This year the Eurovision Song Contest was held in Vienna, Austria and it coincided with a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK so there was no need to rush back home on the Sunday . . . . although as we are both not working at present we could have, in hindsight, booked a flight back at anytime! Given we did not know what our employment situation was going to be when we booked our flights to Austria we booked a late afternoon departure from Gatwick which seemed a sens...

A day at the coast in Devon seemed like a great idea and despite the odd rain shower it really was a lovely day out. The trip with CrossCountry Trains from Derby to Newton Abbot was on board a High Speed Train - always a great way to travel - and we were speeding along the famous sea wall section of railway in Devon about three hours after leaving Derby. This really is a great piece of railway to travel along especially when on board a train that you can open the...

It was a real shame that a very strong headwind delayed my flight from Melbourne to Perth by around 45 minutes. There was then congestion on the ramp at Perth airport adding extra minutes of delay to my already tight schedule in Western Australia of just four hours! I was being met at Perth by Warren and Monica, two people Heather and I met in South America a few years ago when travelling by boat on the Beagle Channel from Argentina to Chile. They really are a g...

Thirteen hours in a Boeing 777 after leaving Abu Dhabi, two dinners, one sandwich, two films (Birdman and The Theory of Everything) and all of the Eurovision 2015 songs (at least twice) later Etihad flight EY460 was in Melbourne. I even managed some decent sleep - woohoo! The flight routing took us from Abu Dhabi over Muscat in Oman, southern India passing Chennai and then after running parallel with Indonesia headed to Australia crossing the coast close to, poss...

Flying from Manchester to Abu Dhabi with Etihad (Airbus A330) was pretty good and the on board service in economy was on par with other major middle/far east carriers. The only downside was my seat, 31A, which was supposedly a window seat but alas all I had was a grey wall to look at for nearly seven hours. I must log this with the SeatGuru website which did not flag this up this problem when I selected the seat when making my booking. It was then a good job the ...