The last travel related item of my 2018 bucket list! Chris and I enjoyed a long weekend which focused on the Christmas Market in Bremen. More details will shortly be available on our travel blog…
Category: Places
A family week in Croatia
Chris and I have just returned from a brilliant week in Croatia with our family. Full details will be available in our up-and-coming travel blog post!
Hello Eastbourne!
Eastbourne is situated along the south coast of England and was the recent end point of my 13 mile Seven Sisters trek! A ‘Victorian landmark’ the Pier is one of Eastbourne’s famous sights and I had a quick wander to the end and back while we waited for the bus to take us to Seaford to begin our trek back to Eastbourne.
Eastbourne seemed a typical British seaside town complete with amusements, fish and chip shops and… stripy beach huts!
The walk took around 5 hours in total and we arrived in Eastbourne at 7 pm, just in time for dinner in a local pub and a couple of drinks 🙂
I certainly have Eastbourne in mind for future adventures… this is the end of the South Downs Way, a 100 mile trail which begins in Winchester. Definitely something I would love to do at some point…
I admit that I slightly tweaked this challenge… originally it was to visit a new city in the UK however I’m not sure I’ll get to a new city this year so decided to settle on a new town instead… the good thing about a personal blog is you can make up the ‘rules’ and chop and change as you go along…
Camping in Wales
As I mentioned in my ‘being grateful‘ post I enjoy camping as much as staying in a 4 or 5 star hotel. Sometimes the home comforts and luxuries you experience in a decent hotel are a lovely and welcome treat. However many hotels and especially branded hotels are all the same and… they are all a fairly bland square box of cream and beige! They don’t beat the real sense of adventure you experience in the great outdoors… sitting around the campfire with great friends, chatting, banter, wine and a BBQ…
Chris and I have just spent a brilliant weekend at the edge of the Brecon Beacons on a wild camping bushcraft weekend! Full details will be available on our travel blog in due course…
South West coast path
It is July already and with such a busy 2018 I don’t think I’m going to get to the west coast of Wales this year. I therefore changed this challenge from the Pembrokeshire coast path to the South West coast path.
OK, so I did only a tiny fraction a couple of months ago and had just a taster of this amazing 630 mile walk. I would love to do the entire South West coast path at some point and I’ll try and get to Pembrokeshire next year…
Details of my short experience of a section near Weymouth and Lulworth Cove of the South West coast path can be found on frombluetogreen.com
Cuba holiday
So… a shared celebration with my best friend! We’ve just returned from a wonderful and relaxing holiday in Cuba to celebrate that we are both 50 this year! My lovely friend Bridget and I have known each other since we met at school when we were about 13 and through the ups and downs of life we have remained good friends ever since!
A full update on our Cuba fun and frolics are available on my travel blog frombluetogreen.com 🙂
Alaska cruise
I’ve just completed my ocean cruise to Alaska and what a wonderful experience this was! The cruise was with Norwegian Cruise Lines on the ‘Norwegian Jewel‘, which departed from Seattle, cruised up to and around southern Alaska and ended in Vancouver. I’ll shortly be publishing a series of blog posts with full details… these will be on http://www.frombluetogreen.com, my travel blog site.
Trip to Montenegro
Another challenge now complete! I recently had 3 lovely days in Montenegro travelling as a solo traveller! This was the first solo trip I had taken since I went to Athens on my own in January 2007. Full details of this trip to Montenegro are available on my travel blog.
Visiting Oslo
Having set myself a goal to travel to every European capital city a few years ago, I’ve been fortunate to visit many of them. This has been greatly assisted with budget airlines such as EasyJet and Ryanair. In the past I’ve even visited some of them for just a day by taking the first flight out, spending the day exploring and coming back on the last flight home.
Oslo is one of the cities I had never managed to visit… well, until last weekend! My daughter Zoe and I had 3 nights in Oslo, the full details of which are covered in our Oslo travel blog post!
There are 51 European capital cities and so far I’ve been to 32 of them:
- Vienna (Austria)
- Brussels (Belgium)
- Sofia (Bulgaria)
- Zagreb (Croatia)
- Nicosia (Cyprus)
- Prague (Czech Republic)
- Copenhagen (Denmark)
- Tallinn (Estonia0
- Helsinki (Finland)
- Paris (France)
- Berlin (Germany)
- Athens (Greece)
- Budapest (Hungary)
- Reykjavik (Iceland)
- Dublin (Ireland)
- Rome (Italy)
- Riga (Latvia)
- Vaduz (Liechtenstein)
- Luxembourg City (Luxembourg)
- Valletta (Malta)
- Monaco (Monaco)
- Amsterdam (Netherlands)
- Oslo (Norway)
- Warsaw (Poland)
- Lisbon (Portugal)
- Bucharest (Romania)
- Bratislava (Slovakia)
- Ljubljana (Slovenia)
- Madrid (Spain)
- Stockholm (Sweden)
- London (UK)
- Vatican City (Vatican City)
Still to visit:
- Tirana (Albania)
- Andorra la Vella (Andorra)
- Yerevan (Armenia)
- Baku (Azerbaijan)
- Minsk (Belarus)
- Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzgovina)
- Tbilisi (Georgia)
- Astana (Kazakhstan)
- Pristina (Kosovo)
- Vilnius (Lithuania)
- Skopje (Macedonia)
- Chisinau (Moldova)
- Podgorica (Montenegro)
- Moscow (Russia)
- San Marino (San Marino)
- Belgrade (Serbia)
- Bern (Switzerland)
- Ankara (Turkey)
- Kiev (Ukraine)
Snowdonia road trip
Wikipedia road trip definition:
“A road trip is a long distance journey on the road”
I wasn’t sure whether a weekend trip of driving for 4+ hours to North Wales and back would technically be classed as a ‘road trip’ and it certainly wasn’t on the same scale as the road trip Chris and I took across Europe from Calais to Prague and back in July 2016 or the road trip through Northern Argentina in November 2016.
However, on the basis I had given this challenge the title ‘Go on a UK weekend road trip’ and this was a weekend, on the road and within the UK, I decided this should therefore count!
The purpose of the weekend was to explore the gorgeous scenery on foot by means of a series of 3 separate hikes which I’ve covered separately in our travel blog.
I did a little bit of driving around Snowdonia but this was mostly driving to and from the starting point of each hike.
And on the way back, I had a night in a spa hotel in Llangollen, a small town near the English border.
Fifty at Fifty 