Our two days in Venice, I'm happy to report were very nice, we had plenty of sun and some fun days trying to find our way round the maze of streets. Expensive but friendly and with good food, Venice was pretty much as I expected it to be.

In contrast, I had no idea what to expect of Zagreb, but what I definitely didn't expect was two days of constant rain! The first day was also a public holiday which unfortunately meant that nothing was open. On the up side, I did find out that I graduated from university with a first class honours degree.

Tomorrow we're off to Budapest in Hungary so hopefully I'll have more news there.

So just as I say that everything is fine and back on track, the French train unions decided to go on strike and all trains in and out of France are stopped, conveniently on the day that we`re due to head from Barcelona to Beziers. Luckily, we were told that we could take a Spanish regional train to Figueres and from there we could take a coach to Beziers.

So, onto the train we jumped and arrived in Figueres two hours later to find that there wasn`t and never would be a coach to Beziers. Luckily a nice man, who happened to be hanging around the station and helping anyone who looked a little lost, pointed us in the direction of a good hostel. We therefore ended up spending two days in Figueres, which incidently turns out to be the birth place of Salvador Dahli.

By the second day the train strike was over meaning that we could resume our trip as planned. We therefore took a train to Nice--which incidently called at Beziers--and we`ve spent the last couple of days enjoying the pebble beaches and French night life of Nice. Tomorrow we`re off to Venice so hopefully there`ll be nothing but good reports from now on!

So things have picked up a little since the unfortunate evnet in Madrid. Yesterday saw us spending the day travelling around seeing sites such as the Sagrada Familia temple and some other Gaudi buildings. We also got to watch some pretty spectacular dancing fountains and to chat with a very nice portuguese man who owns a spanish restauraunt in Hull.

The hostel here is ver nice with friendly staff, free breakfast and free Internet access. I feel that, being a computer geek, I have to mention here that I'm very happy that the computers in the hostel all run Linux! Unfortunately, they all use the GNOME desktop, but it's +1 for software freedom even if we don't have the pleasure of using KDE.

We're heading off to Beziers in the south of France soon where we have 2 nights before heading on to Nice. I can't say if I'll be able to post from there since it depends on Internet access but I'll try.

Here's to the journey!