Welcome back. We’re so pleased you’ve managed to find us again. This is because our web host, simplesites.com, sold the business to one.com, which resulted in the blog pages being migrated to one.com’s system. Needless to say it didn’t go smoothly and it has taken a very frustrating three months of backwards and forwards to get back to something like we were. It's so upsetting because we'd had 920,000 visits to the blog before the takeover and upheaval, I was fully expecting to pass the million mark by the middle of this year, but it won't happen now.

The only outstanding annoyance now is that most of the small pictures I often included within the page of text have now been deleted. There was an error on those pages after being migrated across in that the picture sat on top of the text, thus obscuring it. In the end I went through and deleted most of them myself because I could get a straight answer from one.com as to how the could be corrected. I think it was because they were concerned I would insist on them making all of the individual corrections which would be very time consuming.

Imagine my joy when having deleted most of them I stumbled across how the correction can be made, and having learned that I can now add pictures in the same way. So putting all those deleted pictures back in situ will be a little job for me in the summer.

one.com's system is more complicated that simplesite's and it has been very frustrating trying to master it, but I think we're about there now. If it all becomes too much I'll pause the daily postings and wait until we return home before uploading it all.

It has been difficult to come up with a title for this trip. We plan to start off spending a couple of days in Ypres, Belgium before setting off for another drive to Istanbul. After that we’ll be going in to Greece. From there we have two options. Either we journey to Venice via Albania, Croatia and Slovenia, or we’ll cross the Adriatic Sea and make our way there through Italy.

Back in November we had a very enjoyable day out in London. The Chef’s youngest daughter, Helen, an architect, was involved in the redevelopment of the old Battersea Power Station, and she was kind enough to give us a guided tour of the complex. It was very interesting to get the background on various stages of the project and the problems which arose along the way, and the solutions they came up with.

Christmas day was spent with Rosina’s middle daughter, Louise, and her family which was a very enjoyable way to spend the day, and The Chef got a chance to see more family members.

Meanwhile, out here in The Fens, folk were tucking in to their Christmas Turkpig, the latest innovation to come from the Norfolk Genetics Laboratory. It provides both tasty, moist turkey as well as the meat needed to make the 'pigs in blankets' .........boootiful!

Unfortunately in February, our luck ran out and The Chef and I both went down with Covid, which was rather annoying, given that we’d managed to outrun it for three years, and that was three years of not hiding away, but getting on with our lives whilst  taking all sensible precautions as we did so. It took us a while to recover having lost a lot of our stamina, but at least we’ve got it out of the way before this trip. We’ll now have some immunity against it, but it won’t stop us continuing to take sensible precautions regarding infection control.

I think that’s bought you up to date, so fingers crossed as we head towards our eastern European cousins, starting on 31st March.