Aveiro
Into the north, a Portuguese road trip
This was meant to showcase why Portugal is such a popular holiday destination. But not everything went exactly to plan. […]
Month: October 2019
Europe
What’s so good about Ljubljana
Sitting in a riverside bar in Ljubljana and the movie Logan’s Run pops into my head; I instinctively close my fist around what would be a black-for-an-aeon palm flower embedded into my palm. Ljubljana is a young city, possibly the youngest-feeling city we’ve visited. Young and vibrant. […]
Checking In
Hotels with personality, Trigony Country House Hotel, Dumfries & Galloway
Image a world where in the late afternoon in September In Scotland you could sit outside your hotel room and feel comfortably warm. I don’t mean in a parallel universe, or even sometime in the near future when the Northern and Southern Hemispheres have switched places. […]
El Hierro
The other Canary Islands, the green ones
Social media can often be a forum full of people spouting things they think they know and doing so with unshakeable, definitive confidence. An example of this caught my eye the other morning in relation to a comment on a sponsored post about the Canary Islands. […]
Travel Talk
Desperately seeking acceptable authentic travel experiences
Buzz phrases are created constantly. Yesterday alone I learned a raft of labels I hadn’t heard before; second-city travel; slo-mo; undertourism; all-amusive. Some had the hallmarks of PR speak, others had travel writers’ pitch stamped all over them […]
Chile
Dinner at the fire station in Coyhaique
“The fire station is the best restaurant in town?” We checked we heard right. We had. The fire station is the place to eat in Coyhaique, in Chile’s Aysen region. […]
Hiking
Impressions from walking around Lake Bled in Slovenia
Very quickly the natural and historic scenery takes over, and what glorious scenery it is. Bled Castle sits nobly on its perch; the bushy forest, just taking on some coppery autumn hues in early September, sweeps down to the water’s edge […]
Europe
Is food in Britain boring?
Food in Britain is boring. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a variation of this statement in online travel discussions. When I hear the evidence generally provided to back it up, I tend to wonder about the travel habits of those who make it. […]
Alentejo
Rock and Soul in Beja
I didn’t expect this. Covering almost all of the gable end of a house is a huge blue and red rooster made from discarded pieces of metal. Portugal seems to have a thing at the moment for oversized ‘rubbish’ animals. The rooster’s tail feathers block part of a window whilst a stray metal breast feather juts out over a door […]
Food & drink
Going local with gastronomy or doing a Mumford
What’s available locally has a strong bearing on gastronomic specialities in an area. And what those local specialities are tends to be what restaurants do best. In the hills and mountains these dishes are usually meat based; at the coast they’re whatever salty gifts the sea offers. […]