The best ever birthday present came this year when my hubby, Glyn, bought me tickets and flights to see Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine in Frankfurt. We were unable to see them in the UK due to various reasons and I was gutted as I’ve been a Jello fan since I was 14 years old and have only seen him sing once – I’ve seen three spoken word performances though, but still… It had been hard for Glyn to get cheap flights from the UK, so as a result we left Stoke at 2am for the three hour drive to Standsted airport. After an hour’s flight, we landed at Franfurt Hahn, an airport no bigger than a chicken farm in the middle of the countryside with the pinkest loos you will ever see. ... read more

Sunday 30 December Today was a bit drizzly so we were glad to get on a warm bus at 10.15am for a castles tour. There were only 7 other passengers and Glyn and I got front seat on the upper deck - get in!!! We were given headphones as there was intermittent commentary along the road. We passed through Copenhagen and started seeing countryside. Some of the houses were huge and beautiful, it turns out that they were in fact villas (the Danish use the Italian word villa) and ranged from being worth 1 million to 8 million dollars. We were told the value in Kroner but I've forgotten that. We passed by footballer's mansions, valued anywhere up to $20 million. We saw the sea a lot en route and witnessed people swimming in it. There's ... read more

Friday 28 December Apart from shops, not a lot opens until 10-11am, so we didn't get up too early today. It was very cold, but the sky was blue. We'd pre-booked a bus tour (Grand Tour of Copenhagen) and got on it opposite Tivoli Gardens. The tour guide was an extravagant large lady in a big red coat and she sung a line of 'Wonderful wonderful Copenhagen' to us. The bus took us around Tivoli, past a multi coloured cinema with ace shocking pink walls. We went past Hans Christian Andersen's statue and saw Rodin's Thinker sitting in a tiny park. We went through Christianshavn and through Kongens Nytorv. We arrived at Amalienborg Slot, the Royal residence before 11.30am, in time for the changing of the guard. Btw, 'Slot' mean palace or castle, which is cool ... read more

Tuesday 28th August We left Los Angeles at 6am to avoid rush hour traffic which starts at 7am and lasts a lot longer than an hour. We stopped on the outskirts of LA for gas and bought subway sandwiches for breakfast. At this gas station, and as I have seen at other gas stations, there’s TV on the actual petrol pumps! This particular pump had a loop of X-Factor trailers. Glyn drove along the 15 until we got to Apple Valley which was totally rough and run down. I then started driving and took a small detour to go on the famous Route 66. The road itself was mostly quite well maintained but very undulating, it was like driving over solid sand dunes and fun for a while. On the road side were many closed businesses ... read more

Wednesday 22nd August We left Elk Grove at 7.30am and soon hit the rush hour traffic which wasn’t so bad, especially as we could use the diamond lane (carpool). We were followed by a police car for a while which is never nice. We travelled down the 50, passing by Charles Manson in Fulsom jail, towards Lake Tahoe and soon the landscape got hilly. There were also lots of trees and the road became twisty and turny. Our satnav, Sheila, disagreed with many of our decisions, but she was wrong quite often. It’s a good job we’d also bought a map! Sheila wanted us to go up to Lake Tahoe itself and when we got on the 88 and 89, she tried to convince us to go down a ravine. We briefly stopped to water the ... read more