THE FREN FAMILY’S HOLIDAY SURVIVAL GUIDE!
The Travel Guides Australia favourites unpack the tips they swear by
When it comes to travel, few have more experience than the Fren family from Travel Guides Australia.
“This is our seventh season now – it’s insane!” Mark, 60, tells Woman’s Day of his family’s time on the show. “We’ve pretty much seen and done it all.”
As we speak, the Newcastlebased quartet are all at the hairdressers getting in a last-minute pampering before they jet off to yet another mystery location to film what will be their 54th episode.
To prepare, production gives them only an A4 sheet of paper with bullet points of basic info about the country they’re visiting – the temperature, what time it will be when they land, etc.
To make their travelling experiences as comfortable and less frantic as possible, the Frens have had to get thrifty with their travel hacks.
“I can’t stress this enough – shop around for the best airfares,” says Mark. “Also, when checking in, ask if you can pay for an upgrade! It’s usually an extra couple of hundred dollars, but it’s just so worth it, especially if you’re travelling overseas.
“And if you can’t get an upgrade, use website Seat Guru, which lets you choose your own seats. You’ll never be in the middle seat again!”
For mum Cathy, 58, she leaves all the boring logistics up to her husband and ensures she’s soaking up as much of the experience as she can, urging fellow travellers to
“go out of your comfort zone”.
She advises, “Do at least one thing you’re nervous about – it’ll always be the one thing that you remember and won’t be able to stop talking about when you get home.”
Son Jonathan, 30, echoes his mother’s thrill-seeking sentiments. “Soak it all up,” he says. “Do all the tours, heaps of activities… You might never go back there again, so do everything you can.”
His younger sister Victoria, 28, encourages people to turn into a culinary expert
while on holiday, saying that trying all the local delicacies will grant you a priceless experience, wherever you are.
“You’ll get a pretty good feel for a country’s culture just by eating their food – even if they don’t look too appealing,” she tells.
“Oh, and Google Translate is a must! It’s gotten me out of some pretty hairy situations before!”
Travel Guides Australia screens 7.30pm Monday to Wednesday on TVNZ 2.
Even if you’re a doting pet owner, you probably won’t know much about what happens behind the scenes at your local vet surgery when your beloved companion goes in for care.
But a new book, Tales Of
A Vet Nurse, goes beyond the public reception areas to explore the highs and lows of working in an animal hospital, where the unexpected can happen at any moment.
Written by Jade Pengelly, who works in a senior position in a Christchurch practice, her memoir is filled with illuminating anecdotes and insights from her service to animals in New Zealand and the UK over the past decade.
Jade, 30, recently moved to Canterbury after a two-year period of teaching vet-nurse students at Wintec in Hamilton, sharing the knowledge she’d acquired from working in practices across England.
Originally trained as a journalist, Jade switched to vet-nurse studies at Massey University while working in a practice.
As the book explains, the nursing side of the profession supports the vets’ singular focus on diagnosis and surgery. The nurses look after just about every other aspect of care, including making time for soothing cuddles and, importantly, monitoring pain relief.
“The nurse will be the eyes and ears for the patients,” says Jade, talking to Woman’s Day from her Christchuch practice. “The vets are so busy, they can’t have their eyes on a patient all day and they rely on the nurses to do that. It’s as if the nurses are talking for the animals all the time.”
Jade has had a deep connection with animals since childhood, growing up in the Canterbury countryside with her parents and sister.
“We grew up with pet lambs and calves, then ponies when we were old enough,” she tells. “We had our dog, cats and ducklings we would look after. It was like a child’s dream.”
These days, Jade commutes to work from the rural property she shares with her farmer husband, where they have five dogs, two horses, 30 sheep and a couple of cats.
Time spent at home with her own animals helps Jade shake off some of the pressure that comes with the job. Tales
Of A Vet Nurse reveals the diplomatic skills required by the whole practice team when dealing with stressed-out, sometimes-abusive clients.
“The emotional toll of being a vet nurse is a significant part of the job,” explains Jade. “You try to hide your emotions in front of owners if they are going through something hard because it can make them more anxious or upset.
“There are definitely times when you walk out of the room and have a cry with your colleagues.”
But there was one case when she couldn’t staunch the tears. It involved a young dog, Ruby (she has changed the breeds and names to protect the owners’ privacy), who had come in for a simple spaying procedure but suffered cardiac arrest during the general anaesthetic. Ruby was revived by CPR, which is rare, but she emerged from the operation blind and with brain damage.
“She came in completely healthy in the morning and later that day, the clients – who I had known since she was a puppy – came back to a dog that was completely blind and in distress,” shares Jade. “It was too much for me. It was the only time I wasn’t able to hold it together.”
Ruby’s condition improved after specialist treatment. But some other cases still haunt Jade, notably from her time in a London practice serving the super-wealthy, where money was no object but empathy was lacking.
Mimi, an elderly schnauzer with terminal kidney disease, had owners who demanded the vets should just “fix it”, regardless of the suffering. After a series of forced nasal feeds,
‘It was too much for me. I wasn’t able to hold it together’
Mimi, Jade writes, “would look up at me with an expression of utter fear” whenever she opened the cage door.
And then there was Edward, the mellow Burmese cat with diabetes who needed twice-daily insulin injections at 12-hour intervals – too inconvenient for his socialite owner to follow. Jade’s account of Edward’s preventable decline is filled with frustration and pain.
“Yes, those are really hard situations,” she says. “I actually found that in the UK, working with people who had all the money in the world, was more difficult. When there’s an unlimited budget but no common sense, it’s a lot harder to work with those types of clients.”
Happily, Jade’s book also includes some uplifting stories, like the big, burly
New Zealand farmer who bonded unexpectedly – and proudly – with a tiny Chihuahua.
And while working in a rural practice in England, she helped nurse an adorable rescued blind fox cub, which was eventually sent to a sanctuary.
While exploring a wide range of issues, Jade’s book underscores the dedication of her colleagues, who care deeply for animals and have to manage the full spectrum of human behaviour.
She writes about being in class one day at Massey when one of the tutors asked the students, “Do you want to work in vet care because you prefer animals to people?”
Jade laughs. “And everybody put their hands up! Then they said, ‘Well, every client has an owner.’ So that was a real moment and I guess I really enjoy talking to people as well.”
Tales Of A Vet Nurse by Jade Pengelly (HarperCollins, $39.99) is out on Wednesday.