Peberdoo's Blog

For Christmas 2021 we gave the kids 4 options to chose from for the family holiday. Christmas in Lapland with Santa, Skiing in Austria, a week with the Grand parents or Christmas in Egypt with Pyramids and Mummies. Guess what they chose, much to my own delight? Jump to conclusions of trip -> So, the planning for Egypt began. We have travelled in a number of MENA countries and knowing some of the difficulties with these places we decided to book a private package trip, to still have some control over the travel plans but to have someone else...

For Easter 2022 we decided to take a trip to Prague with the children by train directly from home in St-Cergue. We love taking train trips and have taken a few epic ones over the years, so when we thought about a trip to Prague we looked to see if there was a way to get to there by train. It just so happens that there is in fact a direct sleeper train from Zurich to Prague operated by the Czech railway company. The tickets are only released 60 days before the journey and for popular weekends they sell out...

Like with so many other things this post was a long time in the making during this never ending pandemic. At least a year ago, but maybe two, our washing machine decided to die. This meant that we could get a nice new fancy washing machine, which I was apparently overly excited about and Vanessa could not care less. But this post is not about the fancy washing machine we bought, but what I did with the old one. We didn't throw the old one out right away as I said I was going to use it to make a...

We have had our Audi A4 (B8) for a long time now and it has served us well. It is not as nice as the one I wrote off in 2016 but this car is still going strong despite being an 8-year-old car and having driven over 170,000 kms. But every now and again we talk about getting a new car, and for me, one of the main reasons I would like a new car is because the old entertainment system in our Audi seems very dated. While I get great Bluetooth connectivity for phone calls that is the only...

While searching around on the net a month or so ago I came across a company called KiwiCo. They do age appropriate boxes of fun activities to promote STEAM (previously stem, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) from 0 to 104 (according to their site). You can get individual crates or a monthly subscription. The concept looked great so I ordered a 12 month subscription. A week or two ago Kieran's first KiwiCo create arrived and we worked together today to make it. The instructions are very simple to follow, all the parts are pre cut and there...

Why do I do this to myself? Well, simple reason, I eat too much and enjoy all the worst foods and I gain weight and get unfit real easy. And I have no problem doing silly things when I put my mind to it. I number of years back I heard about this program from Shaun T called Insanity. I had met someone who did it who said that it worked great for them and recommended I gave it a shot as well. I thought, what the hell, I should give it a go as well. Well, today I just...

In these final weeks of school holidays and still in the time of Covid we decided to go on a family (plus friends) camping trip to Feldkirch in Austria. We had a fantastic week with some greet friends and even though our original plan was to go without our kids and have an adult week away our plans were changed at the last minute and the kids came too. As you can see from the photo above we packed everything, a huge 7x7.5m tent, kitchen cabinet, stove, table and chairs, webber bbq, air mattresses, storage cabinets, bikes, child trailer and...

I have been wanting something like this for the kids for a long time. At first we looked at just buying the packaged products and setting it up the garden. But these days gave me the chance to look into building one for myself. I first started with a plan drawn up of what I thought I wanted it to look like, which then allowed me to put together a shopping list and price the whole thing up. Once I had a plan and the parts needed it was easy to cost it up. Surprisingly it required less material than...

During this lockdown period I am sure I am not the only person to do something that is totally unnecessary. This is just one of those things. The Intex Purespa hottub is a great product that we have very much enjoyed using over the last year, summer and winter. But to be able to enjoy this spa you have to make sure that the temp of the water does not drop below 6 degrees or the spa will not turn on and start to heat up. This is not a problem in the summer months as the water always stays...

Recently we flew from Geneva to Malaysia with Etihad and were a bit disappointed with our experience. We expected a lot more from the middle east carrier as our experiences with Emirates and Qatar have always been very good. So we chose Etihad this time based on price, as we were flying for Christmas and New Year the prices on all airlines were quite high and so when we found a good price on Etihad we thought we would take it. We did not think before hand that Etihad was a budget airline but some of their practices seem to...