Month: May 2016

Alaska

Fairbanks

Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska and is pretty much right in the geographic centre of the state. It’s a fairly nondescript city of about 100,000 people. Summer temperatures can get up as high  as 30C and in winter it’s a very cold -40C (coincidentally, this is also -40F). While we have been […]

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Alaska

Riding the Alaska Railroad

Our 3 1/2 hour flight to Anchorage from Seattle was uneventful. The only remarkable thing was the manner in which the Cabin Manager gave the in-flight announcements. She spoke so quickly that I couldn’t understand her. I think as a child, she was inoculated with a gramophone needle. It was as though she was a […]

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USA

Catching Up With Keiko

We had a great time today with my friend Keiko who traveled across from her home in the south eastern corner of Washington State to spend the day with us. She joined us for our day out to two of Seattle’s most outstanding sights – the Boeing Factory and the Chihuly Glass Sculpture Gardens. I […]

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USA

Touring Seattle

I know it’s possible to find our own way around a new city but the easiest way to get a quick overview of the place we are visiting is to go on a city tour. That’s what we did yesterday.  We started with a visit to the ‘Space Needle’. This is Seattle’s version of the […]

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USA

Our First Day in Seattle

Well, after many hours of travel, we reached Seattle yesterday afternoon where we will stop over for a few days. I remember this as a lovely scenic city and I’m keen to see some more of it. I’m very impressed with the solid history of business organisations that are headquartered in the Seattle area. They […]

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Every Day Life

Isn’t Technology Wonderful?

I’m all packed and ready to head off on our next adventure, ultimately ending up in the Yukon in Northern Canada. As I was sorting out my electronics (camera, computer, iPhone etc)i I was thinking back to the old days when i had to lug a lot more stuff around on my business trips. I […]

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Uncategorized

Our Next Adventure

We are off on another adventure on Saturday and here’s a clue a to our ultimate destination. For those of you old enough to remember, it’s Sergeant Preston of the Yukon with his dog King.  We’ll be in the Yukon in about four weeks time but we have some serious traveling to do before we […]

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Family

The Creativity of a Child

My grand daughter Violet (aged five years) is now in her first year of school. She has begun to learn maths and her teacher involved her class by using a worksheet that required the children to work out some addition equations such as 8+6=14 and 5+3=8. Violet then had to create two more equations to […]

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Bushwalking Local Getaways

Bushwalking Around Marysville

The little town of Marysville is about 100 km NE of Melbourne. It was virtually wiped out in the bushfires of ‘Black Saturday’ in 2009. It’s slowly coming back, but I guess that only about half of the original number of houses have been rebuilt and there are still lots of vacant house lots throughout […]

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Every Day Life Family Japan

A School Teacher’s Influence

I’m with Miss Yoshiko Denogami who has been visiting us over the last few days. In Japan, she is more formally known as Denogami Sensei. (Sensei  is a Japanese honorific and a word that is literally translated as “person born before another”. In general usage, it is used with proper form, after a person’s name […]

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