Problog

Where to start? My last blog "Taking the Train Home" ended in Corfe Mullen and it seemed a good idea to start this one from there. Have I spent the last 15 months relaxing in Dorset? Not quite. Most of them have been in South East Asia, in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Philippines, with excursions to Hong Kong, Qatar, Dubai, Germany and Poland. Doing some training courses, both teaching: Microelectronics Reliability, Materials Science, Project management, and learning: Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL).

The idea of an extended trip to South America formed some time before I retired in 2014 and developed as I looked at the places I wanted to visit and various options for joining up the dots. So I have an itinerary but it is far more fluid than my train home plan and doesn't include many trains since South America seems to have closed most of its railways.

Since I titled this blog "Corfe Mullen to Cuba" I suppose I ought to start from Corfe Mullen from where, after a great, family focused, Christmas brought together by my sister, I drove my hired Ford Fiesta to Edgware Road in London where I dropped it off and got the Central Line to Mile End where my nephew kindly put me up for a few days over New Year. Another few days seeing friends and my sister, her husband, another Al,  and my other nephews again.

On Monday I got the District and Piccadilly lines, my nephew, who works for TFL, thinks this might be of interest to some poor souls, to Heathrow from where I flew to Santiago via Madrid. The flight was fine. Watched the Man from Uncle, which I thought was a good homage to the original TV series and recreated the atmosphere of the cold war as it was presented in the TV of the time. I chose the second film, the Intern, on the basis that it had Robert de Niro and Anne Hathaway in it but wasn't very impressed, too sentimental, too much of the American Dream with a happy ending for everyone. But that's Hollywood.