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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Friday 20 May 2022 Mid-afternoon we drove to Montpellier and caught a flight to Amsterdam, trading the clear blue skies of southern France for the clagged in skies of central Europe. We are always impressed flying into Amsterdam by its neatness; from the air it looks like all the streets and buildings have been meticulously […]