You Are My Sunshine….
Heading west from Grafton, we cross the Great Dividing Range and on to our next destination, the agricultural town of Moree. Other than being asked by friends and family why we could possibly want to go to Moree, we were told that because of the severe flooding that had affected many parts of New So...
Jacaranda Time
First stop on the drive back from Brisbane to Sydney is in the northeastern New South Wales city of Grafton to visit nephews Blake and Barton and their families. Grafton describes itself as the "jacaranda capital of Australia" and is home to the annual Jacaranda Festival which we just missed. To be...
Home in the Woolstores
Teneriffe (not to be confused with Tenerife!) is a former industrial Brisbane inner city area along the Brisbane River that from the late 19th/early 20th Centuries was dominated by wool stores where wool producers would bring their fleeces for final preparation and baling before being shipped out. D...
Back Home With Nina
It just rains and rains…..until that is, we’re back in town! Sydney, along with much of south-eastern Australia from Brisbane to Melbourne has “enjoyed” its wettest year, capped off by its wettest October since records began in the 1850’s. And it’s all the fault of Nina….or La Niña to give this weat...
Party Time in the Commonwealth
Even though we lived in the Philadelphia suburbs for 12 years, it has never been clear to me why Pennsylvania is a “Commonwealth”. A political wag did make the observation during an early 2000’s presidential election that “Pennsylvania is Philadelphia and Pittsburgh separated by Alabama”. So it’s pe...
Eleven And Counting....
It’s that time again. Bennett is turning eleven - well almost. Even when we FaceTime on his actual birthday day - October 17, he tells us that there’s a couple of hours to go before he finally popped out, so actually he’s still only ten! But birthday day this year falls on a Monday, so we celebrat...
A Difficult Delivery….
We fly home to Seattle from New York in the expectation that Sandra will be called for jury duty or at the very least have to appear as part of the pool from which “12 good men and true” (!!!) will be selected. We’d anticipated that this would be a King County trial and wouldn’t last longer than a f...
25 Years On
Seems like we only just left, but here we are back again just ten days later. “Home” this time, the Union Square “W” is nowhere near as grand as last visit’s Home….the hotel’s public rooms are all under renovation (until sometime in 2023) a minor detail that wasn’t disclosed to us until the “welcome...
Fighting With The Irish….
Out of Chicago and on to the “American Heartland” or the Indiana bit of the Heartland to be more precise. South Bend, the home of the world’s pre-eminent and largest Catholic university Notre Dame, the “Fighting Irish”, but also the jumping off point for the political career of the US Transportation...
My Kind Of Town….
Chicago is “my kind of town, Chicago is…..” a very impressive city particularly the stretch that borders the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. But with one very large caveat - the weather. Chicago is a great city to visit for the few (and I really mean few) weeks of the year when the weather is good....
A New York State of Mind
Miracle of miracles….we, together with all of our luggage arrive in New York on time and incident free! “Home” here is the old Villard mansion on Madison Avenue, now as it has been for many years, the New York Palace hotel. We know when we’re close by all the police concrete blocks already lining Ma...
A House Is Not A Home
We set out for London during a period of maximum travel chaos. Cancelled flights, rescheduled flights, missed connections luggage that never shows up. But even though we flew from Orange County via Dallas to London our journey was uneventful and our luggage - though just about the last to appear on...