Hey there dudes and dudettes

Well it’s been a long time since we have done a travel blog so I wish I had a better story to write about, but I’m currently sitting in a freezing cold crummy motel in Invercargill which is a town at the absolute arse-end bottom of New Zealand just across the water from Antarctica.

Invercargill is apparently famous for a dude who set the land speed record in the 60’s of which there was a recent Anthony Hopkins movie about it called “The World’s Fastest Indian”…

However, I’m here because poor Avril has fractured her upper arm into about 4 pieces in a nasty snowboarding accident and Invercargill has the only orthopaedic ward in the area, so she’s currently in theatre and we are waiting to hear whether she will get a metal plate put in!

Oh man… we only flew to New Zealand 3 days ago to go snowboarding with our friends Andrew, Dom and Dee in Queenstown… and so far absolutely friggin EVERYTHING has gone wrong!!!

First our 1 hour Jetstar flight from Christchurch to Queenstown was cancelled due to fog, but instead of flying us to Dunedin and then busing us from there, they put us on a shitty 7 hour bus ride instead… Tossers…

Then the bus stops at a pitstop where I step in someone’s vomit in the toilet and then bring the smell back on the bus with me…

THEN the bus stops in some horrid diner in the middle of friggin nowhere and for some god forsaken fecked up reason I decide to eat the pale looking fish and chips that they were giving us for free… which then promptly gave me stomach pain enough to double me up for the rest of the trip…

Which THEN meant that when the bus eventually pulled up to the airport, I didn’t get off to check our luggage, which is what I normally do…

… So of course I didn’t notice that some fuckwit had taken our snowboards off the bus and then left then on the ground while our bus sped off to drop us at our hotels.

And of course the snowboards then went missing for 2 days and no one knew where they were because the dumbarsed feckin tossers who found them handed them into a rental car company instead of Jetstar despite all the luggage labels and contact details on the case… and of course the rental car company didn’t tell anyone that they had them!!!!!

So eventually when we did find them, we managed to only have one nice day of snowboarding until on the very last run Avril falls on her left arm and breaks her upper arm humerus bone!!!

…FUCK!!!!!

Now for all you non-medical people, humerus fractures are NOT very humourous and are definitely very painful, but can often be treated conservatively with a sling… However, when the first aid people picked her off the slopes, they noticed that her shoulder was quite deformed and that she had a very unusual dimple in the front of her shoulder like a bit of flesh was caught in the fracture.

Well Queenstown, despite being a major snowsports area, doesn’t have an ortho department or a CT so she needed to be transferred to Invercargill which is 2.5 hours away on a windy road… And OF COURSE there wasn’t enough room in the ambulance as there were 3 other people needing to be transferred, so we had to drive her ourselves… but because she wasn’t in the ambulance they only gave her very scant pain relief which was really fucked!

And then despite how much pain she was in, we had to wait in a public waiting room for 3 hours to be seen… with some SERIOUSLY festy mong looking people… which was SHIT, but I think we probably couldn’t complain since apparently the hospital in the past had to put patients into rented buses in the carpark when they were overfilled!!!

Anyways, after the orthopaedic reg had finished taking pictures of Avril’s VERY unusual looking arm with his I-phone he worked out that it was likely that her pectoralis muscle was caught in the fracture and hence why she is in theatre right now getting her fracture pulled apart to free up her muscle.

So basically this is turning out to be a SH’IT holiday!!! …NOT very choice BRO!!!

I’ll email again when I know more.

Cheers
Pissed Off - Off Piste Ced

PS. OK we have just heard that when they gave Avril the anaesthetic apparently her muscle must have relaxed and it’s popped out of the fracture on it’s own… so she doesn’t need any surgery… YAY!!!

PPS. I’ve now attached photos of Avril’s deformed shoulder and really cool CT and xray image… You can see on the photo of her arm how the skin is tethered into the fracture and on the CT you can see the sharp bit of bone that caught the muscle as well… YEE-OUCH!!! She’s doing OK now though, and the pain is much better now that the muscle is free.

