Reconnecting with family and friends in the UK

Sadly, in the last week of April 2017, after Trav and I had been living and working in Bucharest Romania for a month, we heard news from family in the UK that Trav’s dad had become gravely ill. It had been less than three months since the death of his mum.

Trav immediately returned to the UK to be with his dad during his last days.

Just a few days later, after his dad had passed away peacefully, Trav returned to Bucharest and together we packed our bags to leave Bucharest and travel back to the UK to be with family and to prepare for the funeral.

First, we flew into Scotland to meet with our son Iain who lives in Glasgow and our son Ben who lives in Edinburgh.

The silver lining in the dark cloud of our bereavement was that for the second time this year, and in a short space of just three months, we would get to spend more time with our sons, with my own mum, and our much-missed family in the UK.

Blue skies over Glasgow

Our son Iain and his lovely girlfriend Alice

During our few days in Scotland, I also took the opportunity to attend a Romantic Novelist’s Association lunch in Edinburgh. It had been several years since I’d met up with my friends in the RNA Scottish Chapter. When I saw on our group Facebook page that a lunch meeting was being arranged for the morning I arrived back, I jumped at the chance to go along. I took the train from Glasgow and it was wonderful to see blues skies over Edinburgh and all my Scottish writer friends again face to face.

Edinburgh Castle in the sunshine

Blue skies over Princes Street Edinburgh

With Rosemary Gemmell in Edinburgh

With Eileen Ramsay - chair of the Romantic Novelist's Association 

It was wonderful to catch up with my Scottish writer friends in Edinburgh

Also, while we were in Edinburgh, we got together with our son Ben and his lovely girlfriend Hayley and all her family.

Trav and I with Hayley and Ben at the bowling club

Hayley is a ladies champion bowls player and there was a match being played that day at the local bowling club. It was a fun day and a welcome chance to spend quality time with Ben and Hayley especially when in just a few day’s time – the day after his grandad’s funeral – they were looking forward to their three-week holiday in Orlando Florida.

Hayley in action

Hayley's mum Andrea and Graham

Fun at the bowling club with Ben and Hayley and her family

Trav and I travelled down to England by train and were once again so grateful to our best friend Dina, who had generously offered to share her home with us again while we were in the UK.

Hanging out with my best friend Dina

In the days before the funeral, we managed to have some fun times with Dina in our old home town of Widnes and we also got to spend a great day out in Liverpool - exploring all the tourist sites like the Albert Dock and the Caven Club.

The day of the funeral was an emotional one for all the Horton family. For Trav and his brothers, Rob and Stuart, to lose both parent’s in such a short time was heart-breaking. As it was for all eight grandchildren to lose their grandparents. Their legacy of course will live on in them all and also in their one great-grandchild, Aaron, who lives in South Korea and whom they sadly had never met.

A short time after the funeral, on a solemn grey and rainy day in May, Jimmy and Dot’s ashes were buried together in the same Runcorn cemetery where their parent’s had been laid to rest. A small and intimate service was held with just their three son’s and wives present. Trav, being the eldest of the brothers, said a few words over his parent’s grave while we all held hands and said our last goodbyes.

For mid-May, initially from Bucharest, I had booked flights to London in order to attend the Romantic Novelist’s Association Summer Party. This writer’s networking event is a great opportunity for writers to get together with publishers and agents and other writing professionals. As I had been out of the country off and on for almost four years, I also saw this event as a great opportunity, not only for me to meet up with my writer friends, but to put my finger back on the pulse of the writing industry and to see what had changed over the past few years.

I had hastily re-organised my travel arrangements and I was very excited to be accompanied to the event and staying with my lovely writer friend Linn B Halton, who lives outside London. Linn and I hadn’t seen each other face to face (if you don’t count Skype) since the Festival of Romance several years before so you can imagine how much we had to talk about!

