Hidcote Manor
Seven years ago, I suggested to my mother I would take her on a trip to England to visit some of the famous gardens. With one thing and another, we never got round to it. Until recently, when my father reminded us of it (partly because he wants to go on a bird-watching trip to Southern Spain with my brother and had a slightly bad conscience towards my mother). I went to the travel agent’s yesterday and came home with information about three different trips we might take. Each is a bus tour, and would take us to quite different parts of the country. I have already been to several of the places scheduled in each case, albeit not with the garden focus, and I definitely don’t mind going back! (more…)
During a recent visit to Malta, I visited the Casa Rocca Piccola in Valletta. It’s a sixteenth-century palace privately owned by the family of the Marquis de Piro, who still live there and have turned the public rooms into a museum. You can only visit it with a guided tour, but as our guide was the marquis himself, and the tour was both charming and fascinating, I for one didn’t mind! 
This week, I had to go on a two-day business trip – my first of that sort. Now I own a perfectly useful rucksack, which I take on weekend trips if there’s not enough stuff to fill a suitcase. But a rucksack not smart. So I took out my largest handbag and tried to fit in everything I would need for two days and one night. 
I went away on holiday this week, and had a fabulous time. Did some tramping, did some shopping, ate mussels, and even got some review reading in. That’s all good. But what made my holiday great were the people I met; specifically, at the B&Bs where I stayed. 
Although we live more than 200 miles from Munich, we are Bavarians, so this year, we did what all Bavarians (in my husband’s opinion it’s an act of patriotic duty) should do: we visited the Oktoberfest. In order to avoid the sad crush of the weekends, we scheduled our work so we had an afternoon off, jumped on the train, and off we were. 
I would go to Antarctica. It looks so COOL. (Absolutely no pun intended. I swear.)
One of my favorite places to spend a day or even a few hours visiting is 
The first week of school holidays was entirely devoted to sleeping and reading, in that order. But the second week I got my hair cut, went to the National Army Museum, looked at my calendar, and realized I hadn’t ventured beyond 30 km of town and holidays were almost over. So I packed a bag and drove across the North Island to Napier. 
