GrandmaParry

Our last point of call was Dubai. It was excruciatingly hot. Dubai boasts over fifty five star hotels and one seven star. Here you can receive free of charge a gold plated I pad when you pay your rent for the night. Of course you will be fifteen thousand dollars poorer. Dubai has an indoor ski run with lifts and everything, it boasts the richest horse race, tennis tournaments and all to attract tourists when the oil runs out. The artificial Palm islands are incredible with thousands of homes on each of the branches. The whole area smells of money. We are now at home with the very sad news that Ed Carroll with whom we exchanged homes had a major cerebral haemorrage and is not expected to survive.... read more

We continued our journey going to London and staying in a very expensive hotel with a horse called Jacob outside.We were near the Tower Bridge,and walked across it. At night we went to see “The Mouse Trap” which was very well done.We wandered the streets after the show..dark alleys but we were safe and we eventually found the railway station. Next day we went to our ship the Marco Polo, the same ship we had sailed on before around the Mediterranean. Most of the passengers were our age, and we befriended a Welsh couple whom we may visit before we come home. We were at sea for two days and landed in Copenhagen where we looked around the town and went to a typical Danish Village Dragor on the Baltic. In Germany we looked around an ... read more

Gillian has tried to set the kitchen on fire twice when trying to cook carrots on a gas stove. David is now expert in cleaning blackened saucepan and carrots are now off the menu. The trains in England are amazing, they travel at 200km per hour. They are very clean and comfortable. Campbell Newman take note. We started this leg of our trip to the Isle of Man with a train journey to Liverpool and were impressed at the transformation of Liverpool Docks. The whole area is now magnificent mix of old and new buildings. Elvis and the Beatles memorabilia are everywhere, museums are first class. Next day we travelled on a catamaran built in Tasmania that the Australian Government would not buy, and we had a very rough crossing to Douglas on the Isle of ... read more

Having returned from a snow covered Wales, we decided to explore the local stretch of the River Frome, which turned out to be a shallow slow stream, so we went over to Downend and saw a fast flowing beautiful Frome river. The next day we caught a bus into Bristol and visited the Museum and saw a real flying box kite made for the movie “The magnificent men in their flying machines. We walked up a very steep hill as to Cabot tower a memorial to one of the first men to go to America. We visited the 900 years old Bristol Cathedral , St Marys Redcliffe (infamous for its involvement in the slave trade) and a church that was bombed and left as a memorial of those thousands who died in the Blitz. Michael and ... read more

This is our first real Travel blog. We left Brisbane flying out at 2.35 am on Monday 25thMarch. No one in their right mind does anything at that hour. Our journey to Singapore was very good because the plane was almost empty and Gillian stretched out over three seats and sort of slept. We arrived at 6am. Our hotel was the Changi Village Hotel which was as far away from the city centre as you can get, but it is close to the airport. It was the site of the infamous prison which is in the process of being demolished. We were able to rest until 10am and then went into the city and travelled on two buses and saw almost all of the city. The most spectacular structures were the Marina Bay Hotel which has ... read more