Jan 18
I’m on my way home to Bermuda after almost a week back at, er, home in the UK seeing family, mates and those Addicks.
I have been in Eastbourne most of the trip, my parents live just outside the town, and although it has been bloody freezing, Eastbourne did live up to it’s billing of the Sunshine Coast.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ My next 2022 Top Five is places. Travel was better in 2022 if not extensive and if I tell you until recently Accrington was on my list, then that tells me I need to get out more..
We did a few trips, nowhere new or too far, but were lucky to sample some new parts of some old places. Here are my 2022 Top Five Favourite Places 🏞️
Please click for moreAs I sit here drinking coffee at my kitchen counter in Sarasota tired from overdoing it on New Year’s Eve Eve, I am pretty pleased to put 2022 in the books.
Normality returned to life as we knew it in 2022 after two pandemic impacted years allowing us to remember again how to do the simple things we took for granted.
I often had to remind those around me, and myself that in times of hassle and intensity, that it was these moments that we’d missed. I love being busy and slightly living on the edge of unorganized and spontaneous, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Please click for moreThe only other time I went to Barbados I stayed with my son up in the north of the island at Saint Peter.
That was 19 years ago, but this past year I was in Barbados twice, both times (first) and (second) to watch my daughter represent Bermuda swimming. Those trips centered around the Aquatic Centre, which forms part of the Garfield Sobers Sports Complex on the outskirts of the capital Bridgetown. The national football stadium Wildey Turf is also there.
Please click for moreI’ve been working this week from Sarasota in between making room for some Christmas festivities, and tip toeing around the obligatory workman at the house.
We have just got in from an early dinner, and there is a real chill in the Florida air. Tonight is expected to be the coldest night in Sarasota and most of Florida for 30 years with the temperature set to hover just above freezing. Extreme weather warnings are being sent all across the country with the rather dramatic threat of bomb cyclones closing in around the Great Lakes.
Please click for moreHappy Thanksgiving to my American friends.
There’s a lot to like about Thanksgiving – eating, drinking, the complete removal of pressures to buy gifts and sport, a lot of it, and this year the added bonus of World Cup soccer football.
Our daughter becomes a teenager this week, and to kick off her teenage odyssey we took her to New York this past weekend.
We’ve taken her to NYC a few times before, but she was much younger then and her fascination with life has matured.
Please click for moreMy son leaves on a jet-plane tonight back to London, a day later than planned thanks to British Airways. We have had him through the past week, his first time on the island since before the pandemic, and it was a pleasure to hang out.
He has done almost everything the tour book can throw up here previously, and therefore he was happy to swim, chill, eat, drink and get some sun on his face.
Please click for moreIf you read my Puerto Rico Travelogue post from last week I wrote that we were told that a Cat 1 Hurricane hitting the island would mean that the fractured power grid would not survive.
Well, over the weekend Hurricane Fiona battered parts of Puerto Rico’s south and central mountain regions with more than 20 inches of rain and Cat 1 hurricane winds of 70-80 mph winds. The southern town of Ponce measured a gust of 103 mph. Landslides broke out in mountainous regions as waterways breached their banks. In the south-west the Guanajibo River crested at over 29ft washing a bridge away.
Please click for moreI have lived overseas for 19 years, but I was never prouder to be British than yesterday. I am a (South) London boy and the world’s best city was resplendent as the country and the world stood still to witness the first state funeral in almost everyone’s lifetime.
It was an emotional yet beautiful spectacle as the world watched every tiny detail so perfected that not even the biggest budget or best film director could recreate. The Queen meticulous to the end as every rehearsed and planned aspect was executed perfectly. Real life theatre showing history being made. It was a wonderful tribute to the most loved sovereign.
Please click for moreWe were last in Puerto Rico in 2009 and was enchanted by the Isla del Encanto, and one afternoon in August sat in our kitchen in Sarasota we decided on a very last minute trip back there.
