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Camping in the heart of Sydney on Cockatoo Island
Cockatoo Island, in the middle of Sydney Harbour, has had a diverse history in its time. Although today it plays host to happy campers and day trippers, it has done time as both a colonial penal establishment and Australia’s biggest shipyard. The island’s latest incarnation is an increasingly popular tourist destination, which blends its industrial heritage…
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Road Trip Day 4 – Mudgee and the road back to Sydney
Minus One. Yes, that is the temperature it got down to on our first night in Mudgee. When we awoke we found car windows covered with a layer of ice glistening in the morning sun. Clearly spring in this part of the country means icy-cold nights, even though the days turned out to be quite bright…
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Road Trip Day 3 – Wellington Caves and the road to Mudgee
Day 3 and time to press on towards Mudgee. We backtracked 50kms or so to visit Wellington Caves, which I had heard some good things about. When we arrived though, I was a bit more sceptical. It had a definite whiff of the glowworm about it. The glowworm is a short hand Mike and I use…
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Road Trip Day 2 – Dubbo Zoo
Our first night in the campervan passed pretty uneventfully. Neither child fell out of the top bunk, despite my grave concerns, although one of them knocked a torch to the floor at about 3am and gave us a serious imitation of a heart attack. I tried to make an early start of it, wanting to…
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Road Trip Day 1 – The Road to Dubbo
We’ve just been on a five day road trip, in a dinky campervan, to see country NSW. All in all we do about 1500 km on our trip and we are not 10 minutes into our journey before Arabella pipes up: “How many minutes until we get there?” My learning about road trips – and…
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Blue Mountain Weekend
I’d forgotten how gorgeous the Blue Mountains are. I haven’t been up there since before we had kids. Shameful, really, given it is only 90 minutes away. It’s a weird sort of bush, the dry, grey of the Eucalypts, but so serene and peaceful. The expanse of it is really what takes your breath away,…
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Find yourself in Rome
When I decided to go to Rome, it wasn’t because I thought I needed it. That came later. It was because Rome is supposed to be the most romantic and wonderful of European cities, and I felt it was worth visiting at least once in my life. I can’t remember why I suddenly hankered to…
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Key replacements for dairy and egg for bakers
When I first became head cook of my family of allergy sufferers, I had absolutely no idea how to go about baking for kids who could not eat egg or dairy. I loved baking. But baking without egg and dairy seemed a formidable task. It took me a lot of trial and error, and serendipitous…
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The Canal du Midi
For the final leg of our trip to France, we putter gently down the murky brown waters of the Canal du Midi. Built to create a continuous water way between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, it was completed in 1681 and has flowed ever since. We start our little sojourn at the port of Le…
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The Dordogne, France – Road Trip
We’ve exchanged the sophistication of Paris for rustic, rural France. We arrived into Bordeaux via the high speed train network and headed straight out again in our newly acquired campervan. On the way to St Emilion, in the heart of acres of green, luscious vineyards, we stopped at, what seemed to me to be, the…
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Reflections from Middle Age 