Stay classy planet Earth!

The plane ride to New York was painless enough and our arrival was similarly easy. As soon as you arrive at JFK airport, there is a conveniently placed travel desk which books you straight on a shuttle bus to your hotel. Once we'd battled through the New York traffic, we arrived at Hotel 31 in Downtown NYC. We were starving by now and it was absolutely freezing so we didn't venture far that night. We just popped to a great little Italian restaurant on the corner of our street which was full to the brim with real New Yorker types. We liked New York so far and it was nice for me to think that, as Kev said over dinner, this was the last unfamiliar place we would be going to on this trip.

The next day, T minus 2, we ventured out into the cold towards Times Square. Times Square is just bonkers, like a poor man's Tokyo but with much more annoying people everywhere! The crowds were doing my head in and it was beginning to snow pretty heavily so we found ourselves a local Irish bar and went in to try and thaw out and get some feeling back in my toes – yes, at the time Kev reminded me of my quote in Kuala Lumpur when I vowed to never complain about the cold again, but I still did complain!

A beer each and ten chicken wings later and it was time to tackle the heavily falling snow again. We walked all the way through Central Park, past the ice rink, past the horse and carts and past the tourists and locals who were also braving the weather that day, right through to the Metropolitan Museum. We went into the foyer, but didn't bother paying to go inside. Instead, we wandered on a little to the Guggenheim Museum of modern art and co-incidentally, there was a Kandinsky exhibition on at the time. Kandinsky is Kev's favourite artists, so obviously, we had to go on in. The inside of the museum is like a huge peeled orange and it made me a little giddy walking up the continuous spherical slope, but it was an awesome place and Kev enjoyed the artwork.

By this time we were a long way from our hotel and the snow was even heavier now, but still we wanted to walk back rather than take a cab. We walked all the way to another Irish bar, about ten blocks from our hotel and decided we had to go inside because by now my Converse trainers and the four pairs of socks I had on beneath them were soaked through and my feet were about to fall off. It was a nice pub and the barman must not have been a genuine New Yorker because he was really friendly!

But we didn't stay in the pub long, just long enough to recharge our internal heating systems and then we went back out there to walk the ten blocks to the hotel. At the hotel, I quickly changed my outfit and we went straight back out to experience a Saturday night in New York City and to see what all the fuss is about! We made it along to an area called Murphy's Hill, which as you can imagine from the name, is full of Irish Pubs, but we like Irish pubs, you know where you are with an Irish Pub!

We ended up spending the entire evening in various pubs, having many drinks and having a very merry Christmas time. In the last pub we met some great guys from Minnesota. One of them, a girl, had just come back from Iraq and she showed me here photos on her phone and told me stories which fascinated me for hours (well, not hours, but a good ten minutes anyway, I've never met anyone who's been to war before!). They were a great bunch who told us that they enjoyed spending their free time deer hunting. I didn't tell them that I thought deer hunting was gross, but when Kev told one of the guys that he had never ever shot a gun, he erupted in amazement and summoned all his mates around to tell them all that 'can you believe this, this guy has never shot a gun'....'never shot a gun!?!' they replied in harmony, it was amusing to say the least.

We left the pub to find a foot of lovely white, clean snow on the ground. That night New York got dumped on by half of it's annual snow allowance for the year, it was chaos everywhere! But me and Kev enjoyed the walk home, rugby tackling each other to the soft, cushioned ground and laughing a lot. We had celebrated our last Saturday night of the trip in style and we were merry!

The next morning however, we were feeling a little rough, but there was no time to waste by lying in bed with a hangover. This was our last full day of the trip and we had much more exploring to do. The guys in the pub last night had given us their sightseeing bus tickets which were still valid for a couple of hours, so we hurried out and literally walked through the snow (they're not very good at cleaning up the snow in NY – unsurprisingly I suppose, when you consider it costs them £1m per inch and they'd had a massive 12 inches over night) to the bus stop, just by the awesome Flat Iron Building.

We caught the bus right down to the Statton Island Ferry pier, through the Greenwich Village, Chinatown and the Financial District. The bus tour was really good actually and if we were to go back we would definitely do the whole thing. The Statton Island Ferry would have taken us over an hour and we only wanted to do it for the views of the Statue of Liberty and the Manhattan skyline. The people waiting at the pier were pretty grimey and we decided that we couldn't face the trip with a hangover, so we saved that for next time! Instead, we wandered through Battery Park (past all the memorials for September 11th ) and to the water edge where we got perfectly acceptable views of the statue.

From there we walked back through the Financial District, past Ground Zero (which we didn't hang around by) and down Wall Street and the Woolworth's Building which is awesome, in fact, a lot of the buildings around there are awesome when you look up. Although me and Kev were amazed at how un-tall the buildings there are, I think perhaps compared to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur they didn't seem too big. From there we went right on back through Chinatown which, despite the name, seemed to be only full of West African men selling dodgy knock off goods! It was horrible around there and the crowds of people trying to get tatty handbags that would probably fall apart by the time they got home was unbelievable! We moved on to Little Italy, which was much nicer, full of little bars and boutiques. From there it was into the East Village, which again seemed really nice, and from there, back to Murphy's Hill for a quick stop off in one of the familiar Irish Pubs.

