"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
December 21, 2025: The winter solstice was at 7:03 a.m. today in our time zone (PST). The days will now be getting longer every day for the next six months! With the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere quickly approaching,
Tourism Fiji recently launched a contest to promote travel to Fiji using Wilson from the movie Cast Away as the centrepiece. After recovering from our initial surprise (Cast Away was filmed in Fiji? It’s been 25 years?!?) their promotion made
When we visit the Amazon rainforest in Brazil next year, we hope to reach the remote village of Loof Lirpa to visit the Home for Homeless Homing Pigeons. The Amazonian subspecies of the common homing pigeon, Columba livia amazonum, nests
When we created our trip page, Uruguay and the Amazon, we were planning to cruise the Amazon from its mouth up to Manaus, Brazil and back on a large cruise ship. We have had to pivot, and have cancelled that
The feature image above is from the CBC article “‘Elbows up’ rallying cry evokes memories of Mr. Hockey” which provides the origin story for the Elbows Up catchphrase. As mentioned on our Amazon Trip Page, we’ve cancelled our plans to
When we disembarked from the ship on Saturday morning, we had an hour or so to look around Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados. Then headed to the airport for our “on time” flight to Toronto. Not sure why we had
According to Wikipedia: A snowbird is a person who migrates from the colder northern parts of North America to warmer southern locales, typically during the winter. The southern locales include the Sun Belt and Hawaii in the United States, as
We follow Audley Travel, not because we travel with them frequently, but because they always have some inspiring destinations. They recently published an article “5 Travel Trends for 2025“. In case you don’t have the time nor the inclination to
A lot has been written about selecting the perfect camera for travelling. The most recent article is this detailed post from National Geographic: “The 10 best compact cameras“. We have to agree with their selections of of some really great
Sometimes it’s good to return to tourist sights close to home. “Home” for us is Vancouver, BC on Canada’s Pacific coast and we spent the day yesterday hosting relatives and showing them just a few of Vancouver’s splendid attractions, made
Yes, we do keep track of the number of countries that we have visited! After returning from our “England and Ireland” trip we added the Republic of Ireland to our list of UN countries that we have seen and we
After our 3-flight, 40-hour odyssey to return home on South African Airlines and Lufthansa through Jo’burg and Frankfurt, we settled into our post-trip routine. There’s always both pros and cons to arriving home. Let’s get the bad points over with
In our trip planning for our “Namibia and Nearby” trip coming up in 2024, we came across a great article in the Audley Traveller Autumn 2023 edition about Cape Town. We’re looking forward to our first visit to Cape Town,
On our Australia VI and More trip in September and October 2024, we visited four countries, but only one was a new destination for us; Timor-Leste. You can read our posts about Atauro Island and Dili for a description of
The Goroka Festival in Papua New Guinea just finished its 2023 run, and PNG’s The National said “Goroka Show hailed a success“. So we’ve begun making plans to attend the 2024 version a year from now. We’ve started a website
We’ve seen some amazing wildlife on our trips, but sometimes we don’t even have to leave home; the animals come to visit us! One recent weekend, we had a visitor on the front doorstep, and then an hour later another
On our “Barcelona to Berlin” trip we visited the 17th smallest country in the world, Andorra. That was our first visit, so we have updated our “Countries Visited” counter on the website to 121. We also visited the second smallest
Every year on June 23rd, Catalonians celebrate La Nit de Sant Joan, the evening before the feast day of St. John the Baptist. Of course this Saint’s day is celebrated everywhere in the Catholic world, but the celebrations of the
Celebrating the first anniversary of the end of a war in Canada (a war that nobody even knew about!). Apparently, when we were off in Australia for most of 2022, Canada quietly signed a peace treaty ending a war that
The brown hyenas of Kolmanskop, Namibia We shared a BBC Facebook post about the only remaining inhabitants of the former diamond mining town of Kolmanskop, Namibia. You can also watch that video on the BBC YouTube channel. (Link at the