PPS. OK that’s a really p.issed off negative blog that I just wrote, so to cheer you all up, here is a link to a music dance clip that Avril and I did a few weeks ago for our friend Dom’s 40th vampire birthday
party.
It’s one of the most amazingly choreographed pieces of dance that you will
ever see.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQH2G-8COJM

PPPS Thanks to Alok my orthopaedic friend for all the phone advice… It really was a very stressful time the last couple of days and it’s times like this I am so appreciative to belong to the medical fraternity. And also
thanks to Dee for driving us around and doing so much organising while I was sitting at the hospital with Avril and couldn’t leave. Thanks guys… You ROCK!!!

Hey guys

Today Brisbane had the worst storms in 100 years and the worst flooding since 1974.

Anyway, I bragged last year about our place being spared by a flood but we’ve just gone underwater so I jinxed myself.

I got home at 3.30pm after a street near work got flooded. By 5pm we were underwater.

Avril had just built a new glass studio downstairs so it is especially heartbreaking since we had just finished it.

Thanks to Andrew Goode and Dom who brought a heap of guys from her work, we were able to get most valuables upstairs. Thanks heaps guys… we owe you. You guys ROCK!!!!

However there is more flooding expected in the next 48 hours so we are going to have a nervous nights sleep tonight since high tide is at 6am tomorrow.

Power and internet are back on so we have uploaded some photos at this link which go in chronological order.

Cheers
Ced & Avril

PS Wish us luck

Hey there dudes and dudettes

So a few years ago when we were doing renovations, we decided to build some retaining walls and raise up our land, which I remember at the time was VERY expensive and we had ummmed and ahhhhed about whether it was worth it or not…

Well… HOLY CRAP and FRIGGIN HELL… thank friggin god we did, since this whole last week Brisbane has been hit by the worst storms on record since 1974!!!

Man… Basically, one entire suburb was destroyed and there has been a lot of flooding around the city… And of course since we have parkland and a creek out the back of our place, we’ve been very nervous about flooding since our place last flooded in 1993.

Anyhows check out these photos of the flooding at our house.

http://www.cedavril.com/photos/#album=brisbane-storms-2008

The first 2 photos are what our back yard normally looks like, and the rest are from the flood.

You’ll see that basically our little island is surrounded by flood waters and ALL of our neighbours got flooded except us.

Man… higher topography ROCKS!!!

Anyways, for those of you who haven’t seen this clip, this youtube link has been going around the web and is a great bit of footage from inside the storm showing how severe it was. The real bit of storm happens about half way into the clip.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=skrnDGl1LxQ

Anyhows, there are more storms due tonight so we’re off to batten down the hatches. Hopefully we haven’t jinxed ourselves by sending out this blog… but we’ll let you know if we do get flooded tonight.

Floody Hell
Ced & Avril

Gruss Gott to all you snow bunnies and wacko spackos

Well, we are currently in Innsbruck, Austria which is the famous winter Olympics town in the Austrian Tyrolean Alps, and yesterday in the ski village of Kuttai, I had one of the most spastic, lamearse, limb threatening snowboarding accidents EVER!!!

Now I had always imagined that my first ever limb threatening snowboard accident would be this TOTALLY AWESOME snowboard jump off a 200m cliff over 7 helicopters… while dodging KGB hitmen on snowmobiles AND outrunning an avalanche!!!

However, all my romantic dreams of having an amazing snowboard stack were COMPLETELY trashed when… Holy cow… I …er… um… simply fell 3m off a chairlift… flat on my face!!!

….FECK!!!!!!!!

Now for those of you who have never snowboarded, basically you get on a chairlift with your left foot strapped in on the front binder of the board, while your right back foot just dangles free.

Then as you are approaching the get off area, you need to angle your body sideways to get the board pointing straight ahead with your left foot forward and your right butt sitting on the chair so you can simply slide off the chair when you arrive… and of course you need to hold onto something so that you don’t topple off.

Now as it has been 2 years since I last snowboarded I thought I would get myself ready well before the get off point so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself and fall over…like I normally do…

However, about 15 meters from the get off area, I had turned my body to the side and was resting my right buttock onto the seat with my left leg dangling down and I reached back to support myself on the backrest of the chair so I wouldn’t topple off… BUT the friggin backrest flipped forward and I toppled off the FUCKING chair!!!