The last time we were there, 13 years ago, my unknowingly-pregnant-other-half and me spent a large chunk of our time sampling the charms of Old San Juan. We danced to very loud music, drunk piña colada’s and tumbled late out of bars onto its shiny blue cobblestones.
Please click for moreI will be in Miami this weekend driving across state today for what will be my sixth time in the Magic City this year.
Miami is known as the Magic City not because of any black arts, although I am sure they exist, but because the once barren land pulled a whole new city out of a hat literally overnight about 60 years ago.
Please click for moreWe haven’t done anything spontaneous for a while. Years ago we would regularly make last minute trips bound for unknown places, but children and life got in the way of such whims and a global pandemic of course.
Anyway that outlook changed suddenly yesterday when we went online and booked a hotel and a flight to Puerto Rico for this morning.
Please click for moreTime to escape the high heat and the nudging 100% humidity of Bermuda, so we are flying to Florida tomorrow for, er more of the same. Actually as an expert in sweating during summers, I think Florida’s heat is a lot more bearable, probably due to modern day air-conditioning. Our Bermuda home built of large slabs of limestone is more than 200 years old, and the air-conditioning units possibly not much younger!
Please click for moreWhilst in East Sussex last week I wanted to take my parents somewhere a little different, and I found an absolute treasure trove of a place just 10 minutes from their home.
To say the Rathfinny Wine Estate is tucked away is hardly legitimate when it occupies 600 acres, with flawless rows of vines growing on the south facing hills of the South Downs. Yet the entrance gates to the estate are located just beyond the chocolate box village of Alfriston near the Deans Place Hotel and one could easily drive past them.
please click for moreI fly to the UK tonight deciding to go around the houses to get to Heathrow to avoid, at the time, striking BA staff and the seemingly unavoidable crazy cost of airline fares.
The cost of airline travel due to fuel rises and returning post pandemic demand is off the charts at the moment, and in Bermuda where BA monopolize the transatlantic route and we are still not back to a complete schedule, the cost of flights are rapacious.
Please click for moreI’ll write a bit more on Barbados later as we saw more of the island in the Windward Islands this time around, although Carlisle Bay with the Kensington Oval in the distance was shrouded in darkness this morning when we left the hotel to fly back to Miami at the crack of dawn.
I said this last time we were there when my daughter was competing at CARIFTA (Caribbean Games) in April that it was exhausting and I didn’t so much as wiggle my toe in the hotel pool.
Please click for moreWe are on our way to Miami this morning, an almost 3-hour flight from Bermuda, and once again just like last time our daughter is on her way separately with the Bermuda swim team to Barbados.
This time it is CCCAN (Central American and Caribbean Amateur Swimming Confederation) Championships. The meet could realistically have been anywhere in Central America or the Caribbean, and selfishly it is a shame that we are back in Barbados again, although at least it will be familiar surroundings.
Please click for moreHappy Father’s Day Dads.
Sadly for me it will be another day isolating in the bedroom struggling with Covid, so I get to enjoy the lazy-do-nothing-all-day vibe but with no one to share it with, although the dog does come down and visit me occasionally.
Please click for moreBarbados was a blur. I couldn’t decide if it went by in a blink of an eye or it seemed like we were there for weeks.
The reason we were in Barbados was that our daughter was representing Bermuda at the CARIFTA regional swimming championships. Like a Caribbean youth games for under 18’s.
Please click for moreWe are in Miami today just me and the free-as-a-bird-other-half. There are plans and motives and proposals of high-end shopping, high-jinks drinking, high-life eating and high-fidelity dancing, but let’s be honest we will probably be wrapped up in bed by 8.
The reason we are on our own is because our 12-year daughter is on her way to Barbados with the Bermuda swim team, after qualifying for CARIFTA, which is the Caribbean youth games (U18).
Despite the geopolitics, the host nations’ human rights record, the circus around Kamila Valieva, the spot Peng Shaui competitions, the fake snow, the arid landscapes, Covid restrictions and the whole ROC farce the Beijing Winter Olympics was well watched in our house.
