Anth Steph

Well, the show's over... The movers have been and gone, our life is in boxes once more, and we're en route back to Sydney. And after 44 blogs, totaling 41,245 words, 1075 photos and 11,408 viewings, this is the last one. There are so many things we'll miss about Prague that we've forced ourselves to make a 32-point list of the things that annoyed us there, so we can reference back to it if we feel sad in Sydney! (Yes Tesco ladies, you are most definitely on it.) We've such incredible friends and memories but one deserves a special mention: a little girl who celebrated her first birthday last week. Happy Birthday Dahlia...out of all these good things in Prague, you're the best :) But this is a travelblog, so Prague aside, here are the highlights ... read more

In 1984 I started Kindergarten, the Soviets boycotted the Olympics and Big Brother was watching (but not in the Diary Room or the communal showers). It was also the last time central Europe had such a cold winter. The snow started mid December, conveniently disappeared for Our Scottish Christmas in France and returned shortly after. The mercury has rarely popped over zero until this last week, meaning the snow mounds had become ice mounds on every curb and we faced a perilous climb over them to get into the car! There have been a few things that have helped us get over the freeze, not least of which is the bragging rights we feel we've earned from surviving such a winter! Although it was easier for some...Just as the frost set in, the girls set off ... read more

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is totally over the top about Christmas - but that makes it a great place to visit at Christmas time. I kind of imagine the locals must be something like the Who's in Whoville (from How The Grinch That Stole Christmas) who must plan for Christmas all year. When we visited Neuschwanstein and the Romantic Road in September, on a whim we drove home via Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It was so beautiful (a medieval walled city, almost 1000 years old) but being 5pm on a Sunday afternoon, nothing was open. We decided we would come back in December, assuming that like all good Bavarian towns there would be a cool christkindlmarkt (Christmas market). Turns out that was a bit of an understatement! We had booked into a hotel that was actually ... read more

We had been looking forward to this for a long time - a true holiday, not the crazy kind we had become used to where you stay in a different city every night. (I guess we have Dahlia to thank for that change in approach!). We had booked tickets with Anth’s frequent flyer points nearly a year ago, but had actually wanted to come since we first visited Canada in 2005. We loved it back then in Spring, but everywhere we went people told us ‘you should have been here in the Fall’. So we came in the Fall, to the eastern Atlantic provinces that we didn’t visit before; Prince Edward Island (PEI) and Nova Scotia. Unfortunately, everywhere we went in the Fall, was closed for the season! ‘You should have come in the summer’ they ... read more

A rare blue sky in Iceland - Heimaklettur, Westmann Islands. It is partly the ominous landscapes, and partly how remote and untouched everything feels that makes Iceland feel like it must be the last place on Earth. I have never seen a place look as beautiful in overcast weather as Iceland does. Threatening clouds and a dark and stormy sky seem appropriate for a land covered in lunar-esque rocks, where steam randomly billows out of the ground. At times we felt like we were on the moon, but then the sun would come out and we realised it was Earth, but in it's most dramatic form. Incredible waterfalls, boiling mud pits, volcanic islands rising out of the ocean, glacial icebergs floating off to sea, and of course beautiful Icelandic horses, all played their part in making ... read more