Vistas from Vienna #1
Looking up in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Everywhere you look is something wonderful. But for the truly surreal, take an after-hours tour at night, where your…
A glass (or four) half full of…Austrian bubbles
Lunch at Hollmann Salon, a designer restaurant in a quiet cobble-stoned courtyard in Vienna’s 1st district, couldn’t go past today without a glass of bubbles. It…
Winging my way to Vienna
Nothing quite makes travelling long distances easier than a lie-flat bed/seat. And occasionally, I am lucky enough to be given an upgrade (or as the check-in staff…
Happy birthday, Queensland!
It’s Queensland Week, a week when my adopted home state celebrates its separation from Australia’s first state, New South Wales, on 6 June 1859. To celebrate, the state’s…
Once in a lifetime
While the world is oohing and aahing over that little black speck called Venus moving across the Sun, I’m just revelling in the once-in-a-lifetime chance to…
A glass half full of…sake!
I’ve always considered sake to be one of those drinks that should be treated with extreme caution. Potentially lethal for the uninitiated. So I eye the…
A glass half full of…what?
There’s a double meaning behind my choice of blog name. Of course, the obvious one is that I’m an optimist at heart. I always tend to…
Head over heels
One of my favourite travel images…for the sheer exhuberance of being in this beautiful place, an atoll in the Cook Islands (one of my favourite places…
Goodbye to my faithful companion
My trusty old suitcase, which has been my constant companion to airports, hotels, cruise ships, road trips and more for about a decade, has finally cried “enough!”. I…
NZ’s expansive pathway to the heavens
With all the talk of this week’s “super moon”, I wanted to share this wonderful image from Wellington’s Carter Observatory, taken by Sally Eyre. In Maori, the…
A Glass Half Full 