Another bucket list location ticked off, Lyme Regis on the stunning Jurassic Coast. It’s where the rugged cliff tops and coastlines of West Dorset and East Devon meet. Bucolic Thomas Hardy countryside with ancient castles, medieval churches, impossibly cute villages and gorgeous seaside towns. Perhaps none more beautiful than Lyme Regis, the so called ‘Pearl…
Author: paulandanthony
We're recently early retired from long and exhausting careers in Brand Design Strategy and TV Producing / Writing. After two long years of being trapped by COVID in our home town of Sydney Australia, we're ready to unfurl our wings and fly off on new adventures that will take us first up to Far North Queensland then the UK and Mexico - revisiting favourite places we haven't been to in over 30 years. Now living in Far North Queensland, Australia.
Deiá and the Serra de Tramuntana
After a couple of days in sunny Palma we headed out of town, having been picked up by good friends to drive across the island and over the mountains to the magical hilltop village of Deiá where they’ve been living on and off for some 10 years. We’ve been looking forward to coming to Deiá…
Ciutat de Mallorca
I can’t believe we haven’t been to Mallorca before. After all the years of travelling, arriving in beautiful ancient Palma de Mallorca (Ciutat de Mallorca) is somewhat of a revelation. Capital of the Balearic Islands, Palma was first founded by the Romans in 123 B.C., but of course given its strategic position in the Mediterranean,…
Charleston and the Churches
It would be hard to pick a more bucolic English setting than Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex. Once the home of Vanessa Bell, her lover Duncan Grant and, as was their modernist way, his lover David Garnett. This was a very unconventional household for 1916. Part of the Bloomsbury Group, they were some of the…
Ancient Rye and The Barren Nuclear Wasteland of Dungeness
Eastwards along the south coast from Hastings lies the old sea port of Rye, founded in 1289 and a member of the Cinque Ports, a confederation of English Channel ports (Hastings, New Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich) dating back to around 1350. Rye, a royal dockyard and shipyard provided half of the ships and mariners…
A Little Unorthodox In St. Leonards-On-Sea
There’s a gorgeously unorthodox Bed & Breakfast in St. Leonards-On-Sea (near Hastings) that’s like a time portal to the 1880’s and the dizzying highly decorated camp of Victorian England. It all gets even more OTT when greeted by the very Orthodox owner, Aleksandr, a recently ordained Russian Orthodox Priest, an imposing and slightly disconcerting sight in…
The Battle For Hastings
The gorgeous Old Town of Hastings in Sussex is set between two imposing chalk cliffs and serviced by a couple of creaky old funicular railways. They link the old-school seaside town with the imposing Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian villas up on the grassy hill tops looking out across the hazy English Channel towards France. There’s…
Six Months On – We’re Officially ‘Troppo!’
Six months on and we’ve well and truly settled into Troppo life here at Clifton Beach, Far North Queensland. We appear to have survived the ‘Big Wet’ (wetter than normal by all accounts), unscathed and thankfully unflustered. Honestly, not nearly as bad as it had been made out to be. We’re two Cyclones down –…
Gion and Miyagawacho – On The Temple Trail
We’ve had a wonderful week in gorgeous Kyoto. It’s been cold, especially coming from FNQ, but we’ve thoroughly enjoyed rugging up with long-forgotten winter coats, scarves, gloves and hats – all required in these chilly sub-zero mornings! Sadly, we missed the heavy snow which Tokyo copped this week but perhaps that’s a godsend as getting…
Temples, Shrines and Pagodas – The Ultimate Torii Gate Experience!
It’s an easy ten or so minute local train ride out of Kyoto station to Inari and a gentle walk up to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, ‘the ultimate Torii gate experience’, famous for its 10,000 vermilion Torii gates that snake up Mount Inari some 233 metres. Ok, so the train out of Kyoto station was…
Travels With My Ant 