2BaysDeb

We’re about half way through our trip now and currently having a “day off”; mainly because the weather is miserable but also because we recognise the pleasure of not being on the go all the time. As I write this we are in Alesund which is about ¾ of the way down the Norwegian coastline. We started our Norwegian travels in Tromso, the largest city in northern Norway. It’s also where we boarded the daily Hurtigruten “mailboat” (we were on the MS Nordkapp) for our journey south along the Norwegian coastline. We could have started our journey a little further north in a small town called Kirkenes, close to the Russian border. However, I wanted to spend time in a couple of Norwegian towns along the way and I also have a tendency towards motion sickness, ... read more

La Conner is our first stop on our round-the-world trip, we arrived here about 30 hours after locking the front door at home. La Conner, where on Earth is that I can imagine you asking? Well, it’s in the US state of Washington, about half way between Seattle and the Canadian border and on the shores of Puget Sound. We’re so close to Canada that the weather app on my phone is giving me the forecast for Victoria on Vancouver Island. La Conner is not very big and according to Wikipedia has a population of around 900. A sign in town lists its various claims to fame, one of which is something like Washington’s Best Town for Romantic Weekends – consequently it has a large selection of eating establishments, galleries, museums and a craft brewery. The ... read more

When I last left this blog we had just left Powis Castle in Wales and were on our way to our next stop in the Peak District. We had a pleasant drive, by passing the cities/towns of Shrewsbury, Market Drayton and Loggerheads; we were thinking that we were making good time, until we reached Stoke-on-Trent at what passes for rush hour. No rushing to be had there. We crawled our way through the approaches to the M6 and along a main road before finally hitting the open road. After a few miles we were getting close to our destination and the roads were becoming narrower. The pièce de résistance though would have to be the last few miles of our trip. We drove along Bottom Lane (pleasant) and then were guided down Parsons Lane and through ... read more

Well that’s Ilfracombe almost done and dusted. We arrived here almost a week ago after spending most of the day in Exeter followed by a slow, wet drive across the moors to Ilfracombe. When we arrived our AirBnB hosts had the fire on! Exeter was pleasant but uneventful. It wouldn’t be an overseas trip unless Terry was trying to find something – a tiny screw driver in rural France, shoe polish in rural China and a replacement camera battery charger in Devon. We spent a bit of time trying to do that but eventually found success and saw parts of Exeter that we hadn’t counted on. Exeter is a relatively small city and was easy to negotiate by foot once in the centre of town – we left our car at the Park ‘n’ Ride. Lunch ... read more

We’ve been in the UK for 5 days now and so it’s time to start the blog before I forget the places we’ve visited. We started our holiday by driving from Heathrow to Seaford immediately after disembarking from our 24-hour travel from Brisbane - thankfully our flight had been uneventful and we’d managed to sleep on the plane. Our trip to Seaford was surprisingly stress-free until 10 minutes from our destination, at which point the battery in Terry’s iPad decided to die, thus taking our GPS and map capabilities with it. Once again we are using AirBnB listings for our holiday accommodation and eventually we managed to find our accommodation for the next week – a B&B on the outskirts of Seaford. Our host is a retired printer/typographer whose daughter convinced him to take up AirBnB ... read more