Ready for the RNA Summer Party -with my lovely friend Linn B Halton

Linn and I travelled to London together by train, had a fabulous lunch in an Italian restaurant in Piccadilly, and then caught up with other Romantic Novelist’s for pre-party drinks. It was so great to see everyone again. Below are a few photos with my lovely writer chums!

With Linn having lunch in London

Pre-party cocktails with lovely writer friends

With Mandy Baggot

With Talli Roland who also writes as Leah Mercer

With lovely Liz Harris

Soon, Trav and I felt ready to move on again. As we don’t have a home of our own in the UK anymore and, as we still have wanderlust to travel, we were keen to take up our nomadic adventures again and there is nothing like losing people to remind us of the fragility of life and how quickly time passes.

Our flight from London to KL via Singapore

Trav and I want to travel the world together while we can, while we still have our health, and before we get too old to do so. Of course, we love and miss our family and friends, but we appreciate they have busy lives too and being close geographically to them is no guarantee we would see them often as we'd like anyway. So I'm so grateful to the times in which we live; when we can keep in touch with our loved ones whenever we like on the internet and, thanks to affordable air travel, no place and no one in the world is much more than 12 hours away from us.

A farewell meal with my family before leaving for SE Asia

So we left the UK to fly back to Asia. We took a flight back to Kuala Lumpur and, while in a taxi to our hotel in KL, we had some wonderful news from Orlando Florida, where our son Ben was on holiday with his girlfriend Hayley. He had proposed and Hayley had became his fiancée.

The newly engaged Ben and Hayley in Orlando Florida

We were thrilled and so excited to see their proposal on video and to see how happy they are together. Our driver must have wondered what was going on when he heard me squealing and tearful on the back seat of his taxi!

After a good night’s sleep in KL, the next morning, we headed straight for the Perhentian Islands off the east coast of peninsula Malaysia. We flew with Air Asia from KLIA2 to Kuta Bharu - a 45 min flight and then took a bus and a boat over the Perhentian Besar (the larger of these islands). It’s a place that has been on our radar for a couple of years now but we have never been in Malaysia during these island’s short season - between May and September – after which all boats stop going there and all accommodations close down.

What is special about the Perhentian Islands you may ask?

Well, for one they are incredibly beautiful - the beaches are white sand beaches and said to be some of the best in the world - and the diving and snorkelling too is said to be amazing. But there is one other very special reason that we headed out to the Perhentians at this time and that is to do with my current Work In Progress. I needed to go to these islands for research purposes.

In my next book, I have a heroine who is establishing a turtle conservation sanctuary on an island– and so for a week I was going to be staying at a turtle conservation center to learn all about sea turtles and turtle hatcheries and baby turtles while Trav went diving.

If I was really lucky, I hoped that on Perhentian Island I would get to see baby turtles hatching and then help to release them to the sea. If I was really really lucky I would get to see a nesting turtle returning to the beach that she had been born on at least thirty years before, to lay her eggs under the light on the moon, before making her way back into the sea.

Please do join me here on the blog next time to find out more about the beautiful Perhentian Islands and to find out exactly how very lucky I was!

Love, Janice xx

January 2017 - a bittersweet month back in the UK

At the end of my previous blog post written just after New Year – a summary of our travels in 2016 that you can read by clicking HERE – I mentioned how we had no immediate plans to leave Koh Tao in Thailand. But that all changed very quickly on the 4th January when we had word that my mother-in-law was gravely ill.

Happier times: Trav's mum and dad celebrating their 50th Wedding Anniversary

We checked for flights back to the UK straight away - but as it was still peak time for new year holiday travel - we had problems with availability. We left Koh Tao by boat and bus and plane and headed to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we knew there was a flight to London with British Airways the following day, on which could be on standby.

We managed to get the last two seats on a flight back to the UK via Hong Kong. 

We were hoping to get back to the UK in time to say goodbye to Trav’s mum before she passed away. Trav was on the phone several times a day with his mum’s nursing carers, and the good news was that his mum had improved slightly, so allowing us more time to get back to her. The bad news was that we heard Trav’s dad had fallen and badly broken his hip. He was now in hospital and due to be operated on the very next day.

