Wandering the world

A little bit of background📝 This post is the final one in a series of four on our winter adventure. The first post in the series documents our winter prelude, the day we spent in L os Angeles  on our way from Australia. The second post is full of snow stuff, as we were lucky enough to experience a white Christmas in Chicago  [and a white Christmas Eve in Milwaukee]. The third covers our NYC   winter wanderings. This post documents our day trip to Washington DC   from NYC. [

A little bit of background📝 This post is number three in a series of four on our winter adventure. The first post in the series documents our winter prelude, the day we spent in L os Angeles  on our way from Australia. The second post is full of snow stuff, as we were lucky enough to experience a white Christmas in Chicago [and a white Christmas Eve in Milwaukee]. This post documents our winter adventure in New York City. I've made a separate post on our day trip to Washing

A little bit of background📝 This post is number two in a series of four on our winter adventure. My LA prelude post documents our stopover in the city on the way to Chicago from Australia. We live in the southern hemisphere, in a part of Australia where it never snows. Christmas is summer for us, hot and humid, like it is for a good portion of the year. I'd had a long-held dream to have a proper winter experience , complete with heavy snow and a white Christmas. I’d also al

Background to the cheeky weekend📝 This post covers the weekend I spent in London in 2015, in the middle of two weeks of filming interviews in Singapore, Paris, London, Portsmouth and Birmingham for a work project. All that sounds rather glamorous, but it was actually completely exhausting! I was glad of the weekend for some downtime. My work project experience are documented here. My London wanderings documented in this post represent my fifth experience of the city. See th

A little bit of background📝 In 2015 I was working at the University of Queensland on an institutional graduate employability project. A key contribution to the project was my leadership of the creation of a Massive Open Online Course [MOOC] to support students to develop their employability. The course, Unlocking your employability, was the first of its kind on the edX platform, a global consortium of top-tier universities who offer short online courses on a range of subject

A little bit of background📝 I was fortunate to have an abstract accepted for the 2014 European First-Year Experience Conference, held at Nottingham Trent University. As with the 2013 conference trip , my experience was a quick gallop across the week I was away, this time in Nottingham, Brighton, and London. Travel to Nottingham ✈️ I flew to London in June 2014 with Singapore Airlines, with the usual Changi Airport stopover on the way over, having left Brisbane on a Saturday

A little bit of background📝 This post is covers the whirlwind week I spent in 2013, first to present at an academic conference in Helsinki, Finland, with a day trip to Tallinn, Estonia. Then I flew to England and for a whirlwind of activity in Brighton, London and Rochester. Yep, you read that correctly. I did all of that in a week! Read on for more... The long trek to Helsinki✈️ It was May 2013, and I'd not long returned from our trip to Hawaii for our 20th wedding anniver

A little bit of background📝 Second time to Hawaii! Read here for the post about my first visit in 2010, to Maui to present at a conference with a bonus few post-conference days on Oahu. My second Hawaiian experience was in April 2013, where we had two weeks to explore Oahu and an overnight sojourn to the Big Island. When I say "we", I mean the four of us on a family holiday to celebrate 20th wedding anniversary. Note: WED is the acronym I will use in this post refer to my fa

A little bit of background📝 This post is part of a series that documents our 1996 adventure, the first time we'd been further afield than Australia and New Zealand. I wrote the post in 2024, some 28 years after the experience, based on the [print] journal I kept at the time and my memories and recollections. As with all my travel posts, they are a journal of sorts, documenting my experience of travel, rather than reading as a travel guide. Some of the information may be out

A little bit of background📝 The year is 1996. My husband [W] and I, aged 25, are on our first ever bus tour. The tour was part of our 6-week first ever world wandering. The trip was the culmination of years of dreaming and 12 months of planning and saving. I wrote this post in 2024 using my memories to guide me and the journal I kept at the time. This post is as much about documenting our experience as it is looking back in time to travel in the 1990s, before the days of Goo

A little bit of background📝 This post is part of the series on our first ever world wandering, a six-week trip to LA, London, Berlin, Europe on a bus tour, and a road trip around England, Scotland and Wales. The post has been written in retrospect, almost 30 years after the trip, from the journal I wrote at the time and from my memories. The first in the series is my post is on our LA stopover  and the second is on our London taster. These posts give good background on how w

A little bit of background 📝 I am writing this post in 2023, 27 years after our [W and me] first big adventure beyond Australian and New Zealand shores. I've kept the journals our travels, typed on an electric typewriter and bound in a book, complete with ticket stubs, pictures from travel brochures, and other printed records of the trip. I hope you find it interesting reading, both for the throwback to travelling in a different time and for the world wanderings themselves.

A little bit of background 📝 I am writing this post in 2023, 27 years after our [W and me] first big adventure beyond Australian [and New Zealand] shores. I've kept the journals our travels, typed on an electric typewriter and bound in a book, complete with ticket stubs, pictures from travel brochures, and other printed records of the trip. I hope you find it interesting reading, both for the throwback to travelling in a different time and for the world wanderings themselves

A little bit of background📝 This post is part of a series on the Great Girls' Adventure to Türkiye, Greece and Romania. Each country on our adventure has its own post, this one on our Romanian wanderings. Here are the links to our wanderings in Türkiye  and Greece . Our inaugural Great Girls' Adventure saw us away for two weeks in October 2015, when my daughter, referred to in my posts as E, was just shy of her 14th birthday. This trip was special as it was just the two of u

A little bit of background📝 As I write this post in 2023, I've been to London nine times. I don't think I will ever cease to be thrilled by being there. London is well...it's London. I know it's a bit grimy, crowded, and the weather is rubbish, but it's one of my favourite places in the world. This post of London wanderings is from my 2011 visit, after I had presented at an academic conference in Manchester. This London experience was my second go at exploring the city, but

A little bit of background 📝 Dubai is somewhere I have stopped over in several times, flying with Emirates on the way to and from Europe. This post is about the one time I left the airport in 2007, on my way back from Morocco. As explained in my Morocco  post, my travelling companion [B] had planned to meet her friend [D] in Dubai on D's way back to Perth from Manchester. This original idea morphed into B and me travelling to Morocco and meeting D in Dubai as our stopover on

A little bit of background📝 In June 2011 I had the opportunity to travel to the UK for the first time since 1996 . I travelled to Manchester to present at a conference, then had 10 days of personal leave. I was able to take advantage of the rules at the time that allowed for personal leave to be added to conference travel by paying half the airfare. I've also made a post on how I spent my 10 days of personal leave after the conference. I have made a post on my London wander

A little bit of background📝 In 2010, I was thrilled to have been accepted to present at my first ever conference, when I was working at a Brisbane university in teaching and learning development. The 23rd International Conference of the First-Year Experience was held in Maui in June of that year. I mean, if one is going to present at a conference for the first time, Hawaii is as good a place as any to go, right? Travelling to Maui🛬 Getting there was an interesting journey,

A little bit of background 📝 Our Orlando wanderings happened by chance when my husband had a last minute opportunity to attend a week-long tech conference in the city in 2008, paid for by his company. He wanted me to go with him and, in a move very unlike me, we organised for my parents to look after our kids [who were 10 and 8 at the time] so I could go. It felt like a big step for us as it was the first time both of us had been away on our own since we'd had children. We l