Please click for moreSo bored of Covid. It has had it’s fun and games, killed loved ones, turned upside down daily life and prevented us from seeing the people and things that make us happy. Please just do one. Of all the hopes and aspirations for 2022 I want Covid to become no more than a nuisance factor and it no longer gets to run roughshod over our lives.
Please click for moreIt’s always spooked me that warm places over-compensate for being sunny this time of year by having the most outlandish of Christmas decorations.
Bermuda goes to town on the festive bedecking but after being in Sarasota, Florida for two weeks I reckon it takes the glittering prize.
Please click for moreI got an unexpected sunny welcome landing at Heathrow Airport this morning. Fast forward ten hours and I’m sat in my parents conservatory looking out at the South Downs which are quickly becoming shrouded in November darkness.
Please click for moreSo we have been in the Florida sun rain for the past 10 days. We spent the first weekend with friends in Miami, which was a lot of fun, and then drove to our house in Sarasota across alligator alley on the other coast at the beginning of last week.
Today in Bermuda is Non-Mariners Day. Traditionally a race to see which homemade boat using the most ridiculous of objects can sink the quickest. Baby strollers, beds, refrigerators and bath tubs have all been used previously with the expected results.
Non-Mariners day is always the Sunday after Cup Match, and is a chaotic and exceptionally busy alcohol-fuelled spectacle within the area around Mangrove Bay packed with the water hardly visible due to a ragtag mob of inebriated non-sailors on boats and pieces of machinery dressed up as boats. The photo is from two years ago.
And yes it is a lot of fun.
Please click for moreJust back from a little trip to Florida, a couple of days in Miami followed a couple in Fort Lauderdale, just 40 minutes north along the coast, and a place I hadn’t been for 13 years. It had changed significantly, and grown like a sunflower.
Neighbouring towns of Hollywood and Oakwood Park have been engulfed by Fort Lauderdale’s expansion. Once a renowned centre for spring-breakers’ high jinks the dive bar and burger joints had all but disappeared and have been replaced by boutique hotels, upscale apartment buildings and a burgeoning restaurant scene.
It is the longest wait for an Olympic opening ceremony in history, but tomorrow morning my time the 2020 Tokyo Olympics that never looked like happening finally opens.
A year late and stymied by all the regular hosting city controversies of construction, corruption, dodgy resignations of officials and even logo arguments, last year the Tokyo Olympics was taken down by the biggest disease of all.
Read moreBermuda went green on the fabled traffic light list this week, so I will take this window of opportunity to fly home tonight to see my family for the first time in two years.
Please click for moreI’m back in Bermuda after our little sojourn to Miami Beach. We stayed just a couple of miles south of Chaplain Towers in Surfide, the site of Thursday’s building collapse tragedy. We drove by it last Monday to have dinner in Bal Harbour, a condo building in a row of non-descript 1980 oceanfront buildings punctuated occasionally by plush hotels.
My heart goes out to every family and friend waiting on news of loved ones 💔
Please click for moreA little bit of a mini break for the next couple of days as we head to Miami later.
Florida has long moved on from the pandemic and apparently visitor numbers are almost back to pre-Covid times. Double vaccinated Americans are increasingly moving around the country and I expect Miami Beach to be busy.
Please click for moreThe first day of Bermuda’s summer is May 24th. Traditionally, well for about 110 years, it was always on May 24th…. I know, weird.
Yet last year Bermuda Day was moved by the government in their wisdom to the last Friday of the month which is a pain in the harris for me as work is chaotic and the last Friday of the month is and will always likely be stupid busy.
Please click for moreJust as my son was, and I hope many of you were, tucking into a nice cold pint in the cold outside your favourite boozer, here in Bermuda we were entering a shelter in place order meaning we cannot leave our homes unless it is for essential services such as grocery stores, pharmacies, doctors, covid testing and vaccines.
We can exercise for an hour only within 1km of our homes, but only in two’s. Never understood that, when you can all sit in the kitchen indoors.
It’s the baby-faced-other-half’s big birthday tomorrow. Don’t tell her I told you.
