A Traveller’s Eye, A Thinker’s Heart
I like to tell stories. I like to take photos.
And I like to share them. Enjoy.
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THE SHUTTERED TERRE
The shutters were closed. Not broken, not hanging off their hinges, not weathered to bare grey — closed, and lately painted, and latched from the inside by somebody who had gone away and meant to come back. Padma, Hans and I walked through three villages in one long cloudy day and I do not think…
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TWO STONES FROM ONE VALLEY
Padma and I have seen a lot of churches in Europe. Spectacular, yes – vaulted, gilded, hushed – but after a while they blur into one another. So when our Swiss host Hans suggested we visit a church, this one up a side valley in Ticino, we didn’t exactly leap for the car keys. Then…
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THE VALLEY BEFORE THE DROP
There’s a particular kind of friend who, when you turn up in his country, doesn’t ask what you’d like to see. He has already decided. I have known Hans Striker since 1981, when I met him on a train in Mexico. He was a medical student then, working his way through an extended holiday of…
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ON THE TRAIL OF MARTIN LUTHER
Padma and I look at a different kind of map these days when planning our travel destinations. Instead of maps with tourist attractions we look at the map showing the incidence of COVID. And after studying the map we could tell that the former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt had very low rates…
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STRANDED!
Padma, Joseph and I have something in common with 19,000 … or 100,000 depending on who is counting … Aussies. We can’t get home. Yet there are plenty of airlines eager to fly us to Australia and no shortage of hotels who will quarantine us and who are desperate to fill empty rooms. In July,…
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NEGATIV
‘Are we being responsible?’ Padma asked me on the first day of our journey through France and Spain. I thought for a long time and tried to spin it so that I could justify our travels during a global pandemic. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Responsible people would stay home.’ But like tens of thousands of other…
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PARTING SHOTS FROM ASTURIAS
In the end COVID won. We have returned home to Germany. We had hoped to keep travelling with no fixed return dates, but it wasn’t meant to be. When we started our journey during the first days of August, COVID was rearing its ugly head again but seemed somewhat contained. It certainly wasn’t stopping Europe’s…
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LUNCH ON THE CANTABRIAN SEA
Visitors to Asturias wake up with a nice dilemma as they plan their day: mountains or the sea. From our base in Gijon, Padma and I could have had either within a few minutes drive. On our last day in Asturias we chose the sea. Our local friends, Terri and Juan, suggested we try Puerto…
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RUTA DEL ALBA … WITH FRIENDS
Earlier in the year when Padma and I starting dreaming of a home in Spain, I joined a Facebook group of expats in Asturias. Someone posted a question about buying property and a local named Juan provided a detailed response. I clicked some links and found Juan’s website and figured he’d be the sort of…
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