My least favourite part of a meal is dessert… unless there is something which awakens the sweet-toothed child that slumbers within. And there regularly is, no matter where we travel around Europe. […]
During the course of a neverending monologue from Marcia, with an “aye, that’s right” thrown in by Preston every now and again, she mentioned their suitcase was half-filled with tins of Spam. It snapped me out of the self-induced coma I’d retreated into. What sort of strange person would pack Spam in their suitcase? […]
The Portuguese, like the Spanish, are complimentary when you make an effort, telling us we can speak it well when we rattle of a few stock phrases when we’re appalling. […]
Enter a forest and an unseen entity gently detaches your problems and deposits them at the treeline to be collected, or not, when you depart with renewed spring in your step and a glow in your heart. […]
Overtourism isn’t new, it’s just taken some destinations time to stop seeing the dollar/euro signs ringing up on tills and start seeing the negative effects of what has often been partly their own doing. […]
It’s a convivial gathering, eight of us around a dining table at a rural hotel in a converted farmhouse. The food has been plentiful, the wine flowing. As the evening progresses we get to know one another better and tongues loosen. […]
After a couple of days in a purpose-built resort I get twitchy, and eager to leave. Their rhythm is out of kilter. In high season there are no weekends as such, each day is ground-hog Saturday night. […]
Ever since we took up walking in earnest, and starting monitoring weather conditions and their after effects, we’ve learned things about the weather we would once never had considered for a second. […]
Portugal’s only National Park meanders spreads south from the Castro Laboreiro to the Mourelo Plateau. It is a wonderfully wild expanse of glacial valleys, boulder-strewn plateaus, lakes and rivers, high mountains (in Portuguese terms), cork and oak forests, and tiny settlements… […]
Without leaving the house, apart from essential grocery shopping, we’ve managed to find ourselves the victims of fake news in a national paper in the UK. […]
In the middle of the 20th cent in the cool and shady interior of the Imperial, an unexceptional bar next to the bullring in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, a regular known to the waiting staff as ‘El Barraco’ grabs a seat at the bar’s counter mid-morning and orders his favourite bocadillo […]
Arrábida Natural Park is a maze of tracks and paths. That’s the upside for walkers. The downside is not all of them are public ways. The trick is knowing which are and which aren’t. […]
Sitting on a wooden bench in the early morning sunshine at pretty little Bohinjska Bistrica train station – flower baskets hanging from wooden eaves frame pine-clad hills and the timber yard opposite – we’re old soldiers. […]
The depths of winter (i.e. now) in central Portugal is a yin and yang affair. Warm enough to eat lunch al fresco in the midday sunshine, as cold as my home island of Bute in Scotland at night. […]
There are three major differences between jumping on a red tram in Lisbon and squeezing onto the iconic number 28 which shakes, rattles, and rolls its way around the streets of Portugal’s capital. […]
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