It’s always nice to be shown around a city by a native. Irene van der Rol and I are distant cousins, having a common ancestor several generations back, but we’d met and corresponded through Facebook. The app does have its uses. I’ve re-connected with a number of people through FB – but that’s another story….
We arrived at Schiphol around eleven in the morning and caught a taxi to our hotel. Banks Mansion is a boutique hotel on the edge of the Herrengracht in central Amsterdam. The usual check in time for hotels is 2pm, which is always a pain when you’ve just been en route for well over a…
Introduction Last week I re-created a blog post that I inadvertently deleted, one part of our 2013 Australian walkabout when we drove around the continent in about a month. That meant checking the website to see if I’d mislaid the item and one thing led to another, as these things do, and I found I’d…
NOTE: No, this isn’t recent. We did this trip in 2013, but the original post for this part of the journey has disappeared. Probably the scatty old bag that writes this stuff deleted it. It’s so hard to get reliable help these days. So the post will be slotted into the journey from the Travel…
Today, 22nd June 2019, is this year’s winter solstice here in the Southern Hemisphere. Our part of the Earth started moving North, back toward the Sun at 1:54am. In the UK, Europe, and the USA and Canada, it’s midsummer. The druids are arriving at Salisbury to watch the sun rise over the heel stone at…
I found an interesting article in the news the other day, talking about what appears to determine which party we vote for. The first words in the article are: ‘Many have tried guessing who first uttered this saying: “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. If you are not a…
Here we are back at a Saturday post, still coughing a little. A few thoughts have crossed my mind since we came back from holidays but I don’t think anybody wants to talk about Australian politics, so I won’t. I’m delighted to hear that Ash Barty has made it to the French Open women’s final….
Today would be our last in New Zealand. We opened the curtains for our final look at Mt Cook before we went down to breakfast. It wasn’t there. The weather in the mountains can be fickle, indeed. On our way to the dining room we passed those members of our group who’d been hoping to…
After a very pleasant high tea at Castle Larnach we set off back towards the mountains for our penultimate stop – Mt Cook Aoraki. The weather continued to remain bright and beautiful and I’ll bet I wasn’t the only one with my fingers crossed. We drove along the coast, looking over the cold waters of…
Bit of excitement of the day was that the Platinum coach, having served us well, was sent off back to Auckland so we got to sit in our shiny new Ultimate coach. The trip from Te Anau to Dunedin took us over the Canterbury plains and New Zealand’s rich pastoral country. As with so much…