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spain + portugal 5: o porto and the douro valley
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; From here we headed towards Portugal, stopping off for a very good lunch at the parador in Pontevedra. We broke our journey in a quiet beach town...
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spain + portugal 6: to salamanca, léon and home
P { margin-bottom: 0.21cm; }We crossed out of Portugal into Castillo y León and the vast high plateau of the interior. Good farming country no doubt but not very exciting, although less arid here than...
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celebration in normandy
Seventeen of us gathered in Normandy this August, this being the sixtieth birthday year for several of our closest friends including Ian: indeed our trip organisers, Sarah and Laura, had...
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boston
It seemed like a good idea at the time: the north eastern United States in spring, a lovely time to visit all our friends there and see the area at its best. It had been a fairly rough winter at...
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provincetown and cape cod
P { margin-bott Next day we picked up a hire car and took a leisurely drive, via Plymouth (with its rather unimpressive Rock) down the Cape to Provincetown, to stay with Andrew and...
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lyme, CT
Time to move on again, as A+A returned to New York and we drove along the coast with a couple of stops, to meet up with Lincoln in Connecticut. Since we last visited, James and Lincoln have...
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MD and DC: a tale of two lincolns
Next, Lincoln kindly drove us all the way down to their other home Maryland. Frederick is another colonial town, that grew at an important crossroads: the main roads still lined with...
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new york
So finally to New York and our friend Kathleen's apartment in Chelsea. As always we were able to spend a lot of time with her and she treated it like a vacation in her own city. We walked the...
View Articlesussex and essex forays
A couple of day trips out of London recently, and quite a contrast. First, to Camber Sands and Rye in East Sussex, on one of the first hot days of the year in late April. The Sands are a...
View Articleurban green walk - new river and regent's canal
We never finished the Capital Ring (maybe soon) but we had another good walk in central London, finding plenty of green spaces on the way. Joined by good local friends Lyn, Judy, Jeremy and Gabi,...
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borneo (and thailand)
More pictures here. Time for another trip out east, and we decided to focus this time on Malaysian Borneo - the rainforests and the wildlife, bookended by some relaxing beach visits. Flying into...
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2018 08 skagen, denmark
Where the Skagerrak ('Skagen-reach') meets the Kattegat, an expanding sand bar juts out into the sea, extending Denmark to the north and east. This is the site of Skagen (skèy-un). The quality of...
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2018 08 berlin and points north
At the end of a long, hot summer, we were off to middle Europe. As is usual with our holiday plans, 'scope creep' led us from an initial few days in Berlin for the European athletics...
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tokyo - january 2019
Japan in winter. This is a long anticipated trip, a rail tour starting in Tokyo and then south and east. The depth of winter seems like an odd time to choose, but the weather then is supposed to...
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hakone
Time to move on to experience a little of rural Japan. Cloase to Tokyo is the hot-springs area of Hakone. We arrived there via the high speed Shinkansen and then two little local trains, taking us...
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hiroshima and nagasaki
Now a prosperous modern city resting on the ashes of the fallen, Hiroshima carefully reminds us of the horrors of war, and stands as a champion for peace. The memorial museum lets the personal...
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kyoto
So from the farthest point on our trip we retraced our route as far as Kyoto. The station features a vast concourse matching Grand Central or Milan in scale, a futurist edifice designed by...
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japan - conclusions
So what will we remember about this whistlestop tour of Japan? Admittedly we only skimmed the surface but we saw a lot in two sun-filled weeks, in which we travelled 1600 miles by train, over 100...
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back to japan 1 - tokyo
FLYING IN EARLY we hit the rush hour on the metro to Ginza and it seems very familiar: jammed in tight, silent, eyes locked on phones where space permits: but different too: uniformity of black...
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back to japan 2 - hokkaido
SO IT'S OFF to the snowy north. The shinkansen whisks us via a long tunnel to the island of Hokkaido. First stop Hakodate, once the main port linking the north to the main island of Honshu. It feels...
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back to japan 3 - fukuoka
LEAVING the north behind we boarded a plane with about 200 school students, all in that formal midshipman's uniform, and obediently lining up in columns, boys to the left, girls to the right. At...
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back to japan 4 - osaka
(or as I occasionally called it, Ocado!) This is the heart of a megalopolis of 19 million people, taking in Kyoto and about twenty other cities of the coastal plain, and it shows: huge retail and...
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back to japan 5 - kyoto
At the other end of the megalopolis lies Kyoto, the capital of Japan for a thousand years. Surrounded by hills, it is self contained and full of history. This was a revisit as we liked it so much...
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back to japan 6 - kanazawa
NEXT DAY it's off to the north coast past the wide grey expanse of Lake Biwa; past snow dusted mountains under mists that make them look like a traditional scroll painting. First impressions of...
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