Derry's review;The best time I had was when I went horse riding in Ecuador. The horse I rode was called Lucas. He was a brown horse and he was led by a man called Wilson. On Lucas I walked I trotted and I even cantered. The place I really liked was the Galapagos Islands. My best buddy was called Soledad. We went on a ship called the Galapagos Legend. And there was another place I went to that was a good place. It was in Costa Rica and the place that we stayed in ...

Suzanne's review We set off with 3 bags and 3 sceptical children and returned 3 months later with a load more bags and hopefully a much better understanding of what it takes to get along with each other, with other travellers and with people who live in the countries we visited and having seen an inordinate amount of wildlife. The Galapagos was our first destination (after the shock of armed guards in every restaurant in Quito) and that was an amazing boat trip...

Day 20 August 8th Well it had finally arrived, the last day of our big adventure. We met the day with a mixed bag of feelings. Part 'let's get packed and organised', part sad, part happy (that part was mostly Derry!). Unfortunately the start was less momentous than desired, being woken by the strains of the trash lorries outside emptying holidaymakers' rubbish...including ours which we'd dumped late last night; several cardboard boxes and spare packaging so the...

Day 18 weds 6th This was our last day in Santa Barbara, and there was definitely the feeling of 'the last few days' as we began to organise ourselves for the end of the trip and the last packing before the big one! Naturally, after all this shopping, the last thing we needed to do was to go buy stuff...OK that was the theory but there were just one or two things we'd spotted along the way and decided to pop out to get! What a mistake that was! We'd left Sien...

Day 15 Sunday 3rd Leaving the duncans was always going to be tough. After all, we've had free admission to a pool all week! We had a fairy normal morning, which meant we didn't really get packing and moving on cleaning the room up until after 9. So the 11 am target departure was never really going to happen, was it? It seemed to take an age - and rightly so, we'd spread all over the house and unlike staying with UK friends, the chances of getting our stuff back...