While we’re all safe at home for the foreseeable future and with no new travel on the horizon for some time, it’s a good time to look back at our past travels and one of my favourite ways of doing that is by making scrapbooks. Actually, I’ve discovered I have a surprising amount of scrapbook … More Stay At Home Storytelling: too many photos in a travel scrapbook
The other day I told you about my first trip to the Altitude Festival in 2010 and now we’re fast-forwarding to my last. The year is 2013, I’m back at Altitude Festival, back at my snowboarding lessons because I’m still not capable of going out on the mountains by myself and I happen to have … More Stay At Home Storytelling: My highest ever paraglide
Last year I was briefly employed as an outdoor activity instructor. I didn’t actually do any teaching but I was paid for two days of training to enlarge my repertoire from just archery and fencing. The bit of training I was most excited about was climbing. I used to climb a bit. When I was … More Stay At Home Storytelling: learning to boulder
A few weeks ago, I did a post on my DofE practice expedition and this is the real thing. The expedition is both the most dreaded and the best known of all the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award components. As a general rule, I think it’s the last thing to get done. The typical vision of … More Stay At Home Storytelling: My DofE Bronze expedition
I considered going to the Altitude Festival this year – for obvious reasons, it’s a good thing I never quite made up my mind to do it. There’s nothing seasonal about this but since we can’t travel at the moment, let’s relive old travel stories. This is Altitude 2010, my first ever visit to the … More My first snowsports holiday
Last June, on my way to my camping weekend in north Devon, I bought an inflatable kayak from the the magical middle aisle at Lidl. I didn’t try it out in Devon; I have enough sense to recognise that water wild and fierce enough for surfing isn’t going to be good for inflatable kayaking and … More Stay At Home Storytelling: how to set out to sea in an inflatable kayak
I thought at the beginning of the year that I’d bring back Travel Library and now the world is at it is, I’m actually posting this one that I wrote in January. And yes, obviously when bringing a series back in 2020, I’m going to start with a children’s book from 1886! Susan Coolidge’s What … More Travel Library: What Katy Did Next
One of the parts of connecting with cultures that we the Anglophones tend not to engage with so much is the language. As a person with a language background, that’s something I like to talk about from time to time. And as I look around my office even as I type this sentence, I can … More Stay At Home Storytelling: How to learn languages
While I was writing about my camp at home over Easter, I wrote in a bit more detail about all my cooking and eating stuff – enough that I realised it should go in its own post. This is that post. This is my stove. It’s a really small basic screw-on gas stove with little … More Stay At Home Storytelling: My camp kitchen
Every year I swear that this will be the year I do something adventurous and new at least once a month. Well, that’s not happening this year. It’s April 27th when this post is published but it’s March 29th when I’m writing it. Are we still in lockdown? Probably. However, last year I did make … More Stay At Home Storytelling: A Segway forest adventure
I Am A Polar Bear 