Wishing you all a happy, healthy and prosperous 2020.
May you have plenty of interesting places to visit, great food to eat, and take many photos!
Our 2019 was all of mad, crazy and busy. Starting with London by day and night and then the mad summer of the coffee trail. A city break in Cork, Ireland and a week in Zakynthos gave us a chance travel a bit and wind down. Here are a few of the highlights.
London Day out
The year started with a bang. Taking an overseas visitor to London. Camden Market for much of the day, just wandering. January is winter so the days are short. That didn’t stop us taking in the Winter Wonderland and London Christmas Lights. Who plays tourist at Trafalgar Square by night? We did!
Oxford
Oxford, on an open top bus, in January is COLD. But it was fun, followed by a walk around Oxford, looking at some of the historic sights.
Sourdough Bread
Yes I know this is a fad, but, not being a stranger to baking bread, it’s one I had not mastered. A few more-or-less successful attempts in April gave it some direction.
We now eat sourdough daily.
Sourdough is an endless journey. There are always tweaks to made to recipes and new tricks to try. More to come in 2020.
The Crazy Summer of 2019 – Coffee!
Also known as the Summer of Coffee Adventures.
We teamed up with Bretts Own Brews for a summer of delivering top class coffee at various events.
This jaunt saw us visiting some interesting places in the UK, which we would never have thought of visiting otherwise. For me the stand out highlights were:
- The British Grand Prix – 1200 cups of tea and coffee in 7 hours! A different view as a “worker”, but still a great experience;
- Standon Calling Music Festival – great experience and good to see Rag and Bone Man live;
- Cowley Road Carnival – music and colour an people from all over in the Cowley Road, Oxford.
Ireland – Glanmire
September saw us visiting Cork, in Ireland, staying at an AirBnB in the beautiful Glanmire Valley and visiting Cobh. Cobh, on the Cork Harbour is home to Spike Island and the impressive St Colman’s Cathedral, as well as being the last point where the Titanic touched land when it was called Queenstown.
Zakynthos (Zante) – Kalamaki Beach
All these adventures were tiring, so October saw us chilling out on the beach at Kalamaki on the Greek Island of Zakynthos. Definitely need another visit there for a bit longer to chill out and explore.
Blogging
Ducking and diving between coffee travels and work, the middle of the year saw very few blog posts, though a lot of effort went into improving SEO.
These are the highlights, but many more interesting stuff went unreported. Have to do better in the new year,
The year end saw a slight revamp, with a new logo and changes to page layouts.
Blogging remains a whole bunch learning curves – speed writing, cloud photo processing on the fly, using Canva and Trello to keep control.
Photography
Bluntly, my photography has been in the doldrums for a while. Watch this space for a revamp of my pixels.com site and more of the photos from our travels.
So that was 2019 – and 2020?
Plans are in progress. Perhaps some more coffee and some new travels.
What have you got planned?
Happy new Year.
Hairy 1 Travels 
I look forward to seeing where your plans take you. And, just maybe, I will get back to attending to my blog! (Fodder for a New Year’s resolution, if there ever was one.)
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