Back when we used to be working people we used to get up before six in the morning and get on the road to Melbourne before seven, and we’d get home again by about seven in the evening. That meant we had the weekend to Get Things Done. You know – washing, ironing, house-cleaning and…
Since I don’t live under a rock I have heard all about sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s epic voyage across the ocean to speak to the UN about the inaction on climate change. And, of course, the student (and others) ‘strike’ across the world. In Australia, the news was full of the marches in the cities. The…
When I went to university I studied history. One of the reasons was my own family history – that is, what my family endured during World War II in Amsterdam. It was all relatively fresh back then. My four sisters were all born before the war and the older of my two brothers was born…
I suppose in everyone’s life there are indelible moments, times you don’t want to forget, others you couldn’t forget if you tried, and others that mark monumental events in time. For me, one such was the Moon landing in 1969. Another was the attack of the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. Last…
For those of us in the southern hemisphere, spring is either around the corner or happening now. It’s not a huge event for us. The only deciduous trees we have are frangipanis and yes, the leaf buds at the ends of the branches are starting to swell. The very coldest (for us) winter nights are…
It’s whale season in the Bay, that time of year when humpback whales make their annual migration up both sides of the Australian continent to give birth to their young in the warm waters of the tropics before heading back down south to Antarctica for the summer. Many whales on the East Coast run stop…
After a very nice breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant we were ready to catch the shuttle bus into the San Francisco city centre. But it turned out to be a shuttle for a lot of hotels in the area, not just the Marriot. The driver came into the foyer and told us the bus was…
After our stay in Washington we would be flying across America to San Francisco on the west coast. I’m not sure why we weren’t on a direct flight, but we weren’t. We would be flying to Detroit, then on to SFO on Delta, which Pete thought was the better of the US airlines. In fact,…
Today we visited the Natural History Museum, with its foyer dominated by an elephant. Like its counterpart in New York, the way the exhibits are displayed is wonderful, showing creatures’ skeletons in the setting where they once lived before the climate changed. There was a minerology section and we saw the famous Hope diamond Later…
On our first full day in Washigton we made a beeline for my bucket list item, the National Air and Space Museum. Ah me – spaceships, planets, nebulae, and aeroplanes. This museum has a comprehensive history of space travel and aviation. Some of the bigger pieces (eg Enola Gay, the B-29 bomber which dropped the…