Category: Travel Journals

Across the Tasman on STS Tenacious

The barque STS Tenacious left Melbourne, Australia, with me onboard, on Monday 4 December at about 1100 hours, bound for Auckland, New Zealand. Before arriving in Melbourne, the ship had sailed out from Southampton in the United Kingdom. Her departure from Melbourne was the beginning of the long trek back home via Cape Horn and the Falkland Islands.

I was on Tenacious because the Jubilee Sailing Trust emailed offering a berth for the voyage from Melbourne through to Auckland. I had just six days to get it together and fly across to join the ship. Getting it together was a bit of a mission, not least because of the travel insurance requirement. None of the readily available providers did other than draw breath and then decline as I described the voyage and the ship.

To read the full story, go to Tenacious: Melbourne to Auckland

 

Lighthouses and landscapes

We spent the last of summer travelling around the lower North Island, avoiding Highway 1 as best we could and taking time for detours along the way. We took a fortnight – last week of February, first week of March – and snagged what arguably was the best weather of the summer. Lots of lighthouses and beautiful landscapes and coastlines.

I recorded our journey in a daily blog, Lighthouses and Landscapes. In these days of Covid-19 lockdown, I thought it would be a good project to convert the blog into a journal, as I’ve done with some other trip blogs. But this time, with much help and encouragement from friend M from T, I decided to make it an online-only journal rather than one to be printed. You can check out the results at Lighthouses and landscapes. North Island road trip 2020. For best viewing, use the Full Screen view.

Happy vicarious road tripping.

More travel, less travail

So often travel turns out to be travail. At least this is what happens to me.

I will give you an example. A few years back on a previous French trip we determined to go to the Airbus factory. The instructions for getting there seemed clear, as did the instructions that required visitors to register online for a tour of the factory. Needless to say, we didn’t manage to register for the tour and we got lost on the way.

The good side, though, is when we finally arrived at the factory, a tour had just started. And two of the registered particpants hadn’t turned up. The reception staff slipped our 80 euros into the till and shuffled us into the recently started tour. It was all in French, which suited J but left me occasionally bewildered, often baffled, and sometimes klutz-like.

And so to this book. This is my story about the 2014 journey to Paris and beyond. J, who travelled with me, tells her story in another book. Her writing is much more travel than travail. She tells of the places we went to and the things we did. I guess there is a place for that in travel writing.

You can read the whole story here.  More travel less travail 1