Category Archives: Nature

<<Knock, knock, knock!>> “The cooking class is starting upstairs,” said one of the boat’s crew through a closed cabin door downstairs. “I guess the optional cooking class is not so ‘optional’!” I whispered to my husband, laughing. We were already standing in the dining room of our purpose-built traditional Chinese junk, waiting. I was keen to watch […]

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When travelling in search of natural phenomena, luck is everything. My husband and I visited Iceland last March for a three-day visit. We were already going to be in England during the northern winter, so when I saw the package “deals” to see the strong>Northern Lights and to go Whale Watching on the North Atlantic, […]

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Winter in England can be grim: cold, wet, and dark early. Finding something to do outdoors with young people in inclement weather can be tricky. I was staying in Hereford late last winter and had friends coming to visit me. I wasn’t sure what they would be interested in, so I sent them a list of […]

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Iceland, that tiny Nordic island nation in the North Atlantic, sits just barely outside the Arctic Circle and has more glacier-covered land than all of continental Europe. With a terrain that has been ground flat by successive periods of glaciation and rendered relatively tree-less by human predation, the winter landscape looks cold and white and eerily bleak from […]

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Another year draws to a close… I find that the period of “limbo” between Christmas and New Year is a good time to reflect on the past: on the trials and accomplishments of the year that is finishing. This time in 2014, I wrote: “This last year has been a turbulent one: wars, acts of terror and insanity, […]

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