Sea cruising might not yet be allowed due to the fear of Covid but land cruising is still available. I never get tired of driving around the Australian countryside – an open road with little traffic and a sunburned country, what more could we want? In our latest ‘land cruise’ we managed to ‘cruise’ 1,800 […]

The old and the new – Golden Princess can be seen with a sailing ship along side. We berthed close to the town, which allowed for a short walk to many places of interest. A touch of yesteryear where ever we looked. Many of the streets and homes reminded me of New Zealand, quiet and […]

Once again, we anchored and the ship’s boats ferried people ashore. We didn’t have to climb down the ladder, which is shown in the photograph. At the bottom of the ladder you can see the main exit / entry port. Each time we re-boarded we had to go through security screening i.e  x-raying of bags, and each […]

While in Georgetown, Penang, we decided to visit an unusual place. I like to hang around a place. Even the dinning room looked a little odd. The kitchen was clean, but the fridge door kept opening when ever someone leaned on the fridge. The piano could have done with a tune up. The strange environment […]

Breakfast was in the hotel, after which, we were ferried by private Emirate Airline car to the airport, for the final leg of our journey to Rome. Departure area in Dubai Airport – very clean and impressive. We passed through emigration & security & boarded a train for the short ride to the satellite area. […]

Writing historical fiction is time consuming to say the least. Each scene that surrounds a character must be true for the reader, and the easiest way to make this scene true, is research and more research. You cannot afford to be wrong, unless of course you do it deliberately, because you are writing an ‘alternate […]

I’ve always loved North & Mid Wales, perhaps because my mother was Welsh and only when the family moved from Caernarvon (Carnarfon to be PC) to Birkenhead, when she was thirteen, did she start to learn English. When my mother spoke of the move she would comment that she moved to England, which sounded strange to me as […]

Sunrise over New Caledonia For a time I was in a business partnership with a Frenchman, who lived in Tahiti and later moved to New Caledonia before finally moving to Sydney. I can remember him saying that for a Frenchman working for the French government and being posted to one of the French colonies in […]

Approaching Napier. NAPIER – So named after Sir Charles Napier 1782 to 1853. The Hawks Bay earthquake of 1931 flattened Napier, and killed 161 people and injured thousands. The local newspaper at the time wrote that the town had been wiped off the map. I took a photograph and this photograph, which was on a large […]

Those of us who were brought up in the ’40’s and 50’s in the UK, always looked forward to Duck Apple night, which was well before Dad hired a TV. Duck Apple was a simple game on the last night of October. We had to try and grab an apple with our teeth. We were […]

22nd February 1969 – it was cold wet day in Liverpool, UK. What to do to celebrate fifty years of happy marriage? We like cruising so how about a cruise around Cape Horn at the bottom of the world? So be it . . . . . Our plan was to fly to Santiago in […]

I wrote three months ago about out recent visit to Dubai, with air conditioned bus stops, very clean railways station and the largest shopping centre in the world. The above photograph shows Dubai Creek flowing sluggishly towards the Persian Gulf in 1964 – I never dreamt that I would return as a tourist fifty two years […]

BOAC  I joined BOAC in 1969 and in 1971 an Act of Parliament merged BOAC with BEA to take affect from 31 March 1974, which would create British Airways. The UK had joined the Common Market, as it was called then, in January 1973, so the merger of the two government-controlled airlines made sense. BOAC […]

The photo was taken from our balcony as we approached Shimizu in Japan, we were very fortunate that it was a clear day. We decided not to do any excursions, because we only wanted to see Mt Fuji and from reading Trip Advisor and Cruise Critic web sites, I knew that if we couldn’t see it […]