We managed to get the last two seats on a flight back to the UK via Hong Kong. 

Then from London we flew straight up to Glasgow because our son, Iain, had kindly allowed us to use his car to save us the cost of car hire. We also managed to see our son, Ben, while we were in Scotland. We had a meal out on the night we arrived in Edinburgh with him and his girlfriend Hayley and her family. I hope they didn’t mind that we were suffering from climate change, we were totally jet lagged, and hadn’t slept for 48 hours!

It had been two years since we’d been back in the UK and it felt quite surreal to sudden find ourselves back there. I had been missing my family very much over the Christmas holidays, so I knew this albeit unplanned trip would be bittersweet time, because it would be wonderful to see family and friends again but very sad indeed to see Trav’s dad in hospital and his mum for what would be the very last time. We had been warned she was now in the last days of her life.

After buying some warm clothes and footwear more suited to the UK in January, we headed down to England, shivering under gloomy grey and rainy skies. I couldn’t help but to think of the sunshine we had left behind us in Thailand – until I checked my Facebook notifications to discover that the very day after we left Koh Tao a monsoon had hit – bringing the worst rainfall in decades. I’m sure that as we had left so quickly and unexpectedly some peeps might have thought we knew something was about to happen – but we didn’t – honest!

Once in England, we visited Trav’s mum and dad, who were in two different locations: Whiston hospital and a Runcorn nursing home. My best friend, Dina, who happens to live an equal distance between the two places, kindly said that we could stay with her for which we were extremely grateful.

Often, while Trav was with his mum and dad, I went to visit my mum and it was so wonderful to spend time with her. I also got to catch up with my brothers and sisters. It was hard to arrange to see everyone during this unplanned trip, even though we were back for a month, when everyone worked during the week and often had plans over the weekend. I did manage to have a meal out with my brothers one evening and to spend a couple of nights with my sister Lorna and her family at her house.

With my mum and brothers David and Steven

Sadly, on the 17^th January, with her three sons and daughter-in-laws at her bedside, Trav’s mum, Dorothy Horton, passed away peacefully in the early hours of the morning. She was 84 years old and she had been suffering with dementia and Alzheimer’s. She hadn't known or recognised her family during her last months but, in the moments before she drew her last breath, I saw her open her eyes, shed a tear, and look with absolute clarity upon her boys.

Sadly, as my father in law was still recovering from his hip operation, he wasn’t able to be with his wife at the end. As you might imagine, this made for an extremely difficult and emotional time, when we had to break the sad news to him later that day at the hospital.

The funeral couldn’t be held for another 15 days due to the Christmas and New Year holidays and with January apparently being a busy time for the funeral services generally. This posed a problem for Trav and I as we had a return flight to Asia booked a couple of days before the funeral date.

We spent a long time on the phone speaking to several departments within British Airways until we finally got someone who could help us. BA were more than helpful and, although there should have been hefty charges associated with changing our flights, they wavered all of them and moved our flights forward by one week to allow us to attend the funeral.

During the next two weeks, we continued to stay as house guests at my lovely friend Dina’s house. As we hadn’t seen Dina since she had come out to see us in Koh Tao the previous January. It was wonderful to see her again.

My best friend Dina and I on Koh Tao Thailand last year

Trav and I were aware that we needed new visas to get back into Thailand, so we made a trip into Liverpool to the Royal Thai Consulate there. I hadn’t been to Liverpool for decades and yet I had been brought up there. My family moved to Liverpool when I was 6 years old and moved out of Liverpool to Runcorn when I was 14. I have to say that the Liverpool I knew back then is a far cry from the rather swish cosmopolitan city that it is today.

I immediately wished we’d been able to spend more time staying in Liverpool at the Albert Dock than the one night we had planned. Especially when a lovely friend who we met on the island of Utila in the Caribbean last year – who plays with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra – got in touch on Facebook messenger and offered us ticket for the following evening’s performance.

