Indelible Adventures

This week I was thinking about connectedness, especially within a family.   Strange topic I admit but recently I’ve been researching grandfather Conolly and it got me thinking about how easily families are split and seemingly go their separate ways. To be honest I’ve been feeling a little like that particularly with both mum and dad being gone, and seemingly no uniting factor for us to be together.  I realize it’s the circle of life but with me living in Canada I feel even more isolated from my siblings than ever before.   Perhaps it’s also a symptom of once again being on my own, although arguably having Zach & Sami each week takes much of that away it’s not quite the same as having a family day-to-day. My sister Glenda's wedding - 1969 Back row: Gary, Glenda, Mum, Laurie Front: James & TW Mum was quite removed from her family as they were spread from Mackay in North Queensland , to Sydney and even further south to Melbourne which is “as the crow fli...

Do you know that feeling of getting home after a long trip... that warm feeling of being surrounded by familiar things and a regular routine?    After being away for the past two weeks (this week I’ve been in Europe) I’m definitely looking forward to being home and most of all sleeping in my own bed (for a change) tomorrow night. The beach at Kaanapali (Maui) - hard to believe its just a week ago... In Hawaii Zach, Sami and I had a single room with two beds and a couch, and although I would normally sleep in one of the beds, Sami had a nasty cold and was feeling a bit under the weather so we traded off sleeping on the couch (Sami) and me on the floor, which to be honest felt pretty good on my recovering back as it had been a bit sore after the recent move. Unfortunately after arriving back in Toronto I had less than four hours before I had to be repacked and leave for the airport and my overnight flight to London.    Yes, coun...

I can remember nights where my mum would stay up all night long reading a book from cover to cover…her tired response in the morning when I was getting ready for school was “I just couldn’t put it down”.  As you can imagine mum was a big reader; she always had a book on the go, although rarely two.    I'd sometimes come home from school to find her perched at the kitchen table, book in hand and cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table beside her.   The room was a cloud of blue smoke as she chain-smoked her way through her books – day or night. My sister Glenda is a bit the same way, some might call her a book worm (well perhaps not to her face), but in reality she is exactly the same as mum used to be when it comes to reading.   She always has a book close at hand and ready to dive into at a moments notice and similarly to mum willing to read all night if necessary, albeit without the cigarettes.   Yes, we were...

I’m sitting on the plane with Zach and Sami jetting our way to Vancouver on the first leg of our journey to Maui (Hawaii).   Vancouver is almost five hours flight time from Toronto, with a couple of hour layover in Van we then board another five hour flight directly to Maui arriving around 9:30 pm Hawaiian time this evening, which will put it at about 3:00 am EST.   I’m guessing we’ll be exhausted! After a crazy week of work and settling into our new place (its been a bit of a whirlwind to be honest) we can all finally begin to relax…actually I’ll be able to relax more when I land in Vancouver and can send all of my work email that churned through in the first hour after takeoff :-) Destination - Lahaina   So, Maui you say?    Sort of an usual story of how this all came about as Maui definitely wasn’t my first choice for our March break.   Actually when I asked the kids in early December where they’d like to go for ...