Today is the day! Today we fly! After roughly six months of planning, it’s time to head off on our family’s next big adventure—travelling through Italy, Croatia, and Singapore. We have a long day ahead of us. First up is a four-hour drive to the airport. Then we fly to Milan with a brief stopover in Singapore to stretch our legs and change planes before continuing the flight. Milan is not our ultimate destination, though. Once we arrive and collect our bags (yes—they will make it 🤞🤞), we will catch a train up to Varenna on Lake Como, which will be our base for the first few days. ...

So… we have moved… again… Hopefully this will be for the last time. I found I was not getting value from paid commercial site hosting services - so have decided to migrate my entire blog out to GitHub with GitHub Actions pushing my statically generated site to CloudFlare Pages for hosting - which is free and simple to manage. Migration to the new environment has been a slow process with a lot of learning along the way. Everything has come together now and I am pretty happy with the outcome. ...

We have finished renovating our old home here at Wordpress.com, and have now moved back in. The old place at SquareSpace is still lingering, but will soon disappear for good. Over the course of the past few weeks (or weekends rather) there has been a lot of work happening in the background to make the transition back into our old home as painless as possible… I expect there will be some pain at some point, but for the moment I think I have nailed most things down. ...

So I have been in Durban for a few days now. Mostly work meetings with clients and not much down time to get out and see the place (im not hear for leisure!). We have ventured out and visited a number of the local cafes to grab a meal here and there and to get out of the hotel - but for the most nothing beyond the walls of the compound we are staying in or the offices of our clients. ...

Tonight I boarded a flight from Melbourne destined for Durban, South Africa - via Perth (on Virgin Australia) and Johannesburg (on South African Airlines). This will be my first time on the African continent (only Antarctica left now!!) - and im not really sure what to expect. So many stories, some good and some bad. This is a work trip however, and I am not anticipating much time for rest and relaxation or sight-seeing - but will endeavour to find some time to take a brief look around Durban one there, and possibly pick up a few gifts for the family back home. ...

Earlier in the week (Monday 17th Aug) we left New York behind us (sad to leave but we have to move on), and flew across the country to Los Angeles. We weren’t actually staying in L.A. but just south in Anaheim as we planed to take Archie to Disneyland. We arrived into our hotel in the early evening and checked in. We had a large suite on the top floor which was quite big compared to all the places we had stayed at on the trip - the only downside was, while being two rooms, it was actually only a single bed room with two queen sized beds - we got over that pretty quickly though. ...

Updated 24-Aug-2015: As promised, more pictures have now been added to this post. Sorry for the delay in getting this next blog post published. There was so much to see and do in New York and we were constantly on the go so by the time we got home to our apartment each night we were buggered - and the last thing I felt like doing was sitting down in front of the computer - so I have saved it all up and have put it together as one big blog post. ...

Last night was our final night in London. Laura and I left Archie with Mum and Jo and then headed out to Soho to find the London Gin Club - something Laura had kindly tracked down for me and thought it would be a great way to spend our last night in London. The club is in an old small pub - pretty casual and unpretentious - which was exactly what we were looking for. ...

So we arrived into London on Thursday afternoon (6th August) from Paris after catching the EuroStar train across the channel. We were expecting a little more from the EuroStar – the name builds up a certain expectation – and we were left wanting. It probably didn’t help that the air conditioning in our carriage was on the blink either – making for quite a warm journey indeed. Thankfully one of the staff members was extremely helpful and did everything he could to make our journey more comfortable. He initially started handing out bottles of water, but seeing the sweat pumping out of Archie he decided to try and move us. After a little exercise in seat logistics he eventually found us two sets of two seats – we wouldn’t all be sitting together, but at least we would all be a little more comfortable in an better air conditioned carriage. The journey would have been horrible without this – as Archie was really getting quite irritable in the heat. ...

Today has been much hotter than yesterday - about 34c - and after the big day we had yesterday we decided to take it a little easier and just hit a few of the sights - with the Eiffel Tower the first on the list. We headed off reasonably early from the apartment (while it was still cool) and headed across the river, past Notre Dame, and then onto the train station we thought would take us straight to the Eiffel Tower - unfortunately that part of the line (and the station) are closed for works… there go those plans and our early start. ...