We did however manage to catch up with a couple of lovely friends who we’d met a couple of years ago while we were in the Bahamas. Jen and Gregg live in Liverpool and are planning to come out to Koh Tao in March to see us and do some diving – so it was great to meet up with them in Liverpool while we were there. They showed us a great night out in the city. We stopped outside Horton House for a photo and went on to a fabulous Brazilian all you can eat restaurant called Fazenda followed by a cocktail bar called The Alchemist where the cocktails all look like science experiments!

We also managed to catch up with our closest friends Jeannette and Nigel and Sara and Douglas and Jane and Pete in Scotland. It was so wonderful to see them again and to catch up with each other over a wonderful dinner that Jeannette cooked for us all. 

While in Scotland, we also briefly go see our eldest son Ben again in Edinburgh and to stay with my sister Lisa and her family who live in Ayrshire. While staying at Lisa’s I was very keen to have a ride on my niece Shannon’s new pony. Her pony, called Star, was her Christmas gift. Lucky girl!

Then we returned to England for Trav’s mum’s funeral. It was a sad and poignant day. Again we were able to meet up with friends and family we hadn’t seen in a long time. Unfortunately, Trav’s dad wasn’t able to attend, as he was still too frail and that made for an even more difficult and emotional day for the family. After a service at the crematorium everyone gathered at a nearby old Cheshire pub that is opposite All Saint’s Church in Daresbury. The church is famously the burial place of Lewis Carol and there is a beautiful stain-glass window there dedicated to Alice in Wonderland.

Trav’s mum’s funeral. It was a sad and poignant day.

Rest in Peace Dot Horton

The day after the funeral Trav and I headed back to Asia with heavy hearts. We decided we needed some down time before heading back to the island of Koh Tao and our busy lives of teaching diving and writing projects. We decided to take a short diversion and fly over to the island of Penang in Malaysia. It is very easy and inexpensive to fly to Penang with Air Asia from Kuala Lumpur and it's a place we had yet to visit. Not that we planned to explore much – that would have to wait for another visit – we just wanted time to rest and recuperate and to get over our hectic and stressful month and from the jetlag of travelling. We were very fortunate, due to Trav being a card member with Holiday Inn - that we were given a fabulous top floor suite upgrade for the three nights of our stay and so were able to get our R and R in absolute luxury!

Next time on the blog I’ll be back on Koh Tao in Thailand. We have lots to do there – Trav is heading up a team of Dive Master Trainees and I have a new book to bring out soon and another to start writing.

So pop back soon for island updates and writerly news and please do consider joining my 2017 mailing list. Every new subscriber will receive a free copy of my bestselling ebook 'How To Party Online' just for signing up to my occasional newsletters by using the form at the top right hand side of this page.

Love, Janice xx

Two weeks spent island hopping in the Seychelles!

The tropical islands of the Seychelles have long been a dream destination of ours but one we always thought would be outside our travel budget.

But in the first week of July this year, when we were back in Scotland for the month, and after a week of catching up with our much-missed families, we saw a last minute bargain flying to the Seychelles from Glasgow with Emirate airlines.

We are subscribed to lots of different airline and travel agency lists and when we were emailed with Emirate’s ‘24 hour flash sale’ – it seemed that a trip to the Seychelles might actually be affordable to us if we acted quickly and made our travel plans independently.

It didn’t take us long to agree and press a few buttons!

The Seychelles are an archipelago in the Indian Ocean consisting of more than one hundred and fifteen islands that are made up of ancient granite and corals. Famous for its beaches and nature reserves, island hopping is an absolute must and we planned to visit all the main islands of Mahé, Praslin, La Digue, and Curieuse, during our 14 day trip.

My husband Trav was excited about the scuba diving – the Seychelles are said to be one the world’s top ten dive locations. I was excited about seeing some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. I was also looking forward to seeing the famous ‘coco-de-mer’ nut - the largest coconut in the world that is only found on these islands. The largest tortoises in the world can also be found here: they have a lifespan of around one hundred and fifty years and the breeding group on the Seychelles remains the only chance to save the species from complete extinction. I was really looking forward to meeting some of these giant gentle creatures.

