Favourite Blogs of 2012!

CHEERS!  – ¡SALUD! –  YIAMAS

I have had a really good year at the keyboard and posting my blogs but I have also enjoyed reading other work just as much.  Some catch the eye straight away, some can be found indirectly through others, some are like shooting stars and disappear without a trace whilst some continue to get better and better.

I thought it would be nice to share with you my favourite blogs of 2012.

They are in no particular order except this one, which is my favourite.  We have fallen out with each other a couple of times but I still keep going back for more of this post about ex-pat life in Gibraltar:

http://roughseasinthemed.wordpress.com/

Author Richard Tulloch writes about his travels:

http://richardtulloch.wordpress.com/

Adrian shares his excellent pictures:

http://adrianharveyphotography.com/

I like this one – there are a lot of stag parties involved in the overseas travel:

http://abitofculture.net/

Great pictures here from Gunta in the USA:

http://gusgus64.wordpress.com/

A lovely recollections and memories blog:

http://opobs.wordpress.com/

A travel blog with a great sense of humour:

http://blondebrunettetravel.com/

A nice blog from Patrecia about ex-pat life in Bulgaria

http://misswhiplash.wordpress.com/

Great posts about one of my favourite countries – Portugal – and more besides

http://restlessjo.wordpress.com/

and finally a gentle pot-pourri of good stories:

http://shipscooksstuff.wordpress.com/

Apologies if I didn’t include you in my top ten this year – I will review the list at the same time next year!

A Life in a Year – 1st May, Two Years of Blogging

On 1^st May 2009 I published my first WordPress Blog. I called the site ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’ plagiarising the title of a 1950s western television series that I used to watch called ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’ starring Richard Boone and it was to be a place to record my travel stories from across Europe. 

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/about/

I had found that, thanks to Ryanair, I was travelling so often that I was having difficulty remembering some of the places I had been and some of the memories were getting mixed up.  This seemed a shame so some time before I began to keep a journal of my travels starting in Greece in 2006.  Most of these stories have now been retrospectively recorded in the blog but I began ‘Have Bag, Will Travel’ with a story about a holiday in Castilla-La Mancha in Spain and in a week of touring, the first destination of Chinchon, a small town just south of Madrid.

http://apetcher.wordpress.com/2009/05/01/chinchon/

I have now written 541 blog entries and have had over 150,000 visitors to the pages.