What this blog is about...

This is a bit weird. As you now know, I travelled extensively across New Zealand and Australia a couple of years ago, and wrote a big blog. A year later my cousin Heather followed in my footsteps on a similar trip.

Well, the other day my Grandma found a big box of letters, diaries, pictures and newspapers in her attic. They dated from the turn of the nineteenth century.

My cousin Heather, Grandma and I got ourselves settled with cups of tea and started trying to read the letters out to each other. Some of them we couldn't make out at all, with their spidery ink scrawl.

Then I found a sheaf of letters written by two ladies travelling around New Zealand and Australia in 1888. They had been to the same places that Heather and I had visited on our own travels, 120 years later.

This is the blog of Anna and Eliza Cairns.

Eliza is Anna's mother, and we think Anna is about 14 years old. The letters are addressed to Elliot (Eliza's son) and Mamie (Elliot's wife).

Sarah