She got back from a quick trip to Sarasota today. I have her locked in the shed quarantining. Our Premier has taken a leaf out of Boris’ rule book and our guidelines are now as equally as confusing and they can’t find time or be bothered to update the government website. We think double shot vacinated, post two weeks, still means ‘mobile quarantining’ until you get your Bermuda arrival test result. The shed is comfy I just told her when I left a bag of mini-eggs outside her door.
I always cringe when Bermudians say they are freezing. I was on a call early this week when a young colleague said just that to someone sat in Boston. Our temperature was twice what it was in Boston, and I could see the snow peaking through his blinds.
But I got to tell you it is proper freezing today. 9.5C on the rock at one point today making it th ecoldest ever recorded for this day. Then with the windy remnants of a huge storm (photo) we had here in midweek, the wind chill takes that down to 4.5C!
🔝5️⃣ I have now been in Bermuda for twelve and a half years. Classic came for four, and you know the rest. As idyllic as the 21 sq. mile island is, the fact I split my time between the UK, the USA and if we were lucky some adventurous holidays, then this small little isle with it’s three main roads never seemed too suffocating.
The year of all years crawls to a welcome end tonight. Sadly nothing will be much different when the sun rises tomorrow, and it is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Still, a new year brings new dreams and hopes of better times ahead.
We have a Chinese guy in our office, and after he returned to Bermuda from being back in China at the beginning of January he was made to stay at home. When he did come back to the office he wore a mask. It was odd to see him walk around with a mask and no one quite knew how to act around him.
Fast forward 12 months and the entire world has been heavily inflicted by Covid-19. This silent terror of a virus has literally changed the world we live in, a film set only previously in the minds of story tellers.
Like most of the rest of you our Christmas Day was spent behind closed doors. Just the three of us with a continual loop of Christmas music, a fridge full of food, a shiny paper mountain of discarded wrapping paper, board games and a few glasses of champagne. The toasts for better times for the world beyond midnight this coming Thursday.
Fortunately though yesterday’s conversation was dominated about how pleased we were to have made the pilgrimage to Sarasota. We felt lucky that we were able to get a change of scene, and a taste of the world outside, my first trek off island for 11 months and for the little-un and island-fevered-other-half more than a year.
I’ve not left this little isle since February. The family since last December. 21 miles long, and a 1.75 miles wide at it’s very widest point can seem very, very small.
Yet, as I told the story the other day during the summer and into the early winter months you’d question yourself why you’d ever leave the beauty and reasonable normality of Bermuda during a global pandemic. Why throw yourself to the sharks, when we can swim with the parrot fish!
“If ye break faith with us who die, we will not sleep, though poppies grow in Flander’s fields.”
It has always amazed me that today is not a bank holiday at home. It is a significant day in the calendar that every race, creed and religion should value. This year’s British ceremonies are masked (sic) in a coronavirus lockdown. More reason if needed to never forget those we lost fighting to protect our freedom.
This is not meant to rub your noses in it, for those of you settling in for the first night of lockdown, but tonight I’ve been at a neighbour’s bonfire night party celebrating that great libertarian Guy Fawkes.
it has been a very active Atlantic hurricane season thus far, with already 18 named storms, 5 in September already so Bermuda was never going to get away scot-free and sure enough Hurricane Paulette is barrelling towards us and is expected to roll right over the top of us around 6am tomorrow. Unfortunately it is meandering so slowly that the island will suffer hurricane force winds for up to 9 hours. What fun!
A couple of weeks back was my birthday. I’m not big on birthday’s, especially those when I’m stuck at home, but the party-planning-other-half had an idea. Let’s make it a birthday week she said. Not focus on the one day but let’s make sure we get out of the house, do something together everyday, and find things we’ve never done in our time in Bermuda.
Taking a full week off work was not possible, and only sat at home eating cake and watching the TV was sure way to have me back in front of the laptop in no time, so doing something out each day was a good balance and it was like a collection of mini vacations.
Day 140 working from home (not that I’m counting 😩).
