KEN AITKEN: 2003 – 2017: Travel Blog for Ken and Harriet Aitken
TRAVEL ….. An International Perspective
Harriet and I love to travel. This comes from the freedom of life we have and having no mortgage on our five acres of land plus the house we built from recycled materials in 1981 for minimal money.
See the house and garden on my personal experiences website:
• OUR HOUSE …. An Overview
• OUR HOUSE …. The Actual Garden
See the current photos of the house and garden and the history of how we obtained rejected materials like the Supreme Courthouse stone (where the Law Courts are now)…. two loads for nothing in 1980. They dumped 100’s of cubic metres as fill and built a school over the top. The stone was cut of the Kangaroo Points Cliffs in 1877.
Harriet and I have been travelling overseas every two years to see the world. In between we have been seeing parts of Australia which is a very large country. We are also a member of Wyndham Vacation Resorts Asia Pacific (a holiday share organisation) where we have available free accommodation in 3 star apartments around Australia. These are largely free of cost.
We both love history and it is very profound to us. People express their ideas on life in the way they build and arrange their living spaces. It is a bit hard to go back to 79 A.D. when Pompeii as a thriving Roman city and was buried with so little warning by 5-6 metre of Volcanic ash from Mt. Vesuvius. Pompeii was literally frozen in time.
You can easily spend a whole day walking the original stone cobbled streets looking at all the houses, temples, public baths and shop fronts.
See the post on this day when we went overseas on our Italy holiday in May 2005.
Australia where we come from only has a European history from when Captain Cook from England sailed into Sydney Harbour in 1778. Australian history grew after this period. When we were on our Italian trip, we went to down to Sorrento for a week. Sorrento is on the southern part of Italy on the Mediterranean Sea.
We would walk the ten minutes up or down to the cobblestoned Tasso Square or from our unit. Looking over a low stonewall, we would look down into a small V shaped valley. In the bottom was a small creek. Stone cliffs fell vertically for about 150 metres to the creek. We would see this very old stone building with a chimney standing out in the V of the creek area. Because we couldn’t speak Italian, we couldn’t ask anyone about it. We could only take photos in the morning and evening when we came home.
When we came home in in late May, I was looking at websites for Sorrento and I came across photos of this old stone building and information to go with it. It was ‘The Deep Valley of the Mills‘ a wheat grinding mill from 900 A.D. The mill was abandoned in the 1800’s as the winds which cooled the Valley were inhibited by the build up of Sorrento as a town and it became to hot and humid down there.
I believe there are three kinds of people in the world. I compare these people to how they would look at trees in a forest. They are:
1. Those who see the trees in the forest: ‘Living in the First Dimension’
2. Those who see the spaces in between the trees in the forest
·…. valuing the spiritual and abstract things of life: ‘Living in the Second Dimension’
3. Those who both count the trees in the forest and see the spaces in between:
‘Living in the Third Dimension’.
Harriet and I are of the third kind of people. When we go travelling, we see and value the physical realities that we are seeing but also the culture behind what we are seeing. We have a great love of history eg. when we were in France in May 2007, we spent a week in Paris, we hired a car and drove throughout Brittany for a week then we drove down through the Loire Valley for another week. See two of the places we saw:
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