December 2024 - Tromsø and Melbourne.

^Dressed up for our son's wedding - a perfect day!

We finished our coastal voyage, spent a night in Bergen and flew out early to Tromsø. We’d booked five nights (four full days) to maximise our opportunities to see the Northern Lights. We found walking around that first afternoon hard in the icy, slippery conditions.

Our hotel, the Scanic Ishavshotel was pricey and the room was small but it was right on the water and super close (max five minutes’ walk) to where all our excursions left from. Best of all, we had an enormous window that looked at the water and across to the mainland (Tromsø is an island). The view was to die for even though most of the view was during pitch-dark hours.

Tromsø is in the Arctic Circle. When we visited at the beginning of December it was bright (sort of!) at about 10am and dark again between 1 and 2pm. It was so strange yet also amazing to see.

The first morning where we woke up in Tromsø, we woke to falling snow which continued to fall for the next four days. To call it magical is to undersell the experience!

That first day the snowstorm was so bad that Andrew’s fishing trip and my walking tour (!!) were cancelled. We spent the morning happily playing in the snow then visited the excellent Polar Museum.

Day Two and we went whale watching. This was our least enjoyable experience mainly because the trip to Skjervoy was seven hours return, with about an hour of whale watching. A lot of the trip was also in the pitch dark. Luckily there was WiFi on the boat. We did see humpbacks and orcas but they were a lot further away than we saw them a year ago in Antarctica. It was also freezing and slippery on deck and a lot of the journey was rough. Cue people running to the toilets and vomiting audibly. Am I selling this trip or what???!!

Next day was a bus trip in the snow to Camp Tamok and a night snowmobile ride. Now, that was a little spooky but a lot of fun!! After the journey through the pristine snow, we had warm blackcurrant juice and fish stew in a Sami tent around a roaring fire. "Pinch me" moments!

Our last day was more “pinch me” moments! We had another bus ride in the falling snow to a Husky camp. We each had a half hour or so of driving a sledge pulled by five Alaskan Huskies. The snow did stop falling for almost the whole hour so visibility was amazing. It was so serene, so white, so gorgeous. We both loved it!

Back to the Northern Lights…well, the snow was magnificent but snowy, overcast skies do not reveal the Northern Lights so not even a peek was had. Despite this, we had some of the most memorable travel experiences we have ever had. I wrote some more detail about it for Mamamia - https://www.mamamia.com.au/what-to-do-in-tromso-norway/

We finished with a day in Oslo, a train journey to Stockholm and a day in Stockholm. The main purpose of these quick visits was to see these cities in the winter and to check out the Christmas markets. We had never been to Oslo and had only been to Stockholm once for less than a day. That visit (a port stop on a Scandinavian cruise) was enough time to see the very fun ABBA Museum and have lunch.

I can’t tell you much about the train trip other than it was a very relaxed and comfortable way to travel. I had a few travel stories to write so I spent the whole day head down typing.

We had a Luxury Escapes credit voucher to use and we spent most of it staying at the Grand Hotel in Oslo. This was on the main street and overlooked the very pretty Christmas market.

The Grand Hotel is historic and lives up to the “Grand” in its name. We learnt from a walking tour that the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each year in Oslo (we saw the Town Hall where this is done and the Nobel Peace Prize Museum). The celebratory lunch is then held at the Grand Hotel. We also learnt (from a museum visit) that when Roald Amundsen returned to Oslo after discovering the South Pole, the celebrations were also held at the Grand Hotel. Pretty cool!

Apart from the walking tour and the Christmas Market, we visited The Fram Museum. Andrew was very excited about visiting this Museum. The Fram was the first ship specially built in Norway for polar research. She was used on three important expeditions: with Fridtjof Nansen on a drift over the Arctic Ocean 1893-96, with Otto Sverdrup to the Arctic archipelago west of Greenland - now the Nunavut region of Canada - 1898-1902 and with Roald Amundsen to Antarctica for his South Pole expedition 1910-12. The Museum is built around The Fram ship and you can go on board.

I really enjoyed our afternoon here. Way more than I thought I would. I think seeing Scott’s ship, Discovery, in Dundee, Scotland in 2022 followed by our Antarctica cruise a year ago and then our time in the Arctic Circle including a visit in Tromsø to the Polar Museum is all building to making me more and more interested in tales of Polar exploration. I think that experiencing the cold of an Antarctic Summer and the darkness and cold of an Arctic Winter also makes you wonder what it must have been like as an explorer…how hard, how dangerous and how lonely it must have been.

Another city, another ship museum. In Stockholm, this was the VASA Museum. The VASA is the world's only preserved 17th century ship. The VASA capsized and sank in 1628 on its debut voyage. You can’t board the VASA but you can learn a lot about her. Again, this was much more interesting that I had thought it would be.

We did another walking tour in Stockholm (we love walking tours, especially in cities we have not been to or seen much of) and we wandered the cute Christmas market.

Home to Melbourne and on a thirteen day countdown to our oldest son’s wedding. M (our son) and his partner, A, have been together for almost 11 years so this wedding was a long time coming!!

After a few days of being home, Andrew jetted off with “the boys" to Brisbane to watch the Second Test (cricket) against India. This was what M wanted to do to celebrate his Buck’s. All went to plan except the weather. It bucketed rain most of the time they were there so not much cricket was watched. Fun was had nevertheless!!

“The girls” celebrated A’s bachelorette on the same weekend with a dinner in a private room at Chancery Lane, a lovely restaurant in the city followed by Karaoke at Crown Casino. We played games at dinner and had a lot of fun!

