Category: Travel

Our Venice Trip

4th October – first full day in Venice Yesterday (and the day before?) was the long, long trip. Two legs – Melbourne – Dubai, two hour wait, then Dubai Venice. Arrived in Venice at 3 o’clock and met by Georgia, our landlord, who walked us from Piazza Romana where...

The Marquesas Islands

Okay, this is a long, long blog entry about our recent trip to the Marquesas Islands. The Marquesas Islands. Officially the world’s most isolated island group (thanks, Wikipedia). The nearest continent is North America, some 5500 kilometres away. A few tiny volcanic dots in the vast blue immensity of...

The Romance of Luggage

I don’t get excited about shopping for much, but two items do get the old heart racing: plastic containers (a story for another time) and luggage. I love luggage. Suitcases, carry-on luggage, backpacks, laptop bags, duffle bags, multipurpose hold-alls. I get absorbed in details of hard-sided vs. soft-sided, construction...

Final Paris Post

I’m still coming to terms with the Paris trip of last November. Partly it’s because I’ve just recovered a huge stack of photos after the catastrophic computer failure I suffered in the last week of the idyll. Short version of this: I’d been carefully moving photos from phone and...

Paris 3

Here I am, working away somewhere in Paris. Thinking is working.                            ...

Paris 2

I’ve been back from Paris for a week now. The jet lag is wearing off and I’m starting to get on top of the email backlog. The whole month long Gallic experience is settling down in my mind, too, enough for me to write a little about it. Paris....

Paris 1

I’ve just returned from a wonderful month in Paris. Yes, I’m a lucky man. We had a superb flat near the Pompidou Centre and spent the entire time walking about, looking at things, eating and drinking. Cheese! I’m working up a comprehensive report, for those interested, but in addition...

Relaxing in my library

I lie, of course. It’s the Enlightenment Room at the British Museum. But if I had a library in my home, it’d be something like this. With ladders to reach the books on the second floor. Of course....

Steampunkery

I picked up this neat little pocket compass-sundial at Covent Garden, London....

Heroes

My recent trip to London became a pilgrimage. It wasn’t planned that way, but I found paying homage to some of my long-time heroes and inspirations, deliberately seeking out their works and their memorials and acknowledging their influence. In no particular order: Charles Darwin. At West Minster Abbey, I...