In this blog: naughty Jack goes swimming, Mike and Ross drink beer, we all nearly die, and Liberty flees the nest... Yes, at last, without visible means of support, we set sail on Liberty on a short "shakedown cruise". Not wanting to place ourselves in danger, we waited to do this until our good Kiwi friends Ross and Julia arrived to stay on board as the boat's "guinea pigs". Mean? No, practical :-) I need to know if I call "All hands on deck" that we actually h...

A bit tardy doing blogs recently sorry, but it's been a busy few days, so I will play catch-up... Unisex toilets. Need I say more? The first disconcerting thing about walking into the one at the Toisin D'Or shopping mega-mall in Dijon last week was the 18 year-old girl waiting just inside, possibly (hopefully) for a friend to come out. I don't know about you but this had an instant and suppressing effect on my need to urinate, as did the row of men's urinals in ...

Mike and Liz Afloat - at last Okay, this is going to be a long one as there is just so much to take in, but in true TV promo fashion, here's what's coming up... We take over Liberty, Giorgio Armani expresses his disapproval, a boat begins to sink at its mooring, and Monsieur Gerard shows us his builder's crack. Read on... Last Friday we arrived in Van Rouge back at the Burgundian inland port of St Jean de Losne at noon, and although we knew Liberty was bobbing ...

We are back in France and - finally - on the verge of starting the Mike-and-Liz-Afloat part of the adventure. But it's been a rocky ride getting to this point. If you picture the whole shebang as a jigsaw, it looks pretty simple; there are really only a few pieces. One piece involved selling up in NZ and then buying an apartment to rent out, either in the Bay of Plenty or Auckland. The second piece shows a picture of daughter/step-daughter Yasmin happily at boar...

Yorkshire is famous for all sorts of things. Yorkshire pudding, for example, the Bronte Sisters, the Yorkshire Dales and Moors, and of course the legendary gruff nature of Yorkshiremen in particular. (There's a saying: you can always tell a Yorkshireman - but you can't tell him much) But the other thing that's as local, resilient and as tough as a Yorkshireman's attitude is the ubiquitous dry stone wall. For over 5000 years people in this part of the world have ...