What the FUCK!!! …Fekkin, fecked up fecking chairlift with feckin flip down feckin backrest!!! What type of fecked up feckin fekker KUNST designs a feckin chair with a flip down feckin backrest???!!! AAAAAARGH!!!!

Now as most of you know, I live and draw my life like a cartoon character… but FECK me!!! This is the first friggin time that I’ve been like Wile E Coyote!!!

HOLY COW!!! I TOTALLY fell face first with my hands near my ears and my legs spread like a frog due to the weight of the board… And to give credit to old Warner Bros cartoonists… when you see Wile E Coyote fall off a cliff and go splat like a frog… well that’s EXACTLY how you friggin fall!!!

Well, the chairlift operator must have also been stunned as he stood up and just stared incredulously… and he actually hesitated before turning off the lift and then trudging down the hill to help me up. He obviously had a moment where he thought he was on candid camera or something, since I’m sure he couldn’t believe what kind of lamearse tosser simply FALLS off a chairlift!!!!

And of course my mate Greco who was watching from below and saw the whole thing, did what all good mates who are concerned for their friend’s welfare do… He LAUGHED his friggin head off… and said it looked like I deliberately dived off the chairlift, so it was one of the funniest things he had ever seen… fekkin fekker!!!

Anyways, the snow was surprisingly soft and I was lucky that I didn’t land on my head and crack my neck… so I got away with no major injuries…

But the funny thing was, that just before I got on the chairlift, there was a school group of about 20 five year old kids and only 2 teachers, so they were asking responsible adults to help chaperone a kid up on the chairlift… presumably so that they could have an adult make sure that the kids didn’t fall off…

Well, they asked me as well, and maybe it was the fact that I didn’t speak German, or maybe it was the fact that I had “This lamearse fekkin tosser is NOT a responsible adult, and is so spacko that he will probably fall off” tattooed across my forehead… but the teacher then said not to worry about taking a kid with me… Which as you can imagine is VERY fortunate… ALTHOUGH it would have been PISS funny to see the teachers’ face if I did fall off with a kid as well!!!

Anyways, we’ve been giggling ourselves for days over this, with only a brief interlude when Greco accidentally tripped up a girl on the bus with his toboggan harness… and she fell flat on her face…

But to our credit, we waited until she got off the bus before we laughed our heads off, much to the disgust of all the other travellers… um… But she did kind of deserve it though as she had thrown a snowball at us earlier in the day… man… we are so badarse!!!

Well, all in all, the sun was out and the snowboarding was awesome and I did go onto have some truly impressive stacks including a high speed toboggan accident that we captured on film, where I ran into a huge snowman that I didn’t realise had turned to ice so it was like hitting a brick wall… So needless to say, I am now sitting here nursing a sprained shoulder.

Anyhows, tomorrow we are off to M-M-M-My Verona in Italy which is the home of Romeo and Juliet, and then we’ll meet up with Avril and heading to Switzerland before going home on the weekend.

Tschuss and Auf Weidersehen
Spacko lamearsed Kunst Ced

PS. If you are bored, our Germany photos of Dresden, Berlin and Bavaria are at this link
And some truly gnarly snowboarding pics in the Austrian Alps are at this link

…2 John’s 1 Cup…

Gruss Gott to all you movers, groovers and other furry animals

Well I am currently in sitting in a crappy hotel in Munich in a cranky pants mood since today we rented a car to drive through the Bavarian Alps to go up to Zugspitze the highest mountain in Germany… but all we saw for 8 hours was the inside of a FRIGGIN cloud!!! In fact, we were driving through the Alps for most of the time and didn’t even know it since the visibility was so fecking s’hitty… FECK!!!

And the thing that p’isses me off the most, is that it’s been like this for the last 3 weeks that we have been in Europe… and doesn’t look like it will clear anytime soon!!! …AAAAAAARGH!!! F’ECKIN European weather…!!!

Anyways, I’ve been on an Eastern European road trip for the last week and a bit, with 2 mates JC and Greco, and we’ve been travelling from Poland to Berlin via Slovakia, Budapest, Dresden and Prague… And honestly, the weather has been so friggin AWFUL, that it has seriously ruined what could have been a great holiday!!!

