Travel Tips

We travelled to London via LA where we spent a couple of nights near Disneyland. I have never seen so many huge bottoms in all of my life!! We had a night flight to London and got there in 'summery' June although the temperature would have made you guess it was February. It was around 8 degrees (celcius) and a bit damp. We stayed with my brother in Ealing Broadway.

We took a 15 day Cosmos bus trip around Europe and visited Brussels, Wurzburg, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Florence, Lucerne and Paris. A brief look at Europe for Mum and a return to some of the places that I had visited 4 years ago.

I opted out of most optional side trips and walked the streets of most of the cities. Venice was especially good with a temporary buddy in the form of a young American girl who wandered around with me.

Rome was also very good and I ended up leading a small group around the places that I remembered from the previous visit. The walk through the ancient city was a real blast and I have lots of photos to remind me of this.

We hired a car and drove around England with a day in Wales and 2 days in Scotland. Our hired Fiat was up to the strain of the Motorways and we zipped around seeing many an item from the golden mile in Edinburgh to the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral. Our route was London, Salisbury, Wellls, Bath, Penarth (Wales), Hereford, Shrewsbury, Chester, Liverpool, Windermere, Biggar, Edinburgh, York, Stratford, Oxford and back to London. Several towns in 10 days.

I arranged an email address for Mum and did a quality job as her typist when she wanted to send a message home. "How will people know where we are to send us a message" she once asked and was surprised that people were quite clever in working out where to send us emails. The odd postcard was also sent and these were attached to various family fridges (refridgerator if you like) when we got home. "Email is just so impersonal" I was informed when I got home.

We spent another night in the USA on our way back but this time in Santa Monica. A day at the beach was quite nice as was wandering down 3rd street and its shopping mall set-up. Mum vowed that she had to do this again so long as her money held out. We hit Auckland Airport at 5am and were on a flight home ot Christchurch by 6.15am. My second big adventure was shorter than the first and, though not as good as the first, had a number of major highlights.