Like most others I’d imagine, I left the office on that Monday in March pretty unprepared for a long working stint at home, I walked out of the office re-assuring the team that I’d see them soon and was armed with my trusted laptop and notepad.
I was temporarily perched on the couch those first two weeks with laptop on lap, but with the TV news on a loop it became apparent how deep and bad the pandemic was.
Bermuda’s airport re-opened last week, but I am in no rush to get on a plane. Lockdown has had me constantly thinking of travel, past trips and what future ones look like. I also realized that I never did write about the families trip to the Florida’s Keys at the end of last summer.
The Florida Keys are a coral string of islands that form the southernmost part of the United States. The iconic Overseas Highway runs from Miami to the bottom tip of the keys at Key West. American Industrialist and important developer of the Atlantic Coast of the state of Florida Henry Flagler attempted an ambitious plan to run a train the 160 miles across the 800 islands from Miami in the early 1900’s.
Flagler’s aspiration was to take advantage of the growing but geographically challenging trade between the U.S. and Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Yet despite some innovative engineering, the railroad was continuously hindered by a run of hurricanes but engineers persevered until the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935. This CAT 5 devastated the Keys and killed 400 people.
That was the end of Flagler’s project, yet many of the track beds, trestles and bridges remain and form part of today’s Overseas Highway.
As Charlton Athletic get tossed about like a rag doll between a couple of rabid dogs desperate to wring out some unjust dirty money, today will forever be remembered as, well, that day.
My brother and I got a cab from his house in Stoke Newington to Paddington early on that Sunday morning. We were both jet-lagged and a little quiet as the driver attempted to make conversation.
Please click for moreI’ve always been pretty indifferent to pets, not overly worried either way. As a kid we had a cat, a dog (for a while), goldfish, budgerigars, probably a school gerbil, I can’t remember, but I never felt the need of fluffy company in adult life.
Yet, ever since my daughter learnt to speak a dog was always on the radar, with strong backing from the dog-loving-other-half I was always under pressure, and have done bloody well to hold out for, well about 9 years 😆🐶.
The biggest adversity the world has seen in many a generation. I truly hope that you are all staying safe and healthy.
A crazy and worrying time, harrowing for some, as the Coronavirus or COVID-19 sweeps every little corner of our world taking no prisoners. A global pandemic, only previously in the deep imaginative minds of movie writers, scientists, historians and risk officers. Now part of all of us, every day, every minute.
It’s hard to even fathom that 20 years ago today we were at work unsure as to whether the computers would even come back on after we came back from the new Millennia celebration. Millennials can look up that near calamity here.
2019 has flown by, work has been the busiest I have known it since I’ve been in Bermuda, the results have been bloody good though, but absolutely exhausting and it didn’t surprise me to just be told I have almost 4 weeks holiday left for the year.
My predilection for travelling has thus taken a backward seat this year, for which I’m very disappointed with myself. Good news though is that after years of attempting to renovate a house in Sarasota, Florida, which has veered from the tortuous to the exorbitant, it may finally become liveable so that is an exciting development and will be a home from home.
Happy Christmas to you all.
We have spent many more years on the island than off it on Christmas Day and I don’t ever remember the weather being anything but clear, sunny and relatively warm. Yet this morning the weather outside is frightful, rain is crashing against the windows and the wind is howling. So, I’ve got the wood fire going, which is of course, quite delightful.
Travelling around the U.S. at Christmas time is always fraught with obstacles, and sure enough our attempt to fly back from Atlanta via two other places, when we could have gone direct to Bermuda has failed us. Wasn’t my idea is all I’m saying. So an overnight stop in freezing cold Philadelphia at a nasty airport hotel means we won’t get home until late on Christmas Eve with hardly any food in the fridge and nothing wrapped etc..
Whilst I was in basking in the 100-degree Arizona heat. I was working I’d like to add, well apart from the Sedona road trip, my family and the island of Bermuda got badly rattled by Hurricane Humberto last Wednesday and Thursday. To show how completely unpredictable hurricanes can be as I left the island Tuesday morning it was coming in at a Cat One (95 mph max sustained winds), but by the time the little f***** got here it was blowing at 125 mph, close to a Cat Four, with gusts as much as 144 mph.
