Frances Valdes
The ‘how to blog’ blogs say I should tell you a little about myself to develop a relationship. I think that could rebound on me horribly. What if you don’t like me?
If you’re a passionate camper wanting to know what it’s like to camp in Namibia, I’ll loose you the minute I say I don’t like camping. Although, I adored the wild camping in the Namib desert.
If you’re a young explorer wanting to know what the remote desert regions of Namibia are like. You’ll stop reading the minute you learn I’m in my sixties.
If you’re an experienced 4 x4 driver wanting to know what it’s like to drive in Namibia, you’re hardly going to relate to my slight OCD issue, which meant I ‘needed’ large water tanks in our vehicle. Although, if you relate to the OCD, you may be amazed at how resilient I was.
So it’s a gamble, but here goes.
I’m Frances Valdes and I love: my husband, my cats, paragliding, cycling, photography, geology, writing, motorcycling, elephants and deserts. The order may vary.
I have had careers as a solicitor, programmer, and administrator for Courier Systems the software company Nigel founded. I make a small amount of money from selling my photos on Istock, and had a bit of success writing articles and short stories. I am about to receive my state pension but still haven’t worked out what career I should have
Oh I’m a vegan – I just lost my one remaining reader didn’t I!
In 1986 my best friend said she was going out with an ex-Rhodesian tank driver. I told her he would be racist, sexist, and misogynistic – I’m sure you get the hypocrisy of labelling someone you know nothing about other than his country of origin, a racist. He and she didn’t work out.
Six months later I met him
Six months later I married him
(it was the eighties and perms were compulsory)
Our friends didn’t think Nigel and I would last. My friends because I didn’t know Nigel, and his friends because they thought I was boring. However, nearly forty years later we may, and I don’t want to be presumptuous here, have proved our friends wrong.
On one of the holidays early in our marriage, Nigel tried to introduce me to his love of camping. But, after I woke up with a slug on my pillow, and spent the next 24 hours crying, he realised camping was a pleasure he wasn’t going to share with me. Well, that was until Namibia.
Nigel Thomas
Nigel was born in Rhodesia (for younger readers who can’t find it on the map, it’s now called Zimbabwe). He spent his formative years in the bush sleeping under the stars, or for luxury under canvas. He loved camping, with as much passion as I hated it.
Nigel was a courier in the 80’s. Couriering was big in the 80’s when everyone was just discovering how urgent everything was. He had trained as an engineer, built his own computer, loved algorithms and experimented with programming. It seemed natural, well for Nigel, that he should write some software to manage a courier company. Courier Systems was born. I joined it as a partner some time later.
I guess Courier Systems is a lifestyle business. Nigel was driven by the intellectual exercise of solving people’s problems with software. He also hoped that working for himself would allow us to pursue the life we wanted. It did. As an added bonus, his analysis of problems and software solutions was brilliant, and earnt us a nice income.
We believe that, by law, all websites should have at least one photo of cats. These are our cats, when they were young.
Desert Wonderers 