Europe
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Beautiful Places #6: Zabljak
Zabljak holds a very special place in our hearts, having been our first mountain destination together, ten years ago back in 2011. Most of our time on that trip was spent in Kotor, much further south on the coast of Montenegro, but for a spell in the middle we hired a car and drove up to the Durmitor Mountains in the north of the country to indulge in a bit of challenging trekking. And wow did we hit the jackpot, with superb hiking, other activities and a delightfully rural setting. Some of our terrific hikes in Zabljak saw us start off in 30+ degree temperatures in the village and then ascend…
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Beautiful Places #4: St Petersburg
The whole point of our visit to St Petersburg was to see a winter city in the depths of winter and therefore to see it as it is meant to be seen. We weren’t disappointed. During our visit temperatures dipped to minus 27, there was heaps of snow on the ground and the river was frozen, but each day was blue sky and wall to wall sunshine: it really couldn’t have been any better. St Petersburg is both beautiful and majestic, and enchanting. The imposing Hermitage with its unbelievably opulent interior; the majesty of the city’s architecture exemplified by the wonderfully named “Church Of Our Lady On Spilled Blood”, easy…
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Beautiful Places #3: Valbona
Quite some distance before we made it to Valbona, the hair on the back of our neck was starting to stand on end, such was the magnificence of the scenery unfolding around us as we left the major roads and headed northwards towards the Accursed Mountains in northern Albania. The road to Valbona hugs the river as it cuts through the deep gorge, climbing steadily until the canyon opens out to the plateau within which lies the village itself, a village which is both tiny and unassuming, with precious little which you could call civilisation. But its beauty is in its setting. We have visited quite a few mountain village…
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Photographic Memories #16
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #16: Sunset & Reflection Spectacular sunsets are always popular – there are places across the World which attract an army of camera carrying enthusiasts to capture that special moment as the sun goes down and fills the sky with colour. A great many such places are coastal, of course, but this one was different on both levels: not coastal, and, certainly as far as we…
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Photographic Memories #15
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #15: New Earth This photograph’s claim to fame is that it is the only place we’ve ever visited where we are looking across land which is younger than we are. Salt pans now dominate the panorama as the new land is put to profitable use, but this land simply didn’t exist until 1971, when the cascading lava of the erupting volcano was cooled by the…
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Photographic Memories #14
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With lockdown incomplete and travel still on hold for a while, we currently have no new adventures to blog; we do though have many such memories… Photo #14: Clouds and Rails This photograph shows how you don’t always need sunshine for a shot to be atmospheric. For me as an absolute lover of rail travel, in particular rail travel in different countries, just standing on a station platform looking along the empty tracks anticipating the arrival of the train still brings out a boyhood excitement even now. Rainclouds looming low over the…
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Lifted Spirits
Things are definitely looking better. The UK’s vaccination programme is racing ahead impressively quickly, and last Monday the Government released the so-called roadmap to recovery, with “earliest possible” dates for a number of the stages of the route to normality. For those of us waiting patiently to resume travelling the world, this is music to our ears. With some kind of perfect symmetry, these announcements coincided with some beautiful weather as early Spring sunshine brought clear blue skies and glorious days throughout the week. We even had a spectacular full moon – the “Snow Moon”, the second full moon of a calendar year. Living both near the coast and in…
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Photographic Memories #12
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories…. Photo #12: Stromboli A bit of poetic licence here as there’s 3 photos instead of the usual 1, but then it’s not often that you get the opportunity to climb a living volcano after dark and look down on the fiery inferno below. This was the Aeolian Islands, 2011. A boat trip from our host island of Lipari to the volcanic Stromboli included an afternoon stop…
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Photographic Memories #7
As every traveller knows, when you look back through old travel photos, many of them trigger wonderful memories. With no current prospect of travel even domestically let alone worldwide, we will have no new adventures to blog, but we do have many such memories….. Photo #7: Morning Light We liked this photo enough to make it the backdrop on our blogsite homepage, mostly for the way it captures the shadows cast across the water by the early morning light. Taken as we walked to our favoured breakfast spot as the town rubbed its eyes, this shot could be almost anywhere yet it comes as a surprise to most to learn…
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Dry January And Wet Walks
Well, it came about like this. When we returned from our 9-week tour of Turkey towards the end of November, we had spent 14 of the preceding 18 weeks out of the UK, bathed in sunshine and lapping up wonderful places, enjoying great food and partaking in the odd sunset beer or two. Put simply, we’d gained a few pounds – not a lot, but enough to make us feel like we wanted to shed them and get a bit fitter, and so for the first 28 days back in the country we ate healthily and abstained from all alcohol. This kind of gave us the incentive to try “dry…
