We attended the fun bull-fighting at Lunel last weekend, after being given tickets by Hadrien who owns the Le Cartel Restaurant at Vauvert and also runs the bull fighting. We popped along for a rather entertaining couple of hours. At this event no bulls die and the blokes in the ring with the bull are […]
A weekend in Toulouse: 5-7 Nov 2022
Monday 31 October 2022 Having arrived back from Washington DC in the US yesterday, and with Tuesday being a holiday and Sylvia having today off, we decided to revisit Toulouse. We set off early for the 250km drive to Toulouse following the toll roads for the 3+ hour journey. Stopping at the old town fortress […]
Eastern Europe Part 3
Monday 17 October 2022 There was a clear blue sky as I headed out of Tirana, with the misty haze in the distance. There were some nice buildings along the way, plus what looked like a large gas processing plant up on the hill. Albania has gas and oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. The […]
Exploring Eastern Europe Part Two
Monday 10 October 2022 – Vienna Rising early, I headed to the rather basic gym and then a rather good breakfast. I caught the local tram the seven or so kms into town and opted for a coffee while I waited for the Information centre to open. There I was able to purchase a day […]
Exploring eastern Europe. Part One.
Saturday 1 October 2022 Two years ago my friend Steve and I were supposed to head to Vienna, then through Slovakia, Ukraine, Moldova and a few other countries in that area, then along came Covid and put paid to that idea. With what’s going on in Ukraine just now, one wonders what will happen over […]
Another Bangkok stop September 2022
Saturday 24 September 2022 Late evening I headed to the Auckland Airport to catch the Air NZ flight to Hong Kong. The airport, unlike others in the world, is still eerily quiet with many shops still closed. Only a few flights a day are arriving and leaving Auckland compared with the pre Covid days. As […]
A weekend in the Dordogne: More on the story of Josephine Baker…singer, dancer, spy
Saturday 23 July 2022 Saturday afternoon we embarked on a journey to Chateau des Milandes, the chateau Josephine Baker (see our Morocco blog) had rented prior to the war from 1937 (and later purchased in 1947). She unfortunately lost it towards the end of her life, in 1968 after going broke. Situated in the Dordogne […]
A Taste of Morocco… July 2022
Wednesday 13 July Another trip to the Marseilles airport – we boarded a Royal Air Maroc flight to Casablanca. The idea of visiting Morocco came about from a book I listed to recently called “the Flame of the Resistance’, about a woman from the southern states of the US, who went to New York to […]
Southeast Asia – June 2022
As I sit down to start writing this in a hotel room in Jakarta, the year is not quite half over and already I have spent nearly 200 hours on aeroplanes and Sylvia probably even more. As yet I have been lucky not to catch Covid, well not that I have noticed anyway. Sylvia caught […]
A Weekend in Ireland
Saturday 4 June 2022 We had managed to get a Ryan Air flight out of the local Garons Airport, which is about 3kms to the southeast of us. It also seems to be a good spot to keep a few redundant aircraft, both military and civilian. We took off and climbed out to the east […]