Hi all, and although it’s halfway through the first month of 2019 already – Happy New Year! I’ve been ultra busy with work since before Christmas, I had a chance to ‘be the boss’ for three weeks which was challenging and extremely time consuming, but I am back to my old role now which is good.

And so the other day I decided I wanted a new look for the blog. Well, I decided a while ago that I did but I needed a few hours to devote to making a decision, and that’s what I finally did. I didn’t find EXACTLY what I wanted, but I like the layout of seeing a few more blog posts without scrolling down. I have had to choose not to have a header photo as I find they take up too much space when you go to the blog, pushing posts too far down.

I must have looked at 100 themes on Word Press! Trying each out via ‘preview’. Some looked absolutely NOTHING like the example they show you. I need to spend some time updating all the country pages, which is on my to do list at the start of the year. I haven’t touched them for over a year. I have to be honest – I find maintaining a blog very time consuming.

I am still not at the point of putting advertising up and making money that way for the blog – and I’m okay with that. I looked into it probably over a year ago now and couldn’t really get it set up properly. I have had offers from companies/people to do sponsored posts, but I don’t feel I’ve had any offers that I would be happy doing. I’ll be asked to write a post or a series of posts on things that a company offers – without having used them and they always say I can’t mention it’s a sponsored post.

Sigh. So travel plans for 2019. I hope to getaway once or twice in the next 9 months for a short break. It’s essential for material for new posts. I recently started scanning in photos from my 2000-2001 trip and so there might be a few more posts in that.

And then I am looking at the end of October for my big getaway for around six weeks. I’ve already pretty much decided on flights and countries – Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Spain and Portugal for the main stops, passing through Hong Kong, Uzbekistan and possibly Belarus. I know – it’s an odd mix of countries. More on that in the next week or two I expect.

So here we are – 2019 – let’s make it a good one, right? Thanks as always for reading – and May the Journey Never End!