The wedding was at Coombe Estate in the Yarra Valley. The day before was about 35 degrees but their wedding day dawned cooler and overcast. By the time of the wedding (4.30pm), the sun was shining and the weather was perfect, setting off Coombe’s magnificent gardens to perfection!

We (Andrew and our three younger kids and their partners) rented an AirBNB for the weekend on the main street in Healesville and we had a mini holiday. It was really fun all being together. We had dinner at a local pub the night before the wedding (M joined us there) and the boys wandered around Healesville on the wedding morning whilst us girls had our hair and makeup professionally done. After we returned from the wedding, we all happily chatted for an hour or so about the wonderful day we had all had.

What can I say about the wedding? I am writing this only a week later so it is all very fresh but, at the moment, all I can say is that I was (am) filled with pride. Pride at my son finding and marrying his love (who is a beautiful young woman inside and out), pride at my other children and their partners for being so happy on the day and so happy for their brother and new sister, pride at my husband and I for raising humans with good, kind hearts and pride at our new daughter’s family for welcoming us into their family. It was a beautiful day, full of love and happiness.

The day after the wedding the two immediate families, the wedding MC (a friend of M & A) and the groomsman and his fiancée (M & A’s friends) joined us for a brunch at a nearby winery. It was a lovely, post-wedding, casual catch-up and capped off a perfect weekend.

The two days after the Wedding weekend were hectic preparing for Christmas but I wandered around doing Christmas food shopping and prep and I just felt like I was glowing, still walking on air.

Christmas Day was lovely as always. I felt my Dad’s absence but I also felt the joy of M & A’s wedding, the joy of my family and the joy of Andrew’s extended family who all came over for dinner. Andrew’s Mum has not been well but she posed with all her grandchildren (in age order) for a photo, replicating a photo we took ten years ago when she turned 70. We all ate and talked and laughed :)

Christmas tradition for the last fifteen-something years has been attending the Boxing Day Test (cricket) at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) with Andrew and our sons. Years ago, it was Andrew’s Dad and my stepdad too (my Dad refused to come, preferring to attend the Boxing Day sales in the city and then later in Chadstone!)

Australia played England in front of record crowds. I used to only go on Boxing Day as my daughters never wanted to go and they were too young to leave. This year, I went Days 1, 2 and 3 and then headed to Rye. I won’t see much of M this year as he will head back to Oxford in a couple of weeks so it was lovely to spend three days with him.

Quite a few more Writing Wins this month after a lean November. I had two flash fiction Christmas stories published - https://www.cafelitmagazine.uk/2024/12/christmas-stocking-surprise-by-leonie.html I actually wrote this a year ago and couldn’t get it published but I tried again this year and voilà!

The other story was published in Café Lit on 31 December - https://www.cafelitmagazine.uk/2024/12/my-christmas-to-do-list-by-leonie.html

The other stories are all travel stories. In date of publication order:

• I Experienced Antarctica From Four Different Perspectives - https://weareexplorers.co/antarctica-from-four-perspectives/

• He said, she said: Did both husband and wife enjoy a blistering trip to Türkiye? https://www.joincitro.com.au/news/he-said-she-said-a-taste-for-turkiye

• A Taste of the Hunter Valley - https://www.joincitro.com.au/news/hunter-valley

• I've found the ultimate white Christmas destination you need to book for next year - https://www.mamamia.com.au/what-to-do-in-tromso-norway/

• Careful: a short cruise might lead to a serious addiction - https://www.joincitro.com.au/news/short-cruise-addict

• A Norwegian Adventure Sailing the Arctic Circle with Havila Voyages - https://www.goworldtravel.com/sailing-the-arctic-circle/

I also had my December entry to the Australian Writers’ Centre Furious Fiction longlisted (ie in the top 10 – 15% of stories submitted!). I have entered every month for two years, been shortlisted (ie published) once and now longlisted three times! Hopefully, I will make the shortlist again in 2025!

Coming up, I expect to have a quieter few weeks on the writing front as I take a break, lie on the beach and read a few books from the pile I have ready!

It has been an amazing year in terms of writing. I have had thirty-seven travel stories published this year (four of them co-written with Andrew). I have another six waiting to be published and a couple more that I have written but not yet placed somewhere. All that when, in 2023, I had had only four travel stories published – all in the latter part of the year. And three of those stories were freebies in a dog magazine.

What started as a fun thing to do whilst I was travelling has turned quickly into a part-time job and I have been sent on cruises in Croatia, Papua New Guinea and Norway (what a trio of diverse destinations!!!) as well as a press trip to the Hunter Valley. At the end of January, I am being sent to the Cocos Keeling Islands and I have a few other exciting things in the pipeline for 2025 already.

Additionally, I continue to do some fiction writing, some memoir writing and a tiny bit of poetry. I have had eighteen short stories or personal reflections published this year so, in total, that is fifty-five published stories In 2024!! (The number will increase to fifty-six on 31 December!) More than one a week! WOW! I can’t quite get my head around that number!

And, drumroll, I have my children’s first reader book “When Harry Got Lost” in production with a UK publisher. This month, I have also been offered a publishing contract for two children’s picture books!! They need to be formally accepted after a couple of editorial rounds but, all going well, I will be able to say more about that soon. This contract is with an Australian publisher. What a headspin!!

I could not have written a more surprising chapter on my life than what has happened IRL (in real life). As they say, truth is stranger than fiction!