Life's about experiences. These are mine.
Despite stopping overnight close to the “classic” Severn Bridge we elected to enter Wales further North thereby avoiding the £6.50 toll, money that clearly isn’t spent on repairing the road surface on the crossing. This was a much more pleasant way to get to Hay, our ultimate stopping point, than a blast along the M4. …
“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” Well, they built a bloody great big wall running from the River Tyne to the Solway Firth, a total of 70 miles, and over the weekend …
Fresh from an exploration of a hidden London gem on Saturday we visited somewhere that has been hiding in plain sight pretty much all my adult life. For four years I went to Portsmouth University (or Polytechnic as it was then) and twenty odd years later my son did the same. In the intervening years …
I like London. It’s a great city. I wouldn’t want to live there and nor would I want to have to commute up there everyday to work but it is a beautiful and richly varied city. A great example of this is the almost jarring contrast between Camden Market, with it’s brash high street and …
In keeping with many we used the time between Christmas and the New Year to blow off a few cobwebs and get out and about. After a few lapsed years we had renewed our National Trust membership this year and so decided to try and get to a different property each time we went out. …
Continue reading “Seven Days, Five Counties, Five National Trust Properties”
This has to be my favourite shop in the world. It was situated directly opposite our hotel and with its unassuming frontage was easy to miss. It’s a lamp shop but unlike any I had ever seen before. In the window were several brass instruments that had been turned into lamps and they were beautiful, …
Thanks to my friends at Ryanair I have an extra hour at the airport to write this blog post, so much for the “on time airline”. Oh well. When abroad Helen and I like to try and find off the beaten track places to eat. This usually is done by a combination of guidebooks, hotel …
Today, the reason we had come to Budapest when it was cold – the Christmas markets. I believe that these originate from Germany but they are everywhere now. We visited Birmingham’s German Market a couple of weeks ago and the ones in Budapest were supposedly bigger, hence the trip. You could ask why we simply …
After a relatively mild start to autumn in the UK the cold of Budapest has come as something as a shock and it’s not even that cold. At 2 degrees it is still hat and gloves weather though so that is how we left the hotel this morning. The city is made up of two …
I guess for some London Stansted is a really convenient airport. There must be some people who say “I know let’s leave this dreary English weather behind and jet off somewhere sunny. Stansted is only just down the road”. Those people don’t live in Reading. For us Stansted means a trek along major motorways of …