Chris & Lina's Travels around the world

Here's a little background about our trip reports

Addicted to holidays:
Most people who know us, know that we spend every available day of our annual leave touring around the world. We have a fairly generous holiday allowance here in the UK and by booking our vacations to coincide with the UK public holidays we can be away for up to 8 weeks per year. We manage to achieve this most years split between 3 or sometimes 4 trips per year.

The end of the postcards...
We used to send a big wad of postcards from each holiday to our family and friends but we were getting ever more frustrated by the small area that was available on them to describe the amazing things we were seeing and experiencing around the world. We were also very conscious of the significant time it was taking to write them all when we could have been doing other things. It was while we were planning an intensive 3-week tour of the four largest Hawaiian Islands that we decided to stop sending postcards from our holidays.

...and the start of the trip reports:
We still bought postcards in Hawaii but, as our time was so limited, we brought them back with us, unwritten, with the intention of sending them once we got home. We decided to overcome the problem of the very limited writing space by typing up a lengthy account of our trip separately and posting this with the unwritten postcards.

This text only format was repeated for our next trip (to San Francisco) but we were already thinking about an alternative scheme since sending only one picture postcard just isn't enough for most of the places that we visit.

Add a little colour...
We were inspired by a letter we received from some friends (Yes! that's you Tim & Alison!) which had been illustrated with pictures of their baby daughter and so we finally decided to replace the trusty old BBC Micro with a new PC, scanner and colour printer so that we could illustrate our trip reports with our scanned in holiday snaps.

We first used these new toys following our tour of India in December 1995. This was our first venture into desktop publishing, and we struggled a little with the many quirks of Microsoft Word 95 but we are still quite pleased with what we consider to be our first effort.

These trip reports have now started to take over our life. We seem to spend more and more of our time on them after each holiday to the extent that we usually only just send out one report before we jet off to our next destination.

...and then let the world know:
Many of our friends have suggested that we make our trip reports available on the World Wide Web. Well, we could barely find the time to write the paper versions let alone convert them to HTML. However, with the many free web page offers around, we have finally signed up for one and we are slowly making them available to the world.

For a while we continued to write the paper based trip reports in Word with the intention of converting them to HTML afterwards, but after a few conversions to html it became obvious that it would be faster to do this in reverse and write the originals in HTML. Our trip to Kuala Lumpur was our first trip report written in HTML.

Anyway, enough of this introduction: Follow this link for a list of all of the places we have visited with hotlinks to any trip reports we have written or click here to go back to our home page.

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