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Countdown To Rio
It’s that time again. Never mind counting the days, we’re just arriving at the stage where we’ll be counting the hours until we lock the doors behind us and head to Heathrow to start our next great adventure. The exotic, vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro awaits, one of the world’s greatest carnivals about to begin, romantic sounding locations like Copacabana, Ipanema and Corcovado soon to be on our doorstep. It’s a little over a week until the journey begins. After waking up on New Year’s Day many thousands of miles from home in each of the last two years, this feels like a late start for us and the…
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Into The Northern Half Of Cyprus
So here we are in the northern half of this partitioned country, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a self-declared independent nation recognised as such only by Turkey itself. The region is accepted by the UN as not being under the control of the Cypriot Government; Cyprus is the only EU country with a section not governed by that organisation’s laws. Despite loosening of controls on the partition line, there are still restrictions in place, which is how we come to be in our current situation. You see, we had the very good idea that it would be interesting to travel through the two separate halves of Cyprus, to…
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Hungry for more……
It’s nearly three weeks now since we returned from our Costa Rica and California trip, three weeks in which we’ve visited family, spent time with Michaela’s Mum, hugged granddaughters and taken in a couple of football matches. In other words, three weeks in which we’ve covered most of our reasons to be in England and so now we’ve started to once again get itchy about travel. It goes without saying, now anyway, that the two years since we retired to travel the world haven’t quite gone according to plan, but we think we can look back and say we’ve been pretty resourceful and, in fact, the travels we have managed…
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Ending The Year
Well, happy new year to everyone, let’s hope it’s a good one. Given that you read our site, then it’s safe to assume you’re interested in travel; our best wish for all people interested in travel is that we are now nearing the time when we can get out and see the world again. For those who are hesitating to make a decision, we have travelled as much as possible during these last two difficult years and we haven’t felt any more unsafe whilst travelling than we have back home. We haven’t mentioned in our posts that we BOTH caught COVID (thankfully only very mild symptoms) – and we caught…
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Journeys In Greek Food
Our very good friend Terrie, food specialist and food historian, always wants to know more about our food experiences on our travels, so this post is for you, Terrie. Taking time to travel through a country brings with it interesting regional variations to cuisine, and our recent Greek trip was a good example. Some dishes stayed pretty constant, some showed subtle changes as we moved through the regions, others were peculiar to a specific region and disappeared from menus as we moved on. Feast your eyes on this selection….
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Gytheio: Final Call
And now, with just days remaining, we head to the very last destination of this 12-week tour, down to the coastal town of Gytheio, which neither of us had ever heard of until we started researching where to spend these last few days. Likewise, we knew nothing of Mystras until we take a diversion about an hour short of Gytheio, and discover a gem of a place – one last terrific historic site before we end this trip. The new Mystras is a lovely little mountain village where, it turns out, we would have been content to see out the rest of our stay. Way above this delightful village, on…
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Olympia: Stories Of Past And Present
It’s with a sense of anticipation that we collect our final hire car – our eleventh of the trip – and leave Kalamata behind after our very brief stay. It may be the last few days of this long adventure but we have some exciting places lined up before we are done. Throughout the 90-minute drive it is very plain that we are in different territory now; this area experiences much more autumn and winter rainfall than most of Greece, making for the kind of lush greenery which we haven’t seen for many weeks. There are deciduous trees, giant bamboos and even a combine harvester as hard evidence of change,…
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Athens & Kalamata: Tales From Two Cities
After eleven weeks in Greece and its islands we are into the last week of our journey through this sun soaked land, leaving the wonderful island of Milos and taking the short prop plane flight over the Aegean to Athens. Amusingly the bus ride from Athens airport to Syntagma Square takes considerably longer than the flight. It’s only two years since we were last here in the Greek capital so this visit is one of expedience and we are here just for a single night, in an 8th floor hotel room with magnificent views of the Acropolis. After so many weeks in an assortment of apartments and houses, a hotel…
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Last Of The Islands: Marvellous Milos
We have mixed emotions when we discover that our last ferry journey of this long Greek sojourn is a hulking great catamaran named Champion Jet 2. On the one hand, it’s disappointing that our final crossing won’t be on a quaint island ferry; on the other, there’s a gale blowing and the seas are extremely rough. The powerful craft ploughs through the heaving waves with barely a roll. And so on to Milos which, if we hadn’t been forced to change our plans back in the first week of August, would have been our third island call rather than our last. After Milos we will take six days touring a new…
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From Paros To Sifnos
“They are very bad people. Dirty money”. Isabella, the hugely likeable matriarch of our host family on Paros, is holding court. “Too many bad people at the top”, she says, “this is how Greece is”. Isabella always has time to talk, by her own admission she likes to get to know her guests, and our late afternoon ferry means we too have time to kill today. Now, the subject has turned to the recent summer fires across Greece, and Isabella is, disturbingly, the third person we’ve met on this trip to expound the same theory. There seems to be a widespread opinion that when the heatwave came, significant money changed…
