4th November 2005 Hove/Brighton, England. With tomorrow being my first ever birthday spent enitrely without even one family member, it was a lovely coincidence to discover that I was in the one country who could make up the deficit by celebrating en-masse with me. Not because my happiness is of particular concern, of course, but because I'd have the forsight to be born on Guy Fawke's Night, otherwise known as Bonfire Night. For those not in the know, Guy Fawke's is the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy to blow up the English Parliament and King James I in 1605. [View Full Entry]

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1st November 2005 Godalming, Surrey, England. Growing up in Queensland left me with an ignorance of the beauty of climatic seasonal changes, for in Cairns all that you have is the Wet and the Dry seasons. Which means that for most of the year, it's varying degrees of hot and there's very little rain to be had; perfect beach weather. Then for about two or three months after March, the Wet Season kicks in, heralding almost non-stop rain, the occasional cyclone, a constant humidity which is thick enough to choke upon, and usually a fortnight of what we innocents bemoan as [View Full Entry]

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21st, 22nd and 23rd October 2005 Amsterdam, Netherlands. WARNING! CONTENT DOES INCLUDE SOME REFERENCES TO PROSTITUTION, NUDITY, ETC. Day 10 Leaving our lovely castle in the wee hours of the morning - indeed, before there was enough light to attempt more than a few half-hearted photos (what's the use in staying in a castle if you don't get to see it?) - we headed north across the border and into the gradually flatter plains of the Netherlands. I should mention here that while many people refer to the country as Holland, that’s actually just a region (or several prov [View Full Entry]

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23rd October 2005 Brugge, Belgium......to Calais, France......to London, England. Whether it be due to aftereffects of the marjuana, the minuteness of the country itself, or a general weariness from the endless travelling of the past twelve days, I remember little of Belgium. What the terrain or the architecture consisted of, I cannot tell you. Of Brugge, where we stopped mid-morning for a very brief walking tour, I remember only quaint stone bridges over swan-filled streams, cart-and-pony traps, belgian waffles, lace shops, stone architecture that possibly looked medieval, and an enormo [View Full Entry]

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18th, 19th, 20th and 21st October, 2005 Munich, Germany and then the Rhine Valley, Germany. Day 7 Today I have seen the sun both rise and fall from the confines of my seat and traversed three seperate countries in the interim. By the time the bus reached Munich this evening I was clinging to the last of my patience with this fool's enterprise, and had long since abandoned my customary vigil by the window for sights unseen. Unfortunately, we were about as far from town or entertainment as possible, so all I could do to burn off the excess energy was [View Full Entry]

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16th, 17th and 18th October 2005 Venice, Italy. Day 5 For the most part, my first day in Belle Italia was spent driving through it. We stopped mid-afternoon in Verona, city of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for about an hour and a half. There we saw the Arena di Verona, or amphitheatre, which was built in the first century AD, and is still used in summer as a theatre-cum-opera house. After that we wandered down some streets and allies and found ourselves in the so-called courtyard of the Capulet's, staring up at Juliet's ever-so-famous balcony. How they figured that out whe [View Full Entry]

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18th October 2005 Innsbruck, Austria. Day 7 We travelled through the mountainous terrain of Austria at something of a brisk trot, playing those horrid Sound of Music songs (as the movie was, obviously, placed in Austria) all the way and stopping for barely more than an hour in Innsbruck. There we obediantly took photos of their Olympic Ski Jump and Goldenes Dachl, or Golden Roof, a balcony from which Emperor Maximilian I of the 1500's would watch tournaments and dancing in the city square below. Afterwards, left with a brief opportunity of time to sightsee, we [View Full Entry]

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14th, 15th and 16th of October, 2005. Lucerne, Switzerland. Tour Day 3 As we travelled from France and into Switzerland - all the while with the most endlessly blue skies I have ever seen in my life - the landscape gradually went from incredibly green hills to amazingly green mountains, and in the distance you could see blue Alps with white snowcaps. The road began to carve its way through endless mountains, and by the time we reached Lucerne I think we may have spent more time in darkly lit tunnels than on open-air roads. Lucerne turned out to be a [View Full Entry]

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12th, 13th and 14th October 2005 Paris, France. Tour Day 1 Finally, after seven months of being in the near distance of it, I am able to say that I have been to Paris, France.....and it is spectacular! Stunning! Grandiose! But let me begin at the beginning; not with birth as Dickens once did, but at the conception of the trip. Having worked almost two whole months without a holiday (ah, but it's a hard, hard life), and with some misgivings on attempting foreign countries and even more foreign languages unescorted, I gave in to the hated idea of package tours [View Full Entry]

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26th August 2005 Edinburgh, Scotland. Day 3 of Skye High Haggis Tour. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Haggis Tour Day 3 *Kyleakin to *Armadale (8am ferry) to *Mallaig then *coastal drive to *Mallaig beach (white sands; some swam) then *coastal drive to *Glenfinnan (Harry Potter bridge) to *Fort William then *Through Glen Nevis past *Ben Nevis (biggest mountain in the UK) to *Glencoe (the 'Weeping Valley') then *Through Rannoch Muir (desolate) to *Kilmahog (and 'Hamish the Hairy Coo') to *Stirling and the National Wallace Monument [View Full Entry]

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