We had the traditional Christmas at Rona’s, there were 14 people this year as Margaret’s daughter Sharon was over with her three boys, and also Pauline’s sister Sue was here with Jared. A lot of work for Auntie Rona! The day went really well, we had roast lamb and roast pork (I did the pork,)…

Well it’s been a very long time since I posted on this blog, in the meantime we decided we liked Josselin so much, we bought a house there!. So we stopped off in Josselin on our way to a conference in Chester towards the end of 2011 and asked our friendly local real estate agent…

We’ve been in Kuopio for about six days now. We had a great trip on the ferry from Stockholm to Turku, it takes about 12 hours but we had a cabin so we slept for a couple of hours, the rest of the time we read books, Pauline did some work, and we had breakfast…

Well the time came and with heavy hearts we said farewell to our friends in Josselin, our next door neighbour Mimi Bonnefoy, our french teacher Francoise and her husband Jean-Pierre, Monsieur the butcher whose name I was never sure of, Phillippe our excellent barman and his lovely wife Catherine, and their son Matteo, and many…

We came home from Guédelon via a night in Chartres, famous for probably the finest gothic cathedral in France. I will remember it for the excellent oysters I had at dinner that night! Our friend Kathryn Bethune popped over from Wales, on the train. Two and a half hours from London to Paris on the…

Pauline spotted an item about this castle in the excellent english language Breton newspaper we used to buy occasionally, and we thought it sounded interesting. Basically, a project to build a 13th century castle using only the period construction techniques and materials, you’d have to say it’s a very ambitious, not to say insane idea.…

We found this place at a bargain rate, I suspect because of the recession. It was only about an hour from Florence, but very much in the country. We stocked up on food from a local villaqe and blobbed out for three days, sitting by the pool. On the last night we had an excellent…

After a happy day at the Vespa Museum, we all hopped in the car and drove to James’ hotel in Pisa, which was up a very narrow one way street and I had great difficulty extracting the car after we’d dropped off our luggage. Anyway, we had a rest and then walked to the Piazza…

Pontedera (named because it was built near a bridge over the river Era) is a very pleasant little industrial town of about 28000 people, which is the headquarters of the Piaggio company. The buildings tend to be orange with lovely green shutters, and sometimes tiny balconies. The Piaggio factory, established in 1884, produced very stylish…

We were staying in the Ibis Milano Ca Granda, a 15 minute tram ride from the Stazione di Milano Centrale depending on the traffic. The hotel was ok but a bit quirky in an Italian manner, for instance Pauline asked if she could borrow an iron, as she wanted to iron some clothes to wear…