travelling allrite

When you are thirty thousand feet in the air the choice is usually very simple. Do you want the chicken, beef, fish or vegetarian? Usually it's not even that, but it's your choice, limited though it is. Stuck here on the ground, it all depends what in the freezer and what the rest of the family are likely to eat with you. Then you (or your darling partner) have to prepare it yourself. Though we are fortunate to have some pretty decent culinary skills in this house (especially when it comes to my partner) and although I've had some pretty poor meals up in the air recently, if I even felt like eating them at all, I have found myself dreaming of aeroplane meals a bit lately. Even if they give you a descriptive menu, you are never quite sure exactly what you are going to get when you peel off that foil and take your first look at the hot meal deposited on your tray table. It's not like those frozen supermarket meals with the clear wrap or enticing photos on the box. You jus...

This is the first weekend since March that we have been allowed to travel outside our local region. I'm still very wary of COVID-19, but the other two were desperate to get out of the house. On Saturday morning I drove us under clear blue skies down a very busy and, at times, very slow Hume Motorway to Berrima in the Southern Highlands. We joined the socially distanced queue to buy pies at the Gumnut Patisserie near the old post office, then condiments from further down the street, breathed the chill air scented with bare winter poplars and other imported deciduous trees. It was still early, so we continued on, back towards the coast past Fitzroy Falls, where rangers were directing traffic away from the packed carpark, and down the steep and tightly winding path of Moss Vale Road down the escarpment to Kangaroo Valley. I could barely take my eyes of the road, but what glimpses of the view down the valley were spectacular, as if we were flying above the landscape. Past the town of K...