COVID has destroyed countless lives and many more livelihoods, so it seems a bit trivial to be also cursing it as a wrecker of travel plans. But as a depositor of flies in the ointments of potential travel itineraries it has had few equals. We'd planned to go to South America in 2020 and then on to visit Emma in Canada. That didn't happen. We'd also assembled a crew of thirty odd family and friends to celebrate Issy's 60th birthday in Bali, but that too came to nothing. Our homeland has fared better than most in its fight against COVID's ravages, but that doesn't mean we've escaped totally unscathed. Our home state of Victoria has had many more COVID deaths than any other of Oz's jurisdictions, due almost entirely to the total ineptness of our authorities' ... read more

Today is the last full day of our nearly three month long expedition, and we plan to spend it doing as little as possible. However before we do as little as possible we decide to take a short drive to the Wailua Falls, which we could see out of the plane window yesterday. The falls are beautiful. They’re actually two distinct streams next to each other and we read that they’re more than 50 metres high. Apparently one of their greatest claims to fame is that they appeared, together with the Na Pali Cliffs, in the opening credits of the TV series “Fantasy Island”. This aired in the late 1970s and early 1980s and featured Ricardo Montalban as the owner of a very mysterious island where people came to have their fantasies played out. I wasn’t ... read more

I’m struggling to come to terms with the tipping culture here in the States. Back home we might tip a waiter up to ten percent if the service was really exceptional, but it would be by no means expected, and other than that I can’t think of too many people that we’d ever tip. Before we’ve even finished the last mouthfuls of our meals here and in Canada, we’ve had either a credit card machine or a bill put in front of us, with a menu of tip percentages on it to chose from. These start at 18 percent and work their way up from there. I get the impression that we wouldn’t get out of a restaurant alive if we declined to add a tip, no matter how bad the service had been. Last night ... read more

This morning we’ve booked a tour to Pearl Harbour. Issy’s still feeling a bit jetlagged, so Scott and I set off and leave her to rest up. The Pearl Harbour Visitors’ Centre includes a museum which gives extensive background to the events of 7 December 1941, a date which is clearly firmly imprinted in the American psyche. It seems scarcely credible in these days of satellites that a fleet of six massive Japanese aircraft carriers was able to make its way thousands of kilometres across the Pacific without anyone noticing. We’re told that around 40 percent of Hawaiian residents at the time were of Japanese ancestry, and the military was far more worried about sabotage than an air attack. In order to reduce the potential damage from sabotage, the US fighter planes were kept in rows ... read more

We’re definitely still in Canada. It’s twenty one degrees outside and the hotel receptionist and a Canadian guest are complaining about the “boiling” heat. We head out for a farewell breakfast with Emma and Michael. We’ve noticed that they seem to go for large food servings here in Canada. I’m not that hungry so I try to order the smallest item on the menu, which I hope is a fried egg on a small piece of toast. It comes out as two fried eggs surrounded by a mountain of fried potatoes, a bunch of grapes, half a pineapple, and a piece of rockmelon. There’s no room on the enormous plate for the two large pieces of toast drowned in butter, so that lot comes out separately. At least some of it’s healthy, and if it has ... read more