To say that I had huge expectations for this trip was an understatement!

We flew out of Glasgow and left the rain and grey skies behind us – heading for Dubai and a change of airplane before flying onto Mahe, the main island. A total flying time of around thirteen hours plus airport waiting time.

The view from our room at a Glasgow airport hotel on the morning we flew to the Seychelles!

But all the travelling was all totally worth it! We landed in Mahe around 6am and having used several internet travel sites like Expedia, Hotels.com and Booking.com, to find affordable hotels, we took a taxi to our hotel of choice.

We planned to be on Mahe for our first three nights before taking an inter-island ferry over to Praslin, the island that we would use as a base for a week of island hopping over to Le Digue and Curieuse. Then we planned to return to Mahe for our last few nights before flying back to Glasgow.

These are just some of my favourite photo memories of those amazing two weeks!

First day - exploring the beach on Mahe Island, Seychelles

Island hopping is easy to do in the Seychelles using the inter-island ferry service

There are no cars on La Digue so we hired bicycles to explore the island

One of the world's most beautiful beaches... Anse Source D'Argent on La Digue Island, Seychelles

Impressively large beach boulders on Pralin Island

Hotel pool on Praslin

We visited a black pearl farm on the island of Praslin

The coco-de-mer nut!

Island hopping over to La Digue

Exploring Praslin on foot with Trav

Trav on a Praslin beach

Walking on the softest whitest sand in the world...

Meeting a giant tortoise on Curieous Island

An amazing sunset from our hotel on Praslin

Once back in Glasgow, on the last weekend of July, we headed up to the university town of St Andrews to attend our good friends daughter’s wedding. St Andrews is also known as the 'home' of golf course, of course. We were thrilled to be invited to share in such a special day and also excited to be meeting up with friends and to be staying overnight in such fabulous surroundings.

Trav and I don’t actually carry ‘best clothes’ in our suitcases while we are travelling, so we had to first head to Princes Street, Edinburgh, where I bought a lovely summery dress from Monsoon (half price in the sale - yay!) and Trav hired a very nice suit from a menswear department.

On Princes Street, Edinburgh, shopping for our St Andrews wedding attire!

The weather on the Saturday, for the wedding, having started out a bit grey and rainy, brightened up beautifully as we came out of the chapel and the sun came out just as we all enjoyed having champagne and nibbles outside on the famous grass quadrangle. While a string quartet was playing, and the wedding party were having the official photographs taken, we got to chat with our lovely much-missed friends and take lots of photographs. It was a fabulous day. Congratulations to the bride and groom, Leanne and Danny!

The day after the wedding, we drove back to Edinburgh, handed over Trav’s hired suit and stayed overnight at our eldest son Ben’s apartment in Edinburgh. 

In the morning, we planned to be up early to travel to Glasgow with Ben where we would meet our youngest son Iain.

We were all traveling together to South Korea to visit our middle son James, his lovely wife Sujeong, and our baby grandson Aaron – whom none of us had yet met!

We were also meeting Sujeong’s family for the first time and I was worried how we would communicate, as they don’t speak any English and we don’t speak any Korean. But I needn’t have worried - as we had an interpreter for our words - but the immediate love and warmth between us all needed no interpretation at all. One week wasn’t enough with our Korean family and we now miss them all dreadfully.

With our lovely Korean family!

So my next blog post will be about of our time, our experiences, and our travels in South Korea. It was wonderful, exciting and emotional trip – and I did get lots of photographs!

Thanks for reading my blog and please pop back soon. If you don’t want to miss any future posts please do consider subscribing to my blog. The form is on the side bar. You can, should you wish to hear about any book or writing news, also sign up for my newsletter – I only ever send out one or two a year and so promise not to bombard you.

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Love, Janice xx