Flashback Friday

In an attempt to get me blogging more regularly, and also because I love looking through old photo albums, I have joined the Flashback Friday pool on Flickr.

This week's theme is Travel Bug.

In 1979, when I was a year old, my Dad got a job in Vanuatu so we packed up our house in Auckland (Mum, Dad and me) and set off for what must have seemed like an endless tropical holiday. A couple of years later after my brother was born, my Dad was transferred to the Solomon Islands. I spent my first year of school in Honiara attending an international primary school. We arrived back in NZ in 1984 and settled near family in Rotorua.

So, with a childhood like that you would expect that I would have lots of pictures of planes and airport farewells to fit the theme, but there don't seem to be any in the albums I have. I do recall a great picture of my parents posing with me and my grandparents outside our house in Auckland shortly before we left for Vanuatu, but that photo must be in my Mum's albums.

Instead you will have to settle for a couple of pictures of me travelling slightly shorter distances on my tricycle.

Here are a couple of photos of me racing around our flat in Vanuatu in 1980 aged about 2 1/2, still dressed in my nightie and with the remains of breakfast on my face. Obviously riding my bike trumped all other things like getting dressed or washing my face! I don't really remember living in this flat but the painting on the wall still hangs in my Dad's house today. I love the decor, especially the orange shaggy rug and the patterned curtains.

My Dad took these photos on his brand new camera - a couple of pages earlier in the album is a picture of me and him at the camera shop picking 0ut his Olympus SLR. He must have still had the new photographer eagerness happening when he took these shots because I noticed when I took the photos out of the album to scan them that he had written the camera settings he'd used on the back of each.