Blogs of the Travel Bugs

Travel is a big part of our life. It was travel that brought Susan and me together in the first place. I had been playing cricket in the UK, Europe and South Africa in the late 1980s. Unbeknown to me then, Susan was in roughly the same parts of the planet at the same time. We both returned to New Zealand in 1989 and both ended up back in Dunedin then. Not long after that we met.
And what did we talk about? Places we’d been and things that had happened along the way.
After we got married it wasn’t long before we headed off to live in Hong Kong, and of course this gave us a whole continent to explore that neither of us knew too much about before then. So by the time Ryan came along in 1997 we already had the travel bug well and truly, and we are now doing our best to pass it on to the boys.
I think we are winning on that score.
We figure they are going to learn more about life by experiencing first hand how people live in far flung places than they will from the couple of days in the classroom they might miss each time. That’s why they have kept diaries on tour – to record what they see and one day some of those things might take on more significance than the roller coasters and ice creams after all.
And it’s not just the places. It’s the people, the colour of their skin, the language they speak, the wealth and the poverty, the history and the heritage. The huge diversity of it all – the way each place out there is different to the last. The excitement and fascination.
Here are some of our blogs and photos from those times, which are some of the fondest memories of my life.