BOGOF

You just can't beat a good bargain and so for those of you who are quite new to Oman, or even for some of you who have been here a while, you may not have heard about this fantastic book called “The Entertainer”.

Basically you pay 29 OMR and you get a book full of vouchers allowing you to buy one main course and get one main course free in a load of restaurants around Muscat and beyond, including some of the top end ones. There doesn’t appear to be any restrictions on using the vouchers, i.e. they can be used at weekends etc, just not major holidays. I reckon you need to use the book at 4 or 5 meals out to cover the cost. It also works for golf courses, BOGOF on green fees and other activities around the city such as kite surfing, scuba diving etc. We got ours at Al Fair but I am sure you can pick it up at a lot of other places.

(And no I haven’t been paid by the authors of this book or given any freebies for this article!)

In the beginning

Having considered writing a blog for several years, I have decided that now is a good  as any. The thinking behind it is for several reasons. Mainly, it allows my family and friends to get regular updates about what we are up to and to keep in contact. Hopefully it will also offer some help and advice to those people who are considering moving abroad and maybe people can learn from our experiences, or mistakes, whatever you wish to call them. This can be for specific to the places we move to or in fact just general information when it comes to putting your whole life into a number of brown boxes and setting sail to foreign lands. Finally, I love visiting new restaurants and eating out, so you’ll also find a few restaurant reviews of places we visit. 

So my life up to now in 2 paragraphs...

I met my wife Jenny whilst working on a summer camp in Pennsylvania, USA. By pure luck we were both studying in Edinburgh at the time and so holiday romance turned into university relationship, which turned into marriage! On the evening of my wedding, (or as I call it 'the best day of Jenny's life') my new bride and I danced to the song by 'The Calling' titled "I'll go wherever you will go", hence the name of the blog. At the time I didn't quite realise the significance of those words but having been dragged all over the world in the years we have been together, this makes me think she had a plan all along!

And so a few years ago, this love of travel developed into something a bit more long term. Jenny was offered a fantastic opportunity to work in Chicago for 18 months and I thought why not? So house rented out, our whole life in storage and a one year career break secured, I found myself saying a tearful goodbye to my parents in Dublin as my German Shepherd, Ralph (I'll introduce him properly later) and I boarded an Aer Lingus flight to join Jenny on the other side of the Atlantic. That eighteen months became two and a half years and I have just recently found myself boarding another flight to Oman where the next chapter has recently begun.

And so the story continues...