Day 5: Vindolanda
This was a deliberate rest day because I’d spotted Vindolanda on the map and knew that it was worth a visit. I think secretly I wanted to do the 7 mile circular walk that...
Author: Chris Bounds
Day 4: Walking the Wall
It was one of the warmest days yet of summer, although here in the north that means 23 degrees. We were very glad by the end of the day to have remembered both shorts...
Day 3: Site-seeing – a rest day
As one might expect, we slept like logs after the exertions of the night before, and it was nice to get up safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t have to drag our aches...
Postscript to our lonely Aussie
Apparently it was common to bury those aircrew killed in training or who died of wounds but whose bodies came home in local churchyards. I suppose since so many Aussies came out of Empire...
Day 2: Snorkels would have helped!
We knew this would be a wet day, but the forecast promised that the showers would clear in the afternoon, so we left John and David at Wormald House in an optimistic frame of...
Day 1: Newcastle upon Tyne: reflecting on ruins
We saw quite a lot of the National Rail System today, but it all worked like clockwork and gave us some insights into rail history. The day began in York and ended in the...
There are things to be said for long flights…
It’s perhaps the only chance I get in the year to catch up with movies, TV series and books that I should have seen or read bu didn’t, so as long as the seats...
Pre-departure excitement
As will become clearer during this post, the process of departure was complicated by Bonnie’s illness, and Paula was understandably distressed by her nearly-nonagenarian mother’s admission to Westmead Hospital only a week before we...
The Good Old Days, and other myths
Two stories in the media caught my eye this morning and left me wondering about humanity’s collective sanity, and in both cases the problem was a political and social myth rooted in a thoroughly...
Albany: any port in a storm
Albany: any port in a stormThe title is a misnomer, because we woke on Monday to find that the worst of the rain and wind had disappeared and Great Southern was looking something more...