THE ADVENTURES OF ELLIE AND BARRY
(AND HENNING THE TROLL)

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Good day, fellow travellers! Today we awoke to much milder weather from the get-go. It was an early start for us, rising at 06:30, having a quick breakfast and rushing out the door. Despite our efforts, we were running a bit behind and it was a little bit panic stations when we came out from the Metro and marched toward Vatican City, the second country of the trip and, as Barry mentioned, the smallest country in the world! Fun fact: highe

This blog is brought to you by Barry Buongiorno! With a busy day ahead of us we were awake at a reasonably early hour, if not the crack of dawn then perhaps the cleft? Breakfast was the first thing in our agenda - always the highlight of a hotel stay if it’s included in the price. Sadly though it was more of a restaurant-style setup rather than a pile ‘em high buffet and so I felt socially unable to request my usual plate of ‘one of everything, plus a few spares’. Still, the

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. We’re back at it again, folks! When we last left you, we had been galavanting all over Geneva for my birthday, getting all Christmassy. Our first holiday of 2026 is going to be a short, but much needed, break. Amid wedding planning and sometimes stressful jobs, it’s nice to get back to normal. Rome is the city of choice this time and I have never been to Italy before! Barry has been to Milan and did not get on so well with Italian public

This blog is (also) brought to you by Barry In our last instalment I promised that Ellie would be guiding you through our trip into the Swiss Alps. However, since our return she has been the busiest of bees, including celebrating her birthday, so I’ve decided to take one for the team and break the usual cycle of alternate blogs while things are relatively fresh in the mind, to save the eventual entry from being ‘we went to the mountains, it was nice’. But off to the mountains

This blog is brought to you by Barry. Some days writing these blogs are easier than others. In the case of the last entry I published, I couldn’t wait to get the words out as it would be a chance to describe the day I’d asked Ellie to marry me. Unsurprisingly for the happiest day of my life, I couldn’t wait to relive it for anyone that cared to read. Other days tend to be a bit more difficult to put together but it’s still a chance for me to try and walk others through our ex

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. I never have had a gift for words like Barry has, and I am still pretty much lost for words, but I have never been so happy in my entire little life. I don’t think I could ever have imagined finding the perfect partner in life and yet there he was yesterday, on one knee in front of me, asking me to marry him on the exact spot I had secretly hoped he would! Naturally, I became a water fountain immediately but managed to choke out an emotio

This blog is brought to you by Barry. The history of cinema contains countless landmarks from visionary auteurs, advances in special effects and storytelling that have captivated audiences worldwide and provided scholars with material to be analysed and scrutinised for generations to come. And of course the pinnacle of these is the 1998 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, where in the words of Joey Tribbiani, they ‘get mail and stuff’. While this introduction

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Despite a wonderfully jam-packed day yesterday and quite a late night, New York waits for no-one. We were up and about bright and early again this morning, munching on strawberry and rhubarb hand pies and sipping the best tea there is. Today was going to be another scorcher and we had a lot to see! Thank goodness for expensive trainers and ibuprofen gel, that’s what I say. We hopped straight on the Subway outside the hotel and headed down

This blog is brought to you by Barry. “How you doing?” The morning found us in good spirits and feeling well-rested despite the length and duration of our travels yesterday. It was a relatively relaxed start with our first appointment not scheduled until 10am, so we had time for a leisurely breakfast of pastries and tea courtesy of our visit to Trader Joe’s yesterday. If anyone fancies opening a Trader Joe’s franchise in the UK then consider me first in line. And so with a sp

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. START SPREADING THE NEWS!!! We’re leaving today - for New York City! That’s right, dear readers, our employers have let us out again for more escapades and adventures. It’s been a little while since we last saw you in Cologne, so let’s catch up; In May, I climbed Mount Snowdon with some much loved friends - all of us had very little experience and most of us wouldn’t do anything similar again. I thought about blogging about it, but Barry

This blog is brought to you by Barry. Day Two began with Ellie heading out on a solo mission to locate some pastries for our breakfast. She always enjoys a morning wander in a new city and returned with a successful haul of a strawberry tart (for me) and apple donut (for her), plus a couple of cups of tea from downstairs at the hotel reception. In comparison to yesterday’s start time (is 2:30am so early it’s actually very late?) it was a comparatively relaxed beginning to the

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Barry’s birthday is coming up this week, or as we like to say in this house, “Barrymas”. His favourite thing to do is visit new places, so we planned a little city break to Cologne, Germany. Little, meaning one night, sandwiched between two very long days! The flight time for this morning had been brought forward multiple times by Ryanair over the last couple of months, to the point where we had to get up at 2:30am to drive through the po