Blogs from England, United Kingdom, Europe - page 1881

To show Tamsin that life is carrying on without her on the lead up to Christmas I am adding this blog with photos to show her it is chilly here and we are nearly ready for Christmas. It is tuesday morning and Paul flew out today to join Tamsin in Sydney for Christmas. At home it is rather sad to have no children here for Christmas but life must go on so this is our frosty tuesday morning for you to enjoy. Tonga doesn't bother getting up whereas Dori is raring to go as usual and ready for anything you can throw at her - literally!! I give myself mild frostbite writing Christmas messages while feeding the animals. Boris follows Tonga's example and stays in the warm while everyone else is ready for breakfast.... read more

I'm writing about a trip to Europe that I did more than 5 years ago, so it's mostly about anecdotes that I remember about this trip. The previous post was about Paris. In the afternoon of Wednesday 20th of December I said goodbye to Paris, hopped on a train in the Gare du Nord train station and crossed the English Channel to arrive at the Waterloo train station, where I was going to be met by Paul Engeham, a retired Royal Navy Lt-Cmdr. Before I go any further with this post, I'll describe how I got to meet Paul (which will set me back in time about 9 years): In 1997 my father was the Commanding Officer of a British built County Class Destroyer ("Almirante Latorre") that was bought second hand to England after having participated ... read more

Hi all, I haven't had access to internet for a while so will catch up now with some backdated entries. We arrived at Heathrow Airport at 7:30am on Tuesday 20 December to check in for our 10:20am flight to Finland via Stockholm. Heathrow was badly fogged in, so at about 8:30am they asked everyone to go upstairs to a departure lounge and wait for the announcement to check in. We went back to the check in desk at 12 noon even though there had been no announcement only to find that our flight was full! Apparently many people had ignored the request to wait and they had actually been checking these people in on the flight. Profuse apologies did not really help me feel any better as we had to stand in another line for about ... read more

Friday - needed own special entry… For shorter version lets just say it went really well, then ok… then it went WRONG and was the worst night of my life and could have cost me several good friends! Conclusion reached… I am a shite! Saturday I was on doggie duty all day, although due to other issues that were unforeseen (due to night before) I did not get to Braintree until about 2pm. I walked the dogs late afternoon, and proceeded to have a giant coughing fit which lead to me puking up down a footpath - nice! Felt really ill, was sweating buckets for most of the evening. My dad took one look at me and gave me some antibiotics to cure me! Sunday after an ok night sleep still felt a bit ill. Was ... read more

So the 2nd trip of my career break is now over. Christmas at home will be followed by a wander through Southeast Asia, starting mid-January. Feel free to join me again then.... read more