Europe
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And So To Greece…..Minus One Backpack
Blue sea beneath the aeroplane changes to tarmac and painted lines as the end of the runway arrives and our excitement grows, we are almost there. But within what seems a few inches of hitting the ground, and just as we anticipate the bump of landing, the engines roar, the plane accelerates and we climb steeply back into the skies from being so close to landing. Something has obviously gone wrong and the passengers fall strangely silent. We are soon advised that the landing was aborted at the last second due to a tailwind stronger than the permitted maximum (17 knots as opposed to 10) and we are off for…
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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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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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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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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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Nudity, Numpties & Numbers: Back Home Once Again
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This English Summer
As we sit trying to predict the next steps in the complicated and illogical rules on international travel from the UK, this non-starter of an English summer just makes our frustration grow and our sense of isolation increase. First we had the coldest April since 1922 in terms of average minimum temperatures, in fact the third coldest April since records began almost 140 years ago. After a cold dry April we were hit with wet May, during which many areas of the UK experienced considerably more than double the normal May rainfall, and the South East, where we live, was again well below average in terms of daily temperatures. And…
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Photographic Memories #23
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 #23: Huskies This is the last in our Photographic Memories series at least for now. Spending time in a “proper” winter environment affords opportunities for activities different from the norm, so during our break in Tallinn in 2015 we enjoyed several experiences for the first time. One such was dog sledding. It was quite an exhilarating feeling to be pulled across the snow by the…
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Beautiful Places #8: Elba
The large house you can see on the headland in the picture above is reputed to be the site of Napoleon’s exile to Elba. When you think of exile, you might imagine imprisonment, but, in his case, Napoleon had the freedom of this beautiful island and lived in opulent luxury in this castle with a view. You might reflect that being in enforced exile on an island like Elba is an awful lot better than the last twelve months have been for many people. Even getting to Elba was special, flying in to Pisa and then taking the train out to the ferry port at Piombino from where the “Moby”…
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Photographic Memories #22
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 #22: Folegandros We all have a liking for photographs of old buildings, dilapidated walls, tumbledown doors and the like, and pretty much all travellers have a growing collection of such shots. This one captures something slightly different for, as you can see, the building is for the most part well maintained, but has a down at heel section which oozes considerably more character than the…
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Markets: Look Away Now (Maybe)
Now, we know this set of photographs won’t meet with everyone’s approval, so just a quick warning: if you find pictures of animals in markets offensive or revolting, you might want to look away. But the truth is, markets across the world are fascinating places, and part of that fascination is in seeing things you wouldn’t see back home, even if some do have a certain yuk quality. Like lots of travellers we seem to have amassed a rather large collection of market shots, but these are some of the more “out there” ones from our archives…. Live eels, Riga…. Edible bugs, Oaxaca…. Delicious chocolate drink (despite appearances!), Ocotlan, Mexico……
