By and large, I’m a solo traveller and I think it’s time I started emphasising that a bit more.
Back in the days when I could solo travel, I gravitated towards Iceland, Scandinavia and the Arctic, with occasional visits to places like the Baltic states and eastern Europe but you’ll find plenty of Paris and Switzerland and western Europe here too. Actually, my non-Wessex UK travels are here as well, so come with me to Scotland, London and a few other places around my own country.
Let’s take a break from the ruins and antiquities and delve into the villa I stayed in in Cyprus. A villa is brand new territory for me. I admit, I’m very much not a fan of the hostel – I can’t be doing with sleeping in a loud room with a dozen loud strangers –… More A villa with a pool in Cyprus
Two blogs into my Cyprus series and you may already be getting the idea that we spent a lot of time visiting ruins. I had a guidebook and I read it before we went but somehow I never connected with the words and it took until we were there to realise how many ruins there… More The Pafos Mosaics
Post 1 in an ongoing series on my week-long trip to Cyprus! In short: I went on my first real family holiday since 2011 and my first real sun-hunting holiday ever. We stayed in a huge but echoey villa near Coral Bay with our own pool and I have a list of about ten posts… More In the Tombs of the Kings
AKA “What I packed for Cyprus”. This is out of my comfort zone. I’m used to cold places, I’m used to packing thermals and gloves and warm socks. The last time I packed, barely a month ago, I was packing snowboots and I spent the trip sliding on the ice. And from your perspective, I… More A cold person packs for a hot place
I hate packing. I will always hate packing. I packed badly for Sweden and that’s for two reasons. I started two weeks early because we were packing bags at Brownies for the World Traveller badge & I wanted to show them a real-life semi-professional bag. But because it was two weeks away and I needed… More Packing for Sweden
It’s almost always worth getting out of the centre of a big city – it’s where the people live, it’s where real life rather than tourist life happens. I went out to the Stockholm suburbs because that’s where I was staying. We did spend most of our time in central Stockholm – Esther likes playing… More Getting out into the Stockholm suburbs
It was the summer of 2013. I was in Iceland. I had a bus passport and a little yellow one-man tent and I was circling the Highlands, Iceland’s inhospitable Interior. I’d already lost a day by not reading the bus timetable correctly, although a day accidentally spent at Landmannalaugar is certainly not wasted. And so… More I swam in a volcano, got rescued by Odin and walked into Mordor
It’s just too easy to title this “Art on the T-bana” or something along those lines. But it’s true, some of the stations on Stockholm’s metro system, the Tunnelbana or T-bana, are indeed works of art. I didn’t notice them at first. The green line, which I used on my first couple of days, is… More Cave paintings in the Stockholm metro
Without my native guide (read: best friend from school who moved there last spring), I would have totally overlooked Skansen. It was certainly mentioned in my guidebook but it wouldn’t have caught my attention and even if it had, I probably wouldn’t have gone there. But Esther, who has three children under ten, has a… More I saw a moose in central Stockholm!
The night before I went to Stockholm, I stayed in a purple pod in Gatwick. It’s called Yotel (and I’m not sponsored; I’m just surprised more people don’t know about it). It’s a chain, with hotels in Gatwick, Heathrow, Paris CDG, Amsterdam Schiphol, Singapore, Boston & New York. I’ve only stayed in the Gatwick one.… More Staying in Gatwick’s purple pods