New York has many names: The Big Apple, The Empire City, The City That Never Sleeps, Gotham, The Melting Pot, even the humble moniker The Capital Of The World. When the opportunity to visit was offered to us via our round-the-world ticket, we jumped at it. How could we pass up a chance to […]
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Paris
When I first visited France for a month in September 2003, I deliberately made Paris my final stop. I suspected – correctly, I think – that if I had started in Paris then I may have gotten so swept up by life there that I wouldn’t want to leave. In the end I spent five […]
London
It’s hard to believe we were there just five weeks ago. We’ve gotten behind in our blogging during that time, but since we left London we’ve been to Paris, Versailles, Zurich, Bern, Lauterbrunnen (twice), Lucerne (twice), New York, Quito (twice) and the Galapagos Islands! Despite all that jetsetting, we both agree that our time in […]
Champagne break
Though we both love a drop of quality champagne, visiting the area that it comes from wasn’t high on our list of places to visit when we started our wohnwagen journey around Europe. It was only when we realised that ‘completing the loop’ by heading back to Graepel via France and western Germany was the […]
Magical Merseault
It began with a gift. Back in the late 1990s James gifted me a wine appreciation course for Christmas, prompted by my budding interest in food and wine. Good fortune saw that the course was run by Sharon Wild, then as now a very enthusiastic wine educator. That educational experience was exciting and illuminating, and […]
The Emperor Has No Clothes
In Hans Christian Anderson’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a gullible Emperor is tricked into believing that a new suit woven by two weavers has threads so fine that they cannot be seen by anyone who is “too stupid and incompetent to appreciate its quality”. There is of course no thread or suit at all, […]
