Our planned three-week visit to South Africa has been postponed.

For several week prior to trip, Bob had severe leg pains (sciatica) which we feared would make for  most uncomfortable journey and perhaps severely limit our itinerary once we were in country.

We hope to make this journey to one of our favorite destinations later in the year or in 2026.

Many of us as parents have been proud to watch as our children successfully passed major
milestones in their education and graduated from High School and then College. Some of us as
grandparents have been fortunate to witness these same events with the same pride – this
time enhanced, it seems, by the generation separation. This past weekend, Molly and I were
privileged to be present at the Northern Kentucky University Commencement Exercises for the
Chase College of Law – and watch as our granddaughter walked across the stage to receive her
Juris Doctor degree. Hayley C. Shepard JD is the result of three years of hard work at NKU and
the whole family is immensely proud of her achievement – especially her grandparents.
Congratulations Hayley!

More pictures of the event can be found in the Other Posts dropdown menu.

As mentioned in the previous post, we were intent on making our trip to South Africa after having to postpone our earlier Antarctica cruise. Despite last minute cases of bronchitis for both of us, we did indeed make our seventh visit to this beautiful country and had a wonderful vacation. The pace has slowed considerably since our first visit in 2005 but the people, the sights and the variety of South Africa are still worth visiting. We can’t wait to go back.

Our full journal is in the 2024 Journals dropdown menu.

We were forced to cancel (postpone!) our planned Antarctica cruise this month as a result of health problems. Bob had some abdominal pain which was accompanied by some worrying side effects and we concluded that sailing the high seas was perhaps not the best plan at this time. A series of tests has failed to give an absolute diagnosis but the presumed viral infection seems to have abated and we are now recovered and looking forward to a March trip to South Africa.

Our Antarctica cruise has been rescheduled for January 2026!

On December 19, the day after our arrival in England for our Holiday vacation, we were able to attend the wedding of Georgina and Josh Sawyer. Georgina is the older daughter of our nephew Nigel and his wife Sam. We felt fortunate to have been invited to the event and the timing worked perfectly for us. The account of the day, together with several more photographs, can be found in the “Journals 2023” dropdown menu at the top of this page but suffice it to say here that we were honored once again (twice within ten days) to have been witnesses to the wedding of another lovely young couple.

On December 9 of 2023, we took a trip to Birmingham, AL to attend the wedding of our granddaughter, Celia, to her fiancee, Ashlyn.

The ceremony was lovely and the whole day was wonderful. We are so happy for them and wish them all the very best in their marriage.

The journal (with lots more pictures) can be found in the drop down menu under “Journals 2023”.

Have you seen the Northern Lights? No, me neither! But I know someone who has and he has kindly allowed me to post his story on this website. Go to the drop down menu for 2023 Journals and take a look at his account. I am sure that you will find it interesting and there are some amazing pictures. Enjoy.

Springtime in England

Springtime in Wyoming

Springtime (November) in South Africa

At the end of 2021 we spent Christmas and New Year in England where we were able to visit with many of our family and friends. We returned to England in mid-February and stayed until the end of March for a very nice early springtime visit.

In April, we took a driving trip of the American Southwest, visiting Nevada, Arizona, California and New Mexico. On that trip we spent a very pleasant evening  with a work colleague of mine at his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I hadn’t seen Ed since his retirement over thirty years ago so it was a real treat to catch up and recall old times.

In June/July we spent another six weeks at “our” flat in Ilkley, and the second half of the year saw us re-visiting countries beyond the US and the UK for the first time in three years. We had a beautiful drive around Ireland, visiting Northern Ireland for the first time and enjoying some magnificent scenery and gorgeous weather in both North and South. In October we flew to Milan and spent time there as well as in Florence, Bologna (a first) and Venice and, as usual in Italy, we were impressed at the architecture and fascinated by the history.

To complete a rather full year of travel, we spent most of November in South Africa, driving from Pretoria to  Cape Town via Bloemfontein (thereby seeing all three capital cities) and spending time on the Garden Route and covering most of the Wine Route. Unemployment and poverty are still major problems in that country but the people, the magnificent scenery (mountains, plains and coast) and the food and wine make for a most enjoyable trip.

Our journals for each of our trips of the past year are now uploaded to the website. Again, these are often quite lengthy writings prepared for our own use as a memory-jogger, but some aspects may be of interest to a wider audience.

The past two years have been difficult for travel (to say the least) and we have not added any new Posts from places across America or from around the world. That’s not to say that we have eliminated all travel as a result of the pandemic and we have continued to prepare journals for each and every journey. We just got out of the habit of “posting”! We did, in fact, send out an email from our first out-of-town trip (to Kentucky in June 2022) but we received some comments that suggested that we should not be venturing out so soon. Whether that was concern for our safety or for that of others was not obvious, but we put a hold on posts for a while. But we did not stop our travels!

This site now contains the journals for all 2020 and 2021 trips. As we have said in the past,  this is primarily for our use as an archive of our journeys but we are pleased if anyone visits and enjoys.

It took us until May 2021 to travel overseas (five cruises and other trips were cancelled in 2020) but we were finally able to get to England at that time – and twice more in 2020. Travel to other countries seems more difficult (it’s not always been easy to get to England!) but we have plans for trips to Ireland and Italy in 2022 and are hopeful that a more normal schedule will evolve as the pandemic fades. Similarly, we hope that posting will also resume.

Happy Travels

Below is the PDF file for our recent visit to Easter Island.

Easter Island Post