Where we are staying

Here are a few photos of where we are staying to whet the appetite for the trip.

The shot of the town beyond a river is St Aignan, and the river the Cher. We are staying in the square house in the middle of the picture (we think / hope!) for seven nights. St Aignan is a little town a little way out of Tours, which is south west of Paris in the Loire Valley.

Then we are off to Norway, to stay with friends from when David was at uni in Brisbane last millennium (and yes, it does feel that way!). The summery picture is their place in Oslo, the wintery one their cabin in the mountains. We will be visiting both on our 6 days in Norway, though we are not anticipating such a diversity of weather.






From there we track on to Ireland, with a night in Cashel and two in Dublin before we fly out. In between we have a week in the Cottage Mary Rose in a little village called Cordal, in County Kerry in the south west.




Our last stop is for a few days in Abu Dhabi with friends from Canberra. Don't have pics of their place yet, so I guess we will all have to wait until late July to fill in that remaining piece of the puzzle. Ah the suspense!

Why Red String

Justine and I have both seen a fair bit of the world, and placing a priority on travel is one of the strongest things we have in common. More than once we've joked that it's the reason we don't have any matching furniture - as soon as we get a batch of money together, we use it to travel somewhere.

We actually do have two matching couches now, but since we bought them off Justine's sister Kristen when she and her husband went to live in the US for two years, we feel that they are sufficiently travel related to stay in the house anyway.

Shortly after we got married we started a game of one-upsmanship about who had been where. I've been to lots of Australia, having driven every km of Highway 1 from just North of Broome all the way down the west coast, across the Nullarbor and up the east coast to north of Cairns. However, Justine has me pretty well covered overseas, having traveled every year from when she was just a babe (well, she still is a bit of a babe, but you know what I mean) until well into her 20s. And more than a few times since.

Anyway, for her birthday one year I stuck a map of the world onto some pinboard and put it into a frame, and gave her some different coloured pins. There ensued the next round of 'I've been to more places than you' as we each stuck pins in the places we've been to and the places we want to go to. Shortly after that, we booked a trip somewhere, and I put in red pins to show the planned trip - and red string to show the route. And so was born the red string idea. Any time the map doesn't have red string on it, there is a palpable air of frustration round the household.

Over the years the map has been a great conversation starter. The original world map was joined by an Australian one (I was getting smashed too badly on the world stage), and by different coloured pins for Aidan and Lauren as well.

Our next trip kicks off on June 29th, and takes in London / Legoland; the Loire Valley in France; Oslo; and Dublin / County Kerry in Europe, before a stop over in Abu Dhabi on the way home to see some friends there for a few days. All up, we are away almost exactly a month.

Over the next few weeks I'll be getting this blog up to speed, and recounting any particularly interesting facet of our planning, packing and panicking. Once we are away I'll regularly put up some pics of where we are, and some hopefully entertaining and insightful accounts of what we are doing. Mentions of Chocolate Croissants will be kept to the minimum possible level - but I apologise in advance if I get carried away!