The world is your oyster, or so they say and I know when that little bit of grit first irritates like a grain of sand between the toes and develops into a full itch it's time to pack the truck or buy a ticket ,break out a fresh moleskin and head off into the wild blue yonder.
Travel is a family tradition with the migratory Scottish ancestors leaping onto trains, planes and boats and four generations later as a family we still do similar at the drop of a hat. I have a photos of Great Uncle Bill wearing leather helmet and goggles sitting astride a goggle eyed moterbike surrounded by snow in then Persia, of my dad in the starched white uniform of a ship's doctor looking out across the Suez canal and of my son on snow peaked Kilimanjaro.
So this is what the blog is all about. A desire to travel and step off the familiar road onto, as Robert Frost described it 'the road less taken' and most of the time I'll do this alone. All sounds very antisocial but usually it's an opposite experience and as one bright spark at the road house in Menzies said ' a sheila travellin' alone hey' propmptly followed by an invitation to visit his gold mine.
So this year it's back to Lake Ballard in March and with any luck a week or so later in the year in East Timor where a giant statue of Christ stands with open arms above Dili and a Timorese woman has a shop in a tree.
