The thing about being retired is which day of the week it is doesn’t matter much. In fact, you know those questions they ask old folks to see if they still have mental capacity? One of them is ‘what day of the week is it’? Just as well I have a computer because otherwise, quite…
One hundred years ago, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the guns fell silent along the Western Front. It was an armistice. The peace treaties were not signed until 1919 but the fighting had ended. Exhausted Europe heaved a sigh of relief. It was dubbed ‘the war to end…
It’s Spring racing carnival in Melbourne and the Melbourne Cup will be run next Tuesday. In celebration, this week I was going to write a little article about the wonderful mares who have graced Australia’s racetracks – Makybe Diva, the only horse to win three Melbourne Cups, Black Caviar who won twenty-five races on the…
It’s all been happening here in Hervey Bay. We started the week with a Royal Visit and ended with something completely different… but I’ll get to that. Harry and Megs arrived at our little airport and it’s wasn’t until then that we learned they were going over to Fraser Island (largest sand island in the…
Whale season is drawing to its inevitable close. Since late July the Bay has been jumping with acrobatic humpbacks, a curious Right Whale and her calf, who hung around for a couple of weeks and even did some breaching, and a few Minki whales. As many as twenty-four thousand whales do the annual migration up…
The drought in Queensland appears to have broken – in our part of the world, anyway. A series of storms have swept in from inland Australia, the warm air mingling with a blast of cooler air coming up from the South, a perfect combination for storms. We were lucky. There was lots of thunder and…
The holiday travels are over for now but I can share with you some of the stories our tour director, Sergio, told us while we were travelling from one place to another on the bus. He’s in his mid-forties, rather overweight and with one of those mobile faces that can get a whole paragraph across…
Our last day in Tuscany was very full. In the morning we went to San Gimignano, a little medieval village on a hilltop. And it certainly was a charming place. The bus parked in the bus carpark with the other buses at the bottom of the hill and we walked up, through the gates, into…
The following day the tour offered an optional extra, a day-trip to the Cinque Terre – or at least, a couple of the villages. Naturally, we declined. Been there, done that, but a number of our group did go for what would be a long, tiring day – starting with a two-hour bus trip to…
Next on our city-state itinerary was Siena, perched high on a Tuscan hillside. It has several claims to fame. Like Florence, its wealth came from banking, not so much trade. However, the city is situated on the Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrimage path to Rome. It was a great place for a stopover well away…