Category Archives: Travel

Travels Part 2: Edinburgh

November 1, 2018 By in Family, Scotland, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Sunset in Edinburgh Marchmont

It was time to leave Harris for the second part of our trip: a week in Edinburgh, followed by a few days in Helsinki, and then the long, long journey home.

We’d said our goodbyes, stuffed things back into our bags, and negotiated the notoriously tricky security line at Stornoway Airport. We were sitting on a tiny plane waiting to taxi to the runway.

Ten minutes later… we were still sitting there.

Twenty minutes later… we were still sitting there.

The pilot came on the radio and said he was going to turn the plane off and turn it back on again, in an attempt to fix whatever mechanical issue was causing the delay. Unfortunately, the old on-off-on again trick doesn’t work as well on Embraers as it does on iPhones, and a few minutes later we found ourselves traipsing down the aircraft steps and back into the airport. Continue reading →

Travels Part 1: Hobart to Harris

October 24, 2018 By in Family, Scotland, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

View from Tarbert Isle of Harris

No matter how many times you’ve done it, there’s still something miraculous and disconcerting about strapping yourself into a metal tube and flying across the world.

Airlines go to great lengths to persuade you that it’s a normal and comfortable thing to do. They try their best to make that tube feel like home. Qantas welcome you with a hearty ‘G’day mate!’ and hand out complementary socks with cartoon kangaroos on them. Finnair design their cabin lighting to resemble the aurora borealis, and Loganair provide Harris Tweed headrests and Tunnocks caramel wafers. But when you undertake ten flights in three weeks, from Tasmania to the Outer Hebrides and back again, the resulting sensory overload means there’s no escaping the strangeness of air travel. Continue reading →

Packing

September 16, 2018 By in Family, Travel 8 Comments

francesca-tirico-450426-unsplash

Packing, part 1: Friday afternoon

I pick DorkySon up from school, where he is hugged hard by kind friends who seem reluctant to let him leave. A classmate joins us for some of the walk home, and the two of them skip ahead of me, singing the baby shark song to each other and laughing.

But when she heads her way, and we head ours, it starts. DorkySon tells me that he will be packing as soon as he gets home, but please can he have a muffin and a drink first. He will need the energy boost for such a massive task. Continue reading →

Rooftop Bars and Hire Cars

November 16, 2016 By in Family, Travel 10 Comments

dsc_0078

On the long plane journey back from the US a few weeks ago, while DorkyDad watched Muriel’s Wedding for the first time, and DorkySon watched the Peanuts movie for the fourth time, I chose to watch a documentary about Nora Ephron, called Everything is Copy.

It felt appropriate. I’m not half the writer that Nora was but our three weeks in the US – landing in South Carolina twelve hours before it was evacuated for Hurricane Matthew – certainly provided plenty of copy.

We’d been talking about this holiday for so long. Through the cold Tasmanian winter, during every sleepless night or stressful early morning, we reassured ourselves.

“Hold on,” we’d say. “The holiday is coming! We have sunshine and music and shrimp in our future.”

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Continue reading →

A Bruny Island Break

April 21, 2015 By in Family, Tasmania, Travel Tags: , , , , , , 15 Comments

dusk on Bruny Island

“We are living on an island, under an island, under an island, at the edge of the world.”

Sometimes you find a holiday spot that’s just so beautiful that you feel torn between telling everyone about it and keeping it a secret so it doesn’t get overrun.

That’s how I feel about our time away on Bruny Island last week. Given that my blog audience is a small one though, and that most of you live many thousands of miles away, I feel safe in spilling the beans. Continue reading →