Dublin be done. We thought we might be hard pressed to find things to do for a 5 week stay - but by purchasing the Heritage Cards from the OPW / Office of Public Works, we've been run off our feet with new places to see. Between the weekend city-breakers, the people coming to town to do their Christmas shopping and the plethora of language schools that proliferate in the city, Dublin seems to be more and more peoply by the day. We were both looking forward to ...

We took the coach up to Dublin on Wednesday (31 Oct) - 3 hours of numb posteriors and a reminder of why we don't fly in Coach/Economy class these days. Put simply, we are soft. We met our new hosts and had a look around the apartment and got a set of keys. We proceeded with just our cabin bags to the Holiday Inn Express (on our IHG points). The Holiday Inn was experimenting and had live music in the bar - incredible fun for a couple of hours and even had a Guinn...

We were sad to leave Paris (it's first-equal with Sydney in terms of favourite places in the world) but happy to arrive in Ireland. James had his 50th birthday in Ireland back in 2015 when we really started in on the housesitting caper - so it's a coincidence that we can be there again for his 60th - that and Ireland and Malta are seemingly the only places in Europe where it's possible to buy 'proper' Christmas nummies like iced christmas cake, plum puddding and ...

A lovely woman we sat for in Paris in April (in the 3rd arrondissement!) asked us if we wanted to come back for a month in Sept/Oct. We had been looking to book our annual trip north, but until this came along we really didn't have a destination, so we almost took her hand off at the wrist at the chance to return. Lovely dog called Willie (though he's enormous and somewhat terrifying to look at). We also call him "Hey get off my foot" and more commonly...

Au revoir Sydney, Paris - Here we come! We look back to when we first started travelling and simply don't recall nerves. Given our experience these days I wonder if I'm nervous when we head off simply because of extensive years of experience and a well baked in awareness of all that could go wrong. Or I can simply blame Covid, when the world came to a screeching stop and the borders slammed shut - enough to give anyone ongoing heebie jeebies about the great unkno...