Rachel's Next Adventure

The August box finally arrived while I was in London, so here it is. A little late but super cute! There are 12 days left to order this box If you use this link you'll get $5 your first box!

After work on Saturday I rushed down to the seafront with my fiancé where we managed to catch the end of the parade of sail and the Summer Streets Festival.

The tall ships races event started in Sunderland on Tuesday, and on Wednesday they had a firework display - just after the World Cup match ended - perfect timing, eh?. I recorded the fireworks so feel free to check out the video below. They'll have another firework display tonight at 9:30.

With the summer holiday season finally here the shops are all filled with cute, practical and affordable clothing, accessories and other items you may need on your upcoming holiday - or even just want for general day to day use! So I thought I would take this opportunity to show you all some of the things i've picked up over the last couple of months ready for our upcoming Japan trip, and, not gonna lie, this is pretty much all from Primark. [excuse the creases, these tshirts are living in a Primark bag until i'm ready to pack!] Mickey t-shirt £8 My first purchase for the summer season, I just love the design. Stitch t-shirt (lost price! £8?) I bought this because it was really big and baggy and in the summer heat in Japan it'll be ideal, but I'm not too sure, when I wear it it looks/feels like a hospital gown. Stitch t-shirt £8 It's a simple design and nice and baggy so it should be comfortable in the su

I'm really starting to feel super unorganised with this trip now, we go in less than 60 days and we still haven't fully finalised our plans or even bought our JR Rail passes yet! Although, to be fair the JR Passes are only valid for three months so we'll probably buy them in the next week or so now that we'll arrive within the validity period. We've finally booked all* of our hotels - we're staying at the Sakura Hotel in Ikebukuro, Disney's Ambassador Hotel, MyStays Maihama, Granvia Hiroshima, Granvia Osaka, Granvia Kyoto and the Hotel Sunny. * I kind of want to add an extra night at Disney, just so we don't have to force onto a commuter train with luggage early in the morning! Currently looking at Disney Celebration, MyStays Maihama and Oriental Tokyo Bay hotels. We have our pocket wifi all booked, it'll be waiting for us at our hotel when we arrive, as always we've booked ours with Global Advanced Communications .

June was a fairly slow month, much like May , as we booked our plasterer back then but he wasn't available until July for such a big job. So, what did we get done in June? Well, not a huge amount to be honest... Electrical: We're actually still waiting on our electrician to get back to us with internal quotes and to give us a quote from his friend that can install our security lights! Because of this delay we've called the plasterer and pushed back the work until September. Fingers crossed we can get the electrical bits done in time! Decluttering: We listed over 50 things on eBay in the first week of June alone. Went through the kitchen cupboards and got rid of some of the stuff we don't need or that went out of date (i'm a cake mix hoarder, can't help it! but our oven doesn't seem to be heating up properly at the minute so it's probably wise to stop buying them for now!). We moved more stuff into the loft that