As somebody who worked for a lot of years at The Age, The Sunday Age and the early online incarnations of those newspapers, it was fun to see my byline reappear in the Traveller section on January 9. What a great start to a new year.

The day we walked it … Pic Nicko

I got to write about one of my favourite things, France, and specifically how wonderful it is to walk across a drained bay from Normandy to Brittany, to visit the Mont Saint-Michel abbey.

I could have written 3000 words on this subject without blinking – including that a distant French relative apparently drowned in the quicksand many years ago. But newspapers have word counts.

The article is here.

The quicksand is real … Pic: Nicko