First the BBC director Mat phoned. As a result of the forest fires we were in a different town to the original plan – some 150 miles to the east of where the crew were standing! But we’d warned them already, so while we were able to have a relaxing morning, they had a drive […]
Read more "BBC Day 1 – Revelstoke"Well, we’re now travelling in a different way to normal backpackers – not just because we’re doing it with two small children, but also because we’ve got a camera team with us, working for the BBC Holiday programme. The idea is that they’ll follow us for ten days, and at the end of that have […]
Read more "Life with the BBC"Today was our first full day with the BBC crew, and because of last night’s late finish, we had a lie-in until 9.00, then met them at 10:30 at the Parks Visitor Centre in the middle of town. They’d already been busy, and had completed an interview with a park ranger on the state of […]
Read more "May the force be with you (in Jasper)"Before I write any more, I have to say “WOW”. Today we drove down the most amazing road, the length of the Rockies from Jasper to Banff. It was around 150 miles, and it took us 10 hours, because we had a couple of long stops, but also because we didn’t want to rush past […]
Read more "Down the Icefields Parkway"When we arrived in Banff last night, we found out that the hostel is about 50% more than on the coast (around £40 for a family room, compared to £20 in Vancouver). On a budget of $120 (Canadian Dollars) a day, spending $95 on accommodation would blow away the daytime options. But fortunately, although we’re […]
Read more "Banff – Expensive, tacky and beautiful"Sometimes I wonder whether it feels odd to the crew, because they are just around us for 10 days, and then going onto their next project, and I guess they’ll never see us again. Whereas for us, as backpackers, being with people for 10 days is a long time and a pretty intensive experience. As […]
Read more "Living with the BBC (well not literally)"Today was a day of moving, and not moving. The plan was to leave Banff and end up in Revelstoke. Along the way we were stopping to see Kicking Horse resort. As soon as we met the crew we changed the plan – we definitely wanted to see Lake Louise, and so we said that […]
Read more "On the road with Auntie Beeb – Day 5"Today we woke up in Revelstoke in the SameSun Hostel (it’s good – a wooden building with solid oak floors, nice staff and friendly guests). The original plan had been to drive across to Kelowna today, without doing any filming. But Revelstoke cries out to be filmed, as it’s full of old wooden buildings, and […]
Read more "Revelstoke – a spiffing city"We’re famous! The Banbury Guardian saw our website last week, and picked up on the Canadian forest fires that we’d written about. And lo and behold, on their website (and presumably in the paper), they’ve written a story on it – they’d emailed asked for our thoughts, and there they are in the article. It […]
Read more "In Flame Infamy"Today we woke up in Kelowna. The hostel, which is much more friendly and informal than the others we’ve stayed at, had a keg party last night (think of the old Party 7 cans and make it bigger). Anyway, although it was on the deck outside our bedroom window, everybody had kept really quiet because […]
Read more "Kelowna – nice but wasted time"Today we moved from Kelowna to Vancouver – it’s a distance of around 400 kilometres – 250 miles. (Here’s an odd thing – although Canada is in North America, it seems to be trying to be in Europe too – they measure distance in kilometres and metres, not miles and feet like the Americans, and […]
Read more "Driving, driving, driving me mad…"Today was “the Vancouver day” for the BBC. We had to pack in a complete filming section for the whole of Vancouver, and boy, did we pack it in. We started at 8.00 outside our favourite coffee shop, being filmed walking down the street, and then buying/drinking coffee and updating our website via the wireless […]
Read more "Vancouver at warp speed"We’re finally back at Mission Beach after 9 days, which means that we’re heading back down south to Sydney after driving North for the first month – so far we’ve driven 2,000 miles in the month. It also means that we’re finally able to pickup our video of the BBC Holiday programme. (Oh, and it […]
Read more "Let’s get a video for the night…."Today was a BIG day – the day we were meeting our director, who will spend the next week filming us around and about Bangkok for the Holiday programme. Ginny’s the director, and the great news was that we had the meeting over lunch at her hotel, so we enjoyed a pretty luxurious lunch in […]
Read more "Meeting the Beeb"Hmm. Here’s a challenge for you – make a factual programme about a family visiting the Bangkok City Palace, without being allowed to film in the Bangkok City Palace. Yup, defeats me too! It turns out that item number one on the schedule was sabotaged by the Thai authorities, who won’t allow filming inside the […]
Read more "Bangkok Filming – Day One"On our second day of filming, we didn’t have much packed down on the agenda, but the traffic in Bangkok makes it so difficult to get around – it takes ages to get between shots. Unfortunately the BBC’s hotel is on the other side of town from ours, so we had to set off at […]
Read more "Not getting easier"Today started really early, as we all had to get up at 5:30, to catch a 6:15 taxi to the train station. We were due to catch the 7:45 train out to Kanchanaburi, where the ‘Bridge over the River Kwai’ was built. But first we had to get through a filmed discussion on the platform. […]
Read more "A long day out to the River Kwai"Another day, another early start. We had to jump out of bed at 5:15, so that we were in a taxi at 6:15, racing across town to get to the BBC’s hotel. Then we all piled into the minibus to go to the floating market at Damnoen Saduak. There are a number of ‘floating markets’ […]
Read more "To market, to market, to buy me a…boat"We had a late start this morning, as the crew came to us for 10 o’clock! So we had time to sit down to breakfast, and read the paper. The Bangkok Post’s Quote of the Day, on the front page, was a rather prescient quotation from Albert Einstein – “Insanity: Doing the same thing over […]
Read more "Tuk-Tuk-to-Tuk-Tuk, One More Time"