Back in Holland for the Tulip Festival

We made another trip to Holland. Again, it was sensational to be able to spend some more quality time with Oma.

We made a point of lining our trip up to coincide with the Dutch Tulip Festival. It was thoroughly worthwhile. We spent a day strolling through the gorgeous gardens of Keukenhof and tried to make the most of the macro lens.

The festival was just beginning to come to an end so missed the opportunity of seeing the fields in full bloom and getting the clichéd ‘field of tulips with a windmill in the background’ shot, but that took nothing away from the gardens in Keukenhof. The colours were vibrant, the landscaping and design of the gardens was beautiful, and there was quite an amazing range of unique flowers. All in all, it was a wonderful experience and well worth making the effort to line our trip up.

Plastic Fantastic - Life through a Lomo

From top left, clockwise - 1) Truman's Brewery, Brick Lane, London 2) The Cotswolds 3) Flying 'home' - Melbourne to London 4) Garden in Yarra Glen

Some of you out there may have seen Daniel carrying around a new camera that Monique gave him for Christmas...a Lomography Diana F+...if you’re interested, read up on the history...it’s pretty interesting!

Having now shot four rolls of film, the learning curve has been painful. The first two rolls were 75% failure, thankfully the second two rolls were much better. Shooting on film is amazing – such a drastically different mindset from digital, and the anticipation of waiting to get the film processed in palpable.

The coolest thing though is the images... soft focus, vignetting, low contrast and high saturation gives the images such an incredible emotive quality. It is becoming quite addictive!

As English as it gets - The Cotswolds

We enjoyed at sensational weekend away in the Cotswolds over Easter (yes, we know it’s been a while since we’ve updated the blog...sincerest apologies!!).

Anyway, the Cotswolds were amazing - quintessentially English in every possible way. Green rolling hills, quaint villages, countless tea rooms, spring lambs, daffodils, ancient pubs....even the weather was classically English – overcast, cold and drizzly all weekend. Normally that would have been pretty irritating...but for some reason it wouldn’t have felt quite right any other way. 

We’re not exaggerating by saying that being in the Cotswolds is a little bit like stepping into a story book. It’s almost hard to image that such a places exists outside of fairy tales and children’s stories – so much so that when we saw a Royal Mail van parked in a small village, we half expected to see Postman Pat and his black and white cat.

We spent four days meandering from town to town, spending a fair chuck of time in tea rooms and pubs – it was that sort of weekend.  

The Lake District

We decided to make the most of our trip up to the Lake District to see Tommy Emmanuel by doing a tour of the area on the Sunday. We booked in for a day-long coach tour that took us to ten different lakes in the region and through a huge amount of genuinely spectacular scenery.  It was a good decision. We were very lucky to get a really clear day, which is apparently quite uncommon for this time of year.

The area itself was really beautiful, featuring some of the most dramatic scenery that we have seen so far. The lakes were gorgeous, the mountains spectacular and the medieval villages very quaint.

We had a sensational weekend. 

Tommy Emmanuel

Monique gave Daniel the greatest birthday present ever…tickets to see a Tommy Emmanuel master class and concert in the Lake District.

Firstly, seeing Tommy up close at the master class was just incredible.  Daniel arrived at the venue an hour early and got a seat front and centre – literally one meter away and directly in front. Aside from being blown away by the sheer brilliance and genius of his playing and song writing (refer video!), we were equally blown away by the quality of the man. He arrived at the master class and walked in the front door carrying his own guitars…very humble.

Tommy-fever continued later in the evening when were having dinner. We ate at a restaurant next to the venue and we joked that it would be funny if the great man walked in. From where we were sitting, Monique could see the door, but Daniel couldn’t. We were just starting our main course when Monique whispers ‘Tommy’s just walked in!’, to which Daniel replied ‘No he’s not…stop messing around’. Daniel barely got the words out of his mouth when Tommy strolls across the restaurant, sees Daniel at the table, and recognizes him from the master class and waves hello. Daniel froze, lost his composure, went bright red, and spent the rest of the meal giggling like a school girl.

After dinner, we made our way to the concert, which as expected was brilliant. We lined up afterwards to get his autograph and a photo. All in all, it was a brilliant experience and an absolute life-time highlight. 

The doors of Europe

It may sound like an obvious statement….but we saw a lot of doors on our travels. Old doors, stylish doors, colourful doors, rugged doors, grand doors, quaint doors, decorated doors, plain doors.

As with so much of Europe, it’s the small details that are so charming. Monique made it her mission to capture the ones that caught her eye. Here is a small selection. 

UNESCO World Heritage sites

View from Skellig Michael, Ireland; 'The Hall of Mirrors', Palace of Versailles, France; A Pompeii room, Italy.

Way back in August at the start of our trip we came across our first UNESCO World Heritage site, Skellig Michael. We debated long and hard about whether or not to fork out the money for the boat trip across to the island. We eventually decided that we would, our reason being that ‘it’s not everyday you get to see a UNESCO World Heritage Site’.

Well, it turns out that assumption wasn’t entirely true.

As we went along we were incredibly fortunate to see some pretty amazing places that have been recognized by UNESCO for their ‘outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science’.

We feel amazingly lucky and humbled to have been able to see the following sites…

1. Skellig Michael, Ireland
2. Old and New Towns of Edinburgh, Scotland
3. Westminster Abbey, England
4. Tower of London, England
5. Kinderdijk, Holland
6. La Grand-Place of Brussels, Belgium
7. Historic Centre of Brugge, Belgium
8. 17^th Century canal ring area of Amsterdam, Holland
9. Luxembourg ancient city and fortifications, Luxembourg
10. Palace and Park of Versailles, France
11. Strasbourg Grand Ile, France
12. Cathedral of Notre-Dame, France
13. Banks of the Seine, France
14. Bern Old Town, Switzerland
15. Historic centre of Salzburg, Austria
16. Palace and Gardens of Schönbrunn, Austria
17. Historic centre of Graz, Austria
18. Historic centre of Vienna, Austria
19. Museum Island, Berlin, Germany
20. Historic centre of Prague, Czech Republic
21. Škocjan Caves, Slovenia
22. Historical complex of Split with the Palace of Diocletian, Croatia
23. Old City of Dubrovnik, Croatia
24. Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia
25. The Cathedral of St. James in Šibenik, Croatia
26. Historic centre of Rome, Italy
27. Historic centre of Florence, Italy
28. Piazza del Duomo, Pisa, Italy
29. Venice and its Lagoon, Italy
30. Historic Centre of San Gimignano, Italy
31. Historic Centre of Naples, Italy
32. Historic Centre of Siena, Italy
33. Archeological centre of Pompeii, Italy
34. Villa Adriana, Tivoli, Italy
35. Val d'Orcia, Italy

Oh, and for the record, if we had our time over we would go to Skellig Michael again in a heartbeat.