200406 Introduction

Hi, everyone, welcome to our website. If you’re visiting for the first time, we hope you’ll find something of interest among all the ‘stuff ‘on the site. If you’ve visited before, you’ll probably notice a few new items being introduced as time keeps marching on.

It’s over a year now since we left the Bahamas. We’ve enjoyed our second English Spring and are looking forward again to summer – if only it could be as good as last year! Things in general are still pretty much the same: Mike working in London, ‘commuting’ to Halifax at weekends and travelling fairly regularly to Switzerland and Jersey on business; Hazel still yo-yoing between home in Halifax, our flat in London and her parents’ home in Scotland, accompanied from time to time by Honey, a bit of an old lady now, but still going strong.

At the moment John is studying hard for his next lot of accounting exams. His job continues to go well and we’re happy to have him at home until something better comes along! He and his girlfriend, Laura, celebrated her birthday with a trip to Dublin at the beginning of April. John's still enjoying his football and is off to Paris later this month to play for his firm and to Denmark in July to help an old friend with a summer football school.

Ruth has been in Australia for a month already. She’s staying in Sydney at the moment, doing some temping work to finance her further travels. She’s hoping to take off again at the beginning of July to visit Melbourne, Adelaide, Tasmania, Aires Rock and on up to Cairns and, hopefully, some warmer weather. (The Australian winter, in Sydney, turns out to be somewhat colder than expected!)

Since our own trip down under in February, we have been on our annual car rally in aid of the Bush Hospital Foundation. We took the ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo at the beginning of May, to meet up with the main contingent from Jersey and drive a pleasant route through France, over the Pyrenees (despite half the road being washed out!) to Barcelona, solving a series of fiendish rally clues along the way. We stayed on for several days after the end of the rally, doing the tourist bit in Barcelona, marvelling at the architectural extravaganza of the city’s favourite son, Gaudi, and taking in the Spanish Grand Prix – an exciting but noisy experience!

We returned just in time to attend the wedding of Hazel’s cousin, Graham, an event made even more special by the fact that we all thought Graham was a confirmed batchelor! The very next weekend found us attending the christening of our eldest niece, Emma’s, first baby – the first of the next generation and the first boy since John was born. We stayed in the beautiful old English village of Castle Combe, which dates back to medieval times and was used as the film set for the original film of Dr Doolittle and one of the Hercule Poirot films.

Please keep in touch with us (click the 'Contact Us' button). We really do love to hear all your news. Hopefully we'll get to see some of you again on our future travels, but in the meantime we can rely on the ether to keep us connected (isn't technology wonderful?!!).