It’s common in nice hotels across SE Asia and the Pacific to place fresh flowers to float in a pretty bowl as decorations. Frangipanis, hibiscus, jasmine and more that I don’t know the name of. This trip we haven’t stayed in many hotels so don’t see it so much. However, in the north east of… Read More Floating flowers 🌺
As the kids really love Thai food, we’d decided early on that Thailand would be a big part of our SE Asia adventure. With the family’s spice tolerance at an all time high, and promises of green curries and lychee sodas we were all quite keen for our month in the land of smiles. The… Read More Green curry dreams
Obviously, one of the reasons you visit Italy is to eat amazing food! Alas, it is not always all pizza and pasta… (the Italian equivalent of sunshine and rainbows) The pasta section in any supermarket is always huge with amazing variety compared to supermarkets we’re used to. We even found tennis racquet pasta! Not that… Read More Other Italian food
Sicilian ancestry (on my mother’s side) lured us to visit the rural north-east of the island. This would be my fourth time going to see the tiny village of Irianni to see the house that Mum used to live in! We based ourselves in a small town on the north coast, not far from an… Read More The Motherland
Next stop on our journey south was the town of Tropea. A very pretty beach side town, with the main old town perched up the top of the cliff. It was a fair bit busier than where we’d been in the Cilento Coast, with the main viewpoint was quite popular with tourists from all over… Read More Tropea (AKA onion town)
From Naples, we headed south to Sicily with a couple of stops along the way. The Cilento Coast was the first as we’d heard it was a more chilled version of the Amalfi Coast and given we’d just hired a car for this journey we were looking for less busy places. Italian driving can be… Read More Cilento Coast
During our class, we obviously needed to not just eat the pizza but make the pizza as well. You know, like that old movie quote: “In this country, you gotta make the pizza first. Then when you get the pizza, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get to eat the… Read More Pizza making in Naples
After the thefts we needed to be cheered up! So, once we’d been to the Police Station to report the cash taken from our luggage (so we could claim it on insurance, we didn’t expect anything to actually be done about it), we did what anyone would do in Naples and ate pizza 🍕🍕🍕 Breakfast… Read More Drowning our sorrows (Italian style)
We didn’t really think it through to be honest. I’d pretty much forgotten about it. Years ago we’d had thefts in Spain, Peru, Bolivia and Chile. But our luck with things getting taken in Spanish speaking countries was far from over alas… After leaving a friend in the south of France we headed into Spain… Read More The curse of the Spanish speaking countries
A highlight of any trip to Scotland has to be enjoying a dram of whisky, sampled in “the home of whisky” 🥃 So we lined up a few distillery visits and set about tasting some new whiskies. Unfortunately the first visit (to Talisker on the Isle of Skye) was a no go, as they were… Read More Uisge Beatha
Country Hoppers 