Tag Archives: Travel Blog

A Crusader castle? It didn’t feel real to me; it was as if the pictures in an old children’s storybook had come to life. My visit to Shobak Montreal Castle – now known as Qal’at ash-Shawbak in Arabic (the nomenclature and spellings vary wildly) – caused me to take a deep-dive back into my vinyl […]

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I’m not sure what impressed me most: the artistic beauty; the architectural complexity; or the mind-boggling age. Mahabalipuram (Thirukadalmallai, Mamallapuram), one of the oldest cities in India, is a coastal town on the Bay of Bengal in Tamil Nadu, and home 40 ancient monuments and temples dated to the 7th and 8th centuries. UNESCO- listed […]

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I’m very lucky: I live in a region with a magnificent coastline, lined with national and civic parks which are criss-crossed by walking trails. Even so, I have to be reminded to get out of my own immediate back yard from time to time! That is why I am so pleased that my local branch […]

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“Life is a journey, not a destination.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance They say that getting there is half the fun and that the journey is more important than the destination. That may well be true, but it helps to keep the destination in mind when you need the motivation to keep going on a […]

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I always struggled with Greek mythology: there was an irrationality and impetuosity to the behaviour of the Gods that didn’t sit well with my conservative upbringing. And, having been trained to ‘be good’ and to ‘work hard’, the concept of being unable to escape one’s fate – regardless of one’s behaviour – was an anathema! […]

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