Now as most of you know, one of my many superpowers is to whinge and complain like a cranky old man, and yet be as immature as a 12 year old kid… But fortunately I have been travelling with 2 mates who totally put me to shame…

JC was probably born a cranky old man, or bitten by a radioactive cranky old man or some s’hit like that… and hence he has whinging superpowers by far greater than my own… And then there is Greco who has the amazing superpower to come up with immature toilet humour in any given situation but due to having congenital cranky bowel syndrome, every joke comes out as a scratch and sniff variety…

So even though the weather has been sh’ite we’ve basically b’itched, moaned, complained, p’erved, giggled and f’arted our way across Eastern Europe… which actually has been fun!!! In fact I’ve never had so much fun whinging and complaining… which is why instead of writing a nice travel blog, I’m totally going to have a moan!

Now firstly Budapest was pretty disappointing since I found the city to be like a cross between Prague and Vienna but even grottier… And even worse was that the whole place had shut down on the Easter weekend, so the place was just bleak… Feckin Easter holidays…

And not only that, we were looking forward to checking out some of the attractive Hungarians that we had been hearing about, but instead, the whole place was filled with English lager louts and morbidly obese english families, no doubt flown in by Ryanair direct from FATWICK Airport… Feckin budget airlines…

However, as bleak as Budapest was, it was nowhere near as bad as Berlin… Berlin really s’ucked!!!

Now we spent a whole week in Berlin during the World Cup, and back then it was such a lively and funky place… so we were completely stunned to arrive during a cold wet weekend when everything was shut down, the whole mood was depressing and the place seemed to be overrun with mutants and morlocks…

Seriously… I have never seen so many INBRED people in such a concentrated area in my entire life…

Man… it was like we’d entered a different dimension or zapped into a HG Wells novel, since all the normal people had disappeared and all the people that we came across were SERIOUSLY weird, COMPLETELY psycho-chicken, or just friggin UGLY!!! …which was really shocking, especially compared to all the hot slavic women that we had been seeing in Poland and Prague…

In fact looking at all the weirdarsed people with their vicious dogs hanging around the Checkpoint Charlie underground, it was like… if you have more than 4 teeth, then you are a smoking hot muffin… And when you want to dress up, you wear your saggy black track suit pants with the 3 stripes down the side instead of 2… For fuchs sake!!! If I wanted to see that, I would stayed home in Brisbane…

Not only that, the place seemed so miserable and bleak, that the people here didn’t just need a happy pill… They needed a fecking big happy enema… Feck it… actually I’ll take the happy enema instead…

And then sure as s’hit, just as we were leaving on the Monday morning… all the normal and funky people came out again, like they’d been hiding in a bunker all weekend…

Feckin Berliners… You’d think with one of the most prominent capital cities in the world, they would open it up on weekends… Oh man… and we were so looking forward to our funky Berlin ch’ick perve too…

Anyhows, Dresden thankfully was cool as we actually had a White Easter since it snowed really hard… although it was the same weather storm that caused a zillion car pile up in Austria so driving through a blizzard on the autobahn wasn’t fun at all… Feckin snowstorms…

And Prague was fun as always, but mainly because it was my second time there so instead of checking out the tourist sights, I just spend 2 days Czeching out all the lovely Czech girls… feckin Avril for taking the zoom lens to Venice…

But now here we are in Munich where not only did we spend 6 and a half hours next to screaming kids on the train to get here, but it’s been p’issing rain the last couple of days so tonight I think I am going to need some p’rozac with my weisbier at the Hoffbrauhaus… feckin Munich…

Anyways tomorrow we are off to catch the last of the Spring snow in Innsbruck, Austria for a few days of snowboarding in the Alps…

…However, if my luck continues, chances are I’ll be carving up gravel and ice with my face, OR I’ll probably break 3 of my legs AND fracture both my armpits… feckin feckety feck…

Oh well… as long as I keep 5 of my teeth, then at least I’ll be a smoking hot muffin in Berlin…

Tschuss
Ausfarht-ing Kunst Ced (They are actually German words not swear words)

PS If you are bored, some bleak Hungarian pics are at this link
And some arty farty pics of Prague are at this link

Dzien Dobry and Wisowy Swiat (happy easter) to all you Polish sausages and Sour Krauts

