June 2026 Within minutes of cycling from our small apartment in Longueau, a small town on the outskirts of Amiens, we arrive at a causeway that crosses a lily-strewn expanse of water: the Somme. The word conjures up images of mud, trenches and death; today’s reality is a peaceful waterway, willows bending over it, small […]
Belgium and Beyond
I really can’t say why I haven’t posted anything here in a while. If you know me personally, or have read my previous post, you’ll know I’m not home and am on an extended break in Europe. We did this a few years ago and I was pretty faithful with blogging as we travelled but […]
Old and Good Times
Our few weeks in England are a mix of family, history and bluebell hunting – over two decades have passed since I last saw the Spring spectacle of masses of small flowers growing together and forming a literal carpet of vivid blue in woodland shade. This is the first time we’ve been back at the […]
A Local Tourist
Returning as a tourist to a place you once lived can be interesting. We did it in Wellington recently, staying in Newtown, an area we’d driven through regularly but never spent much time in. On a wander around one fine morning I looked across the main street and saw, above the awning over standard restaurant/shop […]
Arrival
Apart from security becoming ever tighter, nothing much changes in international travel. Airports will always mean queues and a miasma of mixed perfumes as you choke your way through duty-free, and security and immigration officials who never smile. One surprising change at Heathrow though – we didn’t have to perform the manage-the-multiple-bag dance on arrival. […]
Water, Water, Everywhere…
Our little corner of the world doesn’t make international news much, and it’s usually bad news that travels – I learned of the Christchurch earthquake because I was listening to BBC radio and heard it on their news. Often the only way we know we’ve made it on a global scale is when our phones […]
Bring Me Sunshine
A few weekends ago Neil and I drove over Gentle Annie for a weekend in Hawkes Bay. I’ve no idea why the road between Taihape (about forty minutes from Ohakune) and Napier is so named as it’s anything but gentle, taking you up over one of New Zealand’s many hill ranges and down the other […]
Two Into One: Reprise
Further to my recent post I’m happy to report that all boxes that we transported from Wellington have been opened. The process was quite straightforward: open a box, decide what we want to keep, find its partner in a cupboard/drawer and replace this with the Wellington version. The idea is sound; the practice…well, let’s just […]
Two Into One?
In an era when many people struggle to buy their own home I confess to some guilt that our current first-world problem is wondering how the hell to fit the contents of two homes into the single one we now have. Let’s be honest, it’s a privileged first world problem – words I’ve uttered to […]
Farewell Wellington
Over two decades ago we moved across the world and settled in New Zealand. More specifically, we settled in Wellington, the nation’s capital. We’d already spent a week in Auckland, wondering a lot of that time what the hell we’d done, was it a huge mistake, were we going to have to retrace our steps […]
