Edinburgh has squirrels; I feel that it’s important that you know this. This one was helpful enough to pose dynamically on a tree for maximum photogenicness & drama, and had a nice eye for appropriate backlighting. It’s really refreshing to…

I was getting steadily better, the cough having … well, ‘vanished’ is the wrong word. ‘Diminished’ doesn’t really cut it either. Let’s say that the bouts of horrifying coughing which left my sides hurting and did odd things to my…

I’m counting a thing that happened the night before as happening on π Approximation Day, because of time zones. Or something. Tamsin had asked about how the Gen Con events registration system worked, so we had a play with it,…

The bus left Edinburgh at 8-ish. I get the idea that they’d have liked to have left earlier, but some people had been told to go to the wrong place for pick-up, which complicated things. There were also a couple…

In that it is actually colder, thus more chill, and this allowed me to relax more. I left myself with plenty of time to get to the train station (King’s Cross), so I had time to kill, which I spent sitting…

By pure fluke, I managed to be paying attention at the right time to (I think) get a picture of Southend Pier. Unlike last time, I actually remember getting through Heathrow. (checking back to my diary of a couple of years…

For this one, I’m going to start at the end, then double back to explain how I got there. At the end of day one in Dubai, I wanted nothing to do with the place; Too chaotic, too noisy, too…

Complimentary in the sense of no charge, not in the says nice things sense. Checking out was mostly done the night before, so it was really only handing over my key cards that needed to happen. Naturally, I slept crappily,…

Getting to Arthur’s Pass involved a trip through the now-standard South Island scenic grandeur, which my cellphone is not really capable of capturing, as demonstrated here; Got in as darkness happened, which is why the other backpacker getting off at…