That evening we celebrated our last night NOT in the real world, by going for dinner in the lovely Italian near the hotel. It was a night of mixed emotions. I was so excited to come home, but sad that the trip that had pretty much taken over the whole of 2009 for us, was just about over.

On our last morning, I woke up early. Kev had a long lie in to savour one of the few opportunities he would have in a while to sleep late. Once he had risen, we went out to Macy's, which was a big mistake. I don't know why anyone would chose to go shopping in New York at Christmas time – it's crazy there! There's too many people and Macy's is impossible to find your way around, so we didn't shop for long. Instead, we did what I love best, and went for some food!

With our full tummy's we went back to the hotel to pick up our bags and then walked 11 blocks to Grand Central station, which was pretty impressive. We got on the bus to the airport and waved goodbye to our final destination. I was preparing myself for something to go wrong with our flight home. Throughout the trip we had experienced no delays, nothing stolen, nothing bad at all really and I was just waiting for something to go wrong! How pessimistic of me!

We went to the check in desk, but the guy behind the counter looked confused. I began to worry, we hadn't been able to check in on-line and now I started to worry whether Trailfinders had booked a flight home at all. After about 5 minutes of his confused face and my increasing heart rate, he told me I needed to go to the ticketing desk to get my e-ticket. I didn't know what that meant, but I left Kev with the bags and went to queue in the slowest line ever at the ticketing desk. As I stood in the queue, my nerves were racking, I was nearer to home than I had ever been, yet I was still so far away! I overheard a lady at the counter asking for a ticket (who knows where to, but in my head it had to be that she was wanting a ticket for the 7.40pm to London Heathrow, surely) and the man replied that he couldn't sell her a ticket because all the flights were full – this type of talk did nothing to calm my innards! But I was fretting in vain, as I got to the counter and within seconds, the lovely saviour behind the desk wrote down two e-ticket numbers and told me not to worry, there was no charge (NO CHARGE, I should blinking well think not!).

We checked in and handed over our bags before joining the queue to security. While standing in the queue I watched News 24 and began to panic again when I saw 'travel chaos expected as severe storm forms over the Atlantic'! ......'Uh, Kevin, we're not flying over the Atlantic, are we?'

Silly question, I know, but I just wanted to be sure. Kevin just looked at me and didn't say a word. Then I saw a flash on the TV screen saying 'travel disruption on America's East coast'. Phew, I thought, and for a split second I tricked myself into thinking we were on the West. But no, we were the East coast and then the final news flash ...'delays and cancellations expected at American airports JFK......etc'. Now there was no tricking myself, I was standing in a queue at JFK airport and there was a storm gathering over the water that I needed to fly on. By this point, I was convinced that my long awaited trip home was to be scuppered by nature, dam that nature thing.

But again, my pessimism was uncalled for and while the 7pm flight to Heathrow got delayed, by some stroke of luck, our 7.40pm flight pretty much boarded on time. Secretly, I was thinking, well still nothing bad has happened, surely we're just going to crash into the sea! (of course I didn't say this to Kev, I knew the turbulence that was inevitable on this flight was going to be bad enough for him to cope with, so I kept my morbid thoughts to myself...until now).

But despite all my negativity, we touched down on British soil just an hour late, after a pretty smooth journey and an awesome selection of films on demand. Surely my bag must have been lost in transit, I was now thinking, but no...there it was on the carousel. Everything had worked out fine and there was my Mum and Dad eagerly waiting for me at the entrance.

I though we might have left all the extreme weather conditions in every other country around the world, but it seemed that Britain was experiencing it's own crazy weather. The icy roads slowed us right down and then, for the first time in my life I think, both bridges into Wales were closed. Consequently, the journey to Newport took a million hours, but we finally made it to the land of my birth (well not actually, but it's a line from my school song) by the afternoon.

It's crazy how quickly everything became normal and it already feels like we've never even been away. We'll be heading back up to Scotland after Christmas, we'll be moving into our new flat, and we'll be starting back at work and everything really will be back to normal. I think the weirdest thing to get used to though will be not spending 24 hours a day with Kev. Amazingly, despite spending pretty much every minute with each other for the last four months, we've managed to get on pretty well!

So now that it's all over, I had wanted to sign off with my own line....'You stay classy.....Planet Earth', but Kev insists that that line is cheesorama and he chose a different sign off. Strangely enough, while I'm writing this blog we're watching the film that Kev's choice of sign off comes from so it seems fateful and strangely appropriate to go with Kev's version...and besides, I've kind of hogged this blog for 4 months, so it's only fair that I let him get the last word (it's the only time he'll ever get to do that while I'm around!). So, enjoy the last few photos and thank you all so much for reading the blog, I hope you've enjoyed the whole thing as much as we've enjoyed circumnavigating the globe. And now there's only one thing left to say....so, if I don't see you...good afternoon, good evening and..........goodnight!