BOOKTRAP BOOKS
Travel
Is the glass half empty or half full? Ironically, sometimes life influences our view, and alters our perception. Life changing events, prior to 1997, almost destroyed me. At my lowest point, and just in time, I met Nigel. He helped me to discover how a positive attitude can change everything. I decided not to squander anymore of my time or energy on undeserving people. This new positive approach helps me to perceive my glass as half full, with my aim being to achieve a happy and healthy life for my family. Together, we live life to the full. In 2008 and with good times ahead of us, my glass was half full. As a family, we made the biggest and most difficult decision of our lives; part of our family would immigrate to Australia. We lived the Australian dream; embracing the adventure until adversity came to test us. A sequence of life changing events including, a close family bereavement, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following a road rage car accident, and the shock of losing the roots to our Australian adventure during the Brisbane floods tested us on many levels. Glass Half Full follows our journey into happy, sad and challenging times. Find out, what it takes to survive, when the odds are stacked against you. Do you fight back, and if so at what cost physically and emotionally? Could we maintain our positivity and family values against the odds? This is our story.
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Two dogs and a suitcase: Clueless in Charente, the title says it all: what we have and where we are. This book, the sequel to Glass Half Full: Our Australian Adventure, follows our French exploits as we rebuild our lives in another new country, after spending four and half years in Australia. Our hope for the immediate future is to focus positively on the present. To enjoy being nearer to the children and leaving the dark clouds of the challenges we faced in Australia as a distant memory. Read my reflections, thoughts, and observations about my family, our new surroundings, and our lifestyle including my new writing career and how we start our renovation project while managing our convoluted family life. Once again, we will laugh, cry, and enjoy life to the fullest with a generous helping of positive spin thrown in for good measure.
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Our Frugal Summer in Charente: An Expat’s Kitchen Garden Journal
Meet Sarah Jane, a woman with a reputation for culinary catastrophe who tries to keep her family fed in challenging circumstances in rural France. Frugal living was not part of the plan when they arrived from Australia to undertake the renovation of a quaint cottage in the Charente. However, when life throws them a curve-ball the challenge was set. How to survive in France with very little money and two Australian cattle dogs. The answer came in the form of 5 chickens, 4 ducks and a vegetable garden! The frugal plan was to save money by any means possible, to enable any money they could earn to be invested into continuing the renovation of the cottage. In true ‘Good Life’ style Sarah Jane attacks this challenge head on by keeping some small livestock and converting a garden, that resembled a meadow, into a French ‘potager’ or kitchen garden.The French tradition of using produce from their ‘potagers’ is renowned for enabling families to create meals that are healthy, cost effective and simple. There are 31 recipes for a variety of food and drinks, included in a month by month account, of how they transformed a neglected garden into a frugal yet productive expat kitchen garden. |
Taking up photography, as a cathartic exercise, after losing almost everything to the Brisbane floods in 2011 gave Nigel a different perspective on life and his Australian surroundings.
There is an old saying that a person's eyes are the "window to their soul." We have found that our photographs are the window to our memories. This is the first book in a series from places we have lived, visited and enjoyed which we hope will appeal not only to followers of our adventures, but also to people who are interested in photography or travel. |
I was cycling across Europe in search of Utopia, a place I believed was located somewhere in Greece. When I found it, I would start a new life there. It was my big, fat, Greek mid-life crisis. But now I was having a crisis within a crisis. What on earth had I been thinking? I was middle aged and homeless, soon to be penniless, and really and truly no different from that bag lady sitting on the bench over there. I couldn’t jack it in and go home, because I didn’t have a home to go to anymore. The bicycle and the tent were now home. Wherever I found myself on any given night was now home. And that meant, for tonight, Genoa Piazza Principe Railway Station was home.
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