Our trip to Scotland and Northern England in 2017 was our first serious international foray in eleven years – trips in our own backyard, to New Zealand and Tahiti, don’t really count. We flew to Singapore – my first night ever in an Asian city – and then to mega airline hub Frankfurt and on to Manchester, followed by a drive through the Scottish Midlands – Glasgow and Edinburgh – and then Durham and York and back through Manchester to Singapore. Somewhere in there we ended up in a stone cottage for a week on a peninsula with the Isle of Islay on one side and the Isle of Arran on the other. Of course it all involved more Roman ruins than you could count because my fellow traveller is both a complete Anglophile and a Roman tragic – possibly, though inexplicably, due to her Austrian and German ancestry. All in all, it was a recipe for lots of fun.
Our trip to New Zealand at the end of 2016 whetted our appetite after a long dry spell of staying put – except for our much-loved regional road tours through the smaller towns and cities of Victoria to Adelaide. In August 2017, we took off for Singapore (once again on Singapore Airlines, of course, thanks to Chief Minister Andrew Barr, whose Government had persuaded the airline to be the first to fly internationally from Canberra – no more the need to get to Sydney first).