Well, as a completely rude shock to the system after bumming around stinking hot Africa last week, I am currently on a Eastern European road trip with 2 mates John Greco and John Cebula, and freezing my nads off in a ski lodge in the Tatra mountains above Zakopane in Southern Poland, since Avril left on a plane to Venice a couple of days ago…

Now it is certainly beautiful outside as we have hit an unprecedented patch of snowy weather that doesn’t normally occur this late in the season… but the fact that we are 3 guys who don’t ski, staying in a snowy mountain ski lodge with the only food in the place being frozen bananas and Colgate toothpaste… Well that’s just a little bit TOO Brokeback Mountain for me!!!

And the fact that very soon after getting lost for 2 hours while trying to drive a Ford Mondeo up the ski slopes, the conversation turned to whether you can survive in the snow by eating your own s’emen… probably suggests that if you don’t want to read about men behaving badly… you should probably stop reading this blog NOW!!!

Now as most of you guys know, I usually try and write a travel blog in every country that we go to… But Europe can be so boring to write about, that unless we go somewhere really remote, do something really stupid, or get some good pooo and b’um jokes going, it is really hard to write something funny or interesting unless a country has something outstanding to write about.

But as far as trying to find something outstanding, cool or interesting to write about Poland, I’ve tried to write this blog a zillion times without sounding crass, s’exist or chauvanistic, but it always comes down to one thing… Poland has STUNNINGLY hot women!

Man, we have just spent the last 4 days in Wroclaw which is a university town and seriously, I’d love to write about how amazingly modern Poland is for an ex-communist country, or how brightly coloured and optimistic the main plaza is compared to the boring old plazas in other European cities… but really, the most head turning thing here is how stylish and attractive the women are.

In fact, just to prove that it is not just a fluke or holiday horn, our mate Greco, who is single by the way, decided to SCIENTIFICALLY prove that Poland has a lot of hot women by sacrificing a good part of his day that he could have spent looking at churches… and INSTEAD he stood on the corner of a shopping mall and counted that in any given radius, an attractive woman walks by on average EVERY 7 seconds!!!

Holy cow!!! Now I of course had nothing to do with his childish behaviour and berated him for being so shallow and chauvanstic, preferring instead to help my darling dearest Avril shop for expensive Italian label jackets (vomit)…

…but after spending an hour helping Avril try on clothes and worrying that Greco would be bored, I wandered out to find him happily sitting outside a lingerie shop and I realised then, that far from being childish… this is TRULY a man who has dedicated his life to his science!!!

But seriously, Avril has always claimed that out of all the countries that we have been to, that Colombia has the hottest guys in the world, but I have always been reluctant to make a call as to which country has the hottest women…

However, now after being to Poland, I feel pretty confident saying that Polish girls are definitely the hottest that I have come across so far, especially since they are attractive in a stylish way as opposed to just looking tarty… Man… communism ROCKS for keeping the gene pool clean!!!

The only thing that was a bit weird though was that despite all the girls looking like supermodels, the Polish guys would have to be the one of the MOST unattractive group of guys that we have ever seen… And it would totally do our head in when an absolute stunner walked by dressed in Italian fashion and FM boots… but with a pugfaced boyfriend who looked like he was a Russian henchman from a bad James Bond movie… Oh man… I don’t know whether I should feel happy or depressed about that…???

Anyways… um… I’m sure there is some other good things to write about Poland, but since the weather has been absolutely crap, we really haven’t done a lot other than shopping and hanging out playing Gran Turismo in our mate John’s funky art nouveau penthouse…

But then again, to quote our friend John Cebula who has been living here for the last few months, Poland could be the worst place in the world, but when you are surrounded by attractive women, you just feel happy… Well he didn’t actually say those words exactly… but I really can’t print what he said…

Anyhows, tomorrow after we headcount all the bananas and make sure that all o’rifices are intact, we’ll be leaving our Brokeback mountain lodge and heading through Slovakia to Budapest.

Doby Zena
Cedski

PS. If you are bored our Poland pics are here at this link, but sadly there are no pics of Polish girls… darn Avril for taking the zoom lens to Venice with her!!!

PPS No hot polish chicks were harmed in the making of this blog