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 Ellie. Welcome to the final blog of the holiday! Thank you for coming on this journey with us, if you got this far! I write this from the comfort of my bed in Norwich, very jet-lagged, so please excuse anything nonsensical. The main reason for writing these is that I forget what I did yesterday on a normal day, so I can look back at these when I want to reminisce! It was our final day at Disney today and we were determined to make the most of it

This blog is brought to you by Barry Another early start, another Disneyland day! We were settled in to our regular theme park routine by this point, rising with the sun and rousing ourselves with a cup of tea and some of 7/11’s finest cereal. After completing 50% of our intended attractions on Monday our plan for the morning was to tackle things on the remaining ‘left side’ of the park. In comparison to the previous day it was a beautiful Southern California morning and we b

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. We came to California to escape the rain, which naturally means we woke up this morning to a downpour. We’d known this was coming so I’d purchased some rain ponchos yesterday (kindly modelled by Barry on day seven whilst escaping Tiana’s Bayou Adventure). There was no getting around it, we had theme park tickets and we were going to get the most out of them, dang it! We ventured out into the rain. The first stop on our agenda today was Di

‘Nothing can stop us now, I’ll tell you how we’re going to make it happen’ This blog is brought to you by Barry. There’s very few reasons that I’d be happy to be up and awake at 6:15am. Thankfully a day at Disneyland is one of them, so after a shower, an energising cup of tea and bowl of cereal we were bouncing out of the Alpine Inn with a spring in our collective steps. The California location sits on a much smaller site in comparison to the other Disney resorts around the w

“Night blooming Jasmine” This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Folks, I’m sorry to say that our time in Los Angeles has come to an end and we must go Southward. We’ve had the most excellent week here and have seen and achieved so much! My favourite is still the Hollywood sign hike and also, obviously, seeing Brendan Fraser holding a tiny dog. Apologies that we don’t have photo evidence of this, but we were trying to be respectful and were also pretty starstruck! Today we move

Staying out late, X’s on hands. Since when did you like punk rock bands? This blog is brought to you by Barry. In comparison to previous days, the agenda I’d set for poor Ellie’s legs today was far less challenging, almost verging on ‘relaxing’. After whipping up our now traditional breakfast of Trader Joe’s Pumpkin-Os (with added fruit) and a banging cup of tea, we were out of the door at 9am sharp for my longest drive of the holiday so far. The six point turn required to ge

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Hello there, fellow travellers! Welcome to another day in sunny Los Angeles. Today was to be a day of two halves and a quite cultural one too, but first I had to drag my weary bones and muscles out of bed, which sounds easier than it was after the last two days of marching about. After a quick shower and breakfast, we were back out for a short drive down to La Brea Tar Pits. You may have seen the iconic image of the woolly mammoths stuck

This blog is brought to you by Barry. Yesterday featured early morning mountain climbs, heat, jet lag and challenging drives around twisty-turny streets in LA traffic. With all that taken into account, I’m sure it was little comfort to Ellie’s legs to know that when planning this trip, even I looked at our schedule for today and thought ‘this could be a bit ambitious’. Nevertheless, we were taking advantage of the fact that the massive shift in time zones had temporarily turn

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. Thanks to a healthy dose of jet lag, we rose bright and early at 05:30 on the first day of this year’s big Barry and Ellie getaway. We started the day with a squidgy apple cinnamon roll and our favourite tea, purchased from Trader Joe’s yesterday. We packed a bag with sandwiches and snacks and headed out for our first full day. The plan today is as follows: Make Ellie hike to the Hollywood sign (an adventure I did not feel I was capable o

Well I’m going out west where I belong… This blog is brought to you by Barry. As the discordant chorus of phone alarms woke me from my slumber in the bland but comfortable surroundings of Premier Inn Terminal 4, I stirred with the knowledge that there would be many hours and many, many miles until I would next be in bed. And yet, an early start for a holiday is better than a regular start for anything else, so with that mantra in our heads we were washed, dressed and on our w

This blog is brought to you by Ellie (and special guest Animal Correspondent, Ruth!) Well, yesterday was pretty eventful, despite ending well. Shall we have a chilled day today? I think we shall. We had a slow breakfast this morning on the front terrace (a choice of terraces, how hard our life has been this week). Today we had a small and perfectly formed plan. Myself, Barry and Dad were to drive into Periana to fetch two highly sought after items, then return victorious and

This blog is brought to you by Barry Today began in what was becoming the usual routine for this Spanish excursion, with everyone emerging sometime after 9am for coffee, juice and breakfast by the pool. The plan for the group was that we were to spend a chilled morning in the villa before heading on an expedition to the city of Granada around 12:30. These hours passed quickly without much to report - Sam, Steed and I used the time to perfect our aquatic ball and frisbee thro

This blog is brought to you by Ellie. This morning I woke up, blinking sleep out of my eyes, at 7am. I fell straight back to sleep and when I next woke, three Spanish hours had passed like magic. It seemed everyone was rising late this morning, a sure sign we have started to relax. When my parents, brother Samuel and Ruth arrived, they were given a short tour by the owner and a sizeable bag of oranges. We enjoyed their juice this morning with our breakfast on the pool terrace

This blog is brought to you by Barry Day Dos (that's Day Two for the uninitiated) began with a bright beam of light calling me from above. Had I passed away in the night and been called up to heaven? Unlikely, for a number of reasons, but the powerful ray of sunshine was enough to ensure that I could no longer keep my eyes closed. As I began to stir from my slumber, I surmised that I was not in fact about to be handed my very own cloud, harp and opportunity to reunite with my

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