Mr popular at home this morning as I crashed and banged out of the house at dusk lugging a suitcase for a work trip. I leave behind a family and an island that is bracing it for its first major hurricane in three years.
Hurricane Humberto is moving east-northeast at 7mph and then is due to take a sharp right turn as it finds Bermuda’s warm waters and will roll very close to us as a Cat 2 storm on late Wednesday night.
To The Valley, my only desire.
The first time I stepped into The Valley was in 1975. I have worshiped it ever since and still now whenever I walk into that vast theatre the hairs on the back of my neck never fail to stand up. I first wrote the below piece in 2012, and although today The Valley in it’s full bouncing glory is something to behold this is what this iconic old football ground means to me.
It’s Bermuda Cup Match long weekend, a cricket game that shuts the island down and we don’t have to go to work. Yay. So the choice is going to the game, which I have done many times, camp on the side of the road like the locals do, sit indoors under the a/c, or make use of the bank holiday and get off the island. We’ve done the latter.
We haven’t really left the humid weather behind because we are in Florida, but despite similar heat levels, you never seem too far from proper air conditioning here, so the sweaty uncomfortableness doesn’t seem quite as brutal.
The trip starts on the gulf coast to check in on the long running saga of a house renovation we are doing in Sarasota. I’ll leave that there because the slight mention of it gets me into a embittered temper and a grump.
*Counts to 5*
“You’re taking your 8-year old to Colombia” people said. Well Colombia isn’t the dangerous gang infested place it used to be, and indeed Cartagena never really was, an historic north coast oasis away from drug fuelled murders and kidnapping.
It was this time a year ago I was looking at some places to get a quick getaway for a week, and Colombia kept coming back to me, so despite some other people’s reservations we did it, and it was great.
Cartagena is for the adventurous, the history buff, the coffee lover, the romantic. The walled city is full of majestic churches and palaces, picturesque balcony-lined streets and lively plaza’s.
I’ve spent many a day and weekend in Brighton, in fact our recent family get together was a little flick through my brother and I’s memory book of younger boozier and clubbier days.
We gathered the CA clan together in Brighton for a long overdue get together and I purposely chose the Hotel Du Vin to stay because of it’s location within The Lanes.
I arrived at Gatwick this morning with the fam, a couple of large espresso’s and a bacon sandwich that I don’t need and then we’ll get a train down to Brighton as we gather up the CA clan for a couple of days.
We’re on the way, we’re on the way….
Yesterday morning I woke bruised and weary. With a slight headache and a sense of bewilderment, but the red blood in my veins flowed like a gentle river.
Last night was another night of sweet dreams. I flew back to Bermuda yesterday and am back in the office today, and nothing, not nothing will take this massive smile off my face.
How we all doing?
My heart rate is a bit more normal, and I’ve spent a large chunk of the day trying to sort out tickets. Although I have dipped back into video clips of Friday. It’s like heroin. And there’s been a fair bit of singing. Just me, on my own, but my voice is a lot better.
Much thanks to various friends for the help with tickets and advice. I’ve spent a lot of the day on the CAFC tickets website, which is pretty easy to navigate, although better I’d think on a computer than an iPad.
Very appropriate that I spent today in St George’s, the oldest continuously-inhabited English town in the New World and settled 407 years ago, and three years after Admiral Sir George Somers deliberately beached the ship Sea Venture onto Bermuda’s reef’s to avoid sinking.
Now UNESCO World Heritage site, the town of St George has slowly started to come back to life, helped by regular cruise ship visits, and a couple of good eateries. There was no ship in today but many, and mostly Japanese, visitors were walking around the town’s narrow and colourful streets.
It has a way before it becomes as beautiful as somewhere like Cinque Terre, but the pastel coloured hilly streets still ask to be explored and much work is being carried out on many of the large homes such as Whitehall, for years occupied by the town’s mayors.
TPC Louisiana
