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The 2021 Obstacle Course Of Travel
Well, as far as we know, we are now on the verge of heading out to Greece, in fact our flight to Thessaloniki is tomorrow morning, Monday 19th. We say “as far as we know” because arrangements for travel are just not as straightforward as they used to be. Let us say first though that Greece is, at the moment, one of the easier destinations, with no quarantine on arrival and no requirement for a negative test as long as you’re fully vaccinated, but there are still a number of hurdles to overcome. First, our original intention of booking only one-way flights was scuppered by the new post Brexit rules…
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Framlingham Castle
If someone asks you to name ten English castles, our guess is that unless you live in Suffolk, you won’t have Framlingham on your list. Certainly we didn’t know much about it and only stumbled on it this week whilst fitting in a last minute visit to Michaela’s Mum before we head off to Greece, yet it turned out to be an interesting destination. Like many of England’s castles, Framlingham was granted to and confiscated from the gentry in equal measure depending on whether the monarch required the support of the local barons. As it happens, this was the sum total of any conflict seen at Framlingham: its walls were otherwise…
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Ramsgate Tunnels
In these last few days as we allow ourselves to get excited about our prospects of making it to Greece, we enjoy trips to a couple more destinations in England, both of them slightly out of the ordinary. The first of these is Ramsgate Tunnels. The port of Ramsgate, less than 20 miles from our home in Kent, has a rich maritime and wartime history including being, as we have posted before, part of the amazing “little ships” story from WW2. Tucked around the corner from the harbour, hidden now by the new hotel and apartment complex currently under construction which will further enhance the quickly developing seafront, lie the…
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Run For Home: When COVID Began
Many travellers faced a panic run for home as the world shut down as the seriousness of the pandemic began to sink in. This is our own story of March 2020, when COVID began…. We walked hand in hand back from the deserted seafront and past the desolate locked hotels, trying to eke some romance out of the ghost town which surrounded us. Murky grey mists hung over the flat calm sea dotted with idle tour boats anchored out of harm’s way. As we turned the last corner towards the hotel, a figure in the street ahead was gesticulating wildly, arms waving in the air, his movements frantic. It took…
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Cleared For Take Off….?
It’s beginning to look like we’ve got lucky. We do seem to get lucky quite often, but this one is making us smile. If you read our post the other day, you will know that we booked flights a couple of weeks ago with the intention of getting away for the rest of the summer, but with travel restrictions of all kinds still prevalent there were some decisions to make in terms of destination. It soon became clear that Greece currently has the least amount of restrictions on visitors entering from the UK, comprising just proof of double vaccine and a passenger locator form, so we went with our instinct…
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Sugar Sugar….Or Not
For a blog site with a name like ours, and being people who go out of our way to enjoy local delicacies and specialities, there is a glaring gap in our commitment to eating our way around the world. It hardly ever occurs to us to eat anything sweet. Neither of us has much of a sweet tooth, and, whether travelling the world or back here in England, we barely ever even look at what desserts are on offer, both of us being of the opinion that anything sweet would just spoil the flavours of the great tasting meal we’ve just eaten. Sometimes though, we can’t help but think we’re…
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Bring Me Sunshine
Our “best case scenario” for most of this year has been that by mid July, travel restrictions would start to be lifted and we just might be able to get away. We are very excited now that such a scenario is becoming reality – so excited in fact that we have booked our flights to get away for the entire summer. As of July we are now 19 months into our retirement, a retirement which was meant to be endless travel seeing as much of the world as possible but which instead has been…well, we all know the end to that sentence. In the end we were travelling for 148…
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St Albans: Romans, Saints & Boudicca
With no opportunity to leave these shores just yet, we continued our exploration of our own country this week with a brief visit to Hertfordshire, centred on time in St Albans, an ancient city steeped in fascinating history. After a motorway closure made our journey somewhat tortuous we rolled into St Albans around lunchtime and set about exploring a city with some of England’s most dramatic history. St Alban the man was a religious martyr executed on the spot which today houses the cathedral, itself originally an abbey which was ransacked and all but destroyed by Henry VIII’s men during the Reformation. From a distance, the wide central tower of…
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Travel Stories: Pedro And The Strange Bed
The bus station was quiet as we alighted in Santa Cruz, no passengers to board our bus, the cafe empty and, most notably, nobody hawking rooms. Close by was a map of the town: there were no hotels marked on it. The tourist information office was, helpfully, closed. Next step in these circumstances is usually to enter a bar and ask if they have rooms available; even if the answer is negative, they will normally have a “cousin” with rooms to let. Except, it seemed, in Santa Cruz, where all such enquiries met with blank faces and that all too recognisable shrug of Spanish shoulders. And so our backpack laden…
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Travel Stories: Under Pressure In Turkey
As I switched on the ignition, dashboard warning lights, instead of fading out after a couple of seconds, stayed shining and winking like an aeroplane cockpit. The first of these said flat tyre. “Not problem, not problem”, said the car hire guy, waving his hands dismissively and pointing me towards the vehicle exit. Even as I walked around studying the four tyres, each with no obvious sign of defect, he continued to bark the same phrase. “Not problem, not problem”. Hire car boss man came over to intervene, helpfully grabbing Google translate on his mobile and pointing to the word “tyre”. I held my palms upwards to show the international…
