Tag Archives: Travel

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 →

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 →

No More Planes

February 26, 2015 By in Family, Travel Tags: , , , , 15 Comments

DSC_0311

One of the nicest things about our holiday up the East Coast last year was that it didn’t involve getting on a plane. We just threw our stuff in the back of the car and off we went.

We’ve just made plans for a few days break over Easter and we’ve done the same thing – booked a cottage that is less than a couple of hours drive away.

I am not keen to get on a plane again for a good long while.

I’ve been trying to work out when it stopped being fun because as a child even the prospect of flying was brilliant. Growing up on Harris, I used to lie on my back in the garden looking at the sky. Tiny Loganair planes flew over the house, on their way to adventures in Inverness or even Glasgow. I would imagine the strangers in suits, quietly reading newspapers and sipping drinks that sparkled with ice cubes and slices of lemon. When I visited my Grandpa, down in Staffordshire, I’d lie and watch bigger planes that had taken off from Manchester. I always thought the rows of white jet trails looked like someone had dragged a fork across the sky. Continue reading →

Binalong Bay in Pictures

October 8, 2014 By in Tasmania, Travel Tags: , , , , , , 9 Comments

Bay of Fires

It is the middle of spring break here so I have DorkySon home from school and haven’t had a lot of time to sit down and write. But we visited the East Coast of Tasmania for a few days last week and I really wanted to share a few photos.

We were staying in Binalong Bay  which is a small coastal village on the Bay of Fires, once named the best travel destination in the world by Lonely Planet. It’s about three and half hours drive from Hobart, although because we were travelling with DorkySon we chose to break the journey up with lunch on the way up (at Saltshaker in Swansea), and with ice cream on the way back (at Kate’s Berry Farm), so it probably took us more like four and a half. The roads were a bit hairy in places, but the views were spectacular for most of the way, especially driving though the wine valleys and then catching our first glimpses of that bright, white East Coast sand.

We had a really magical time. The house we were staying in – Bay of Fires Seascape – didn’t overlook the main beach at Binalong Bay, but it had an incredible view of Skeleton Bay, and all three of us spent a lot of time just gazing out the window watching the hundreds of birds, the sea, and the ever-changing light. Continue reading →

An Isle of Harris Holiday: In Photos

August 8, 2014 By in Photography, Scotland, Travel Tags: , , , , , 15 Comments

Howdy-doodle.

We are back from a lovely ten days in Scotland. Two 35 hour journeys in less than a fortnight has not left me at my most eloquent, so I will save the write-up for another day, but I wanted to share a few photos of our time away.

We were staying in a stunning self-catering house called Croft Cottage, which has views of East Loch Tarbert and across to Skye. On a still night, this is what it looked like…

view from Tarbert Isle of Harris

Continue reading →