We had a splendid final night in Dublin, enjoyed our welcome drinks at the bar and had our first (very small) cooked breakfast in months on Monday morning at the Holiday Inn Express, Dublin city centre. And made a couple of bacon and sausage sandwiches to have for lunch. We arranged a 2 pm check out and ended up nattering with the GM for 10 minutes or so… There was an enormous taxi van in the rank just outside the hotel which was handy but the 15 minute ...

By the time we'd spent 6 weeks in sunny, windy, seaside Dun Laoghaire… it was time to move on. Little did we realise we would end up spending almost 3 months in Ireland. What can we say - we're popular. But we are fully realised adults these days and we've also realised we are 100% city people. We like the buzz, the shops, the walking, the food for the eyes - all of it. We were robbed of it during the four month lockdown in Sydney and are still catching u...

What a trip! Long but good. We could have flown direct from Marrakech to Dublin with Ryanair - but between the 8 hour delay on our incoming flight to Morocco, the ever present threat of strikes and the antisocial hour of the arrival (which would have involved half a night in a hotel as we'd arrive at 1 am or so)… Instead we flew to Istanbul, had a 7 hour layover for a great snooze and a shower in the lounge, and then on to Dublin. Lots of movies, nice food...

Well. That's that. We've decided that the next time we have a Moroccan sojourn (and there definitely will be a next time), we will definitely spend our whole 3 months in Essaouira - it is just beautiful there. And the climate was perfect - 10 degrees lower than what we're heading to in Marrakech. Fresh winds every day off the ocean. Easy to eat well for 10 euro per night for two and a beautiful beach front walk to do every morning. On our way out of town we had...

Oui oui Monsieur - after a tiny break of… well… 10 years, we are revisiting the beautiful, windswept blue and white city of Essa'oui'ra on the coast of Morocco. Well eventually we revisited - but in these PC (post-covid) trying travelling times, it was not without drama. So many years of blissful, more or less, on time travel came to a grinding halt with the overnight stop in Lisbon and it made us think connecting flights were more risk than were w...