in sight.  Sick feelings aside, we are so excited to be finally locking things in. 

On that note we have also secured 2 weeks English teaching in Spain, with VaughanTown  near Madrid.  We will be teaching at two consecutive "English Camps" where Spaniard's come for a six day conversational english retreat.  It is the first thing we have confirmed and it is very exciting to know that we will be in Spain in September.

Quietly freakin out,

Rick 

P.S:  Ricks posts will appear in this green colour and Jasmines will be in purple..