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.
When I was a kid and a teenager, I spent all of my summers on holiday with Keycamp – camping for people who don’t like camping, really. You arrive on a campsite to find your tent or caravan all ready for you to move in, fully equipped with plates and wine glasses and pillows and… More Eurocamping as an adult
Last week I went camping in northern France with my sister and we had to go to Disneyland Paris. This was not my choice or indeed my preference. I first went to Disneyland Paris on a school trip in the summer of 2000 when it was a novelty and also when Disney-mania was not quite… More A Disney-hater’s day at Disneyland Paris
It’s May and the sun is shining so when better for a photoset of some of my favourite pictures from Tromsø in February. Tromsø is easily the most photogenic place I’ve ever been and I put so many of them on Instagram for so long that I couldn’t imagine sharing this photoset in any shape other than… More Photoset: Tromsø 2017
When you travel, even part-time, you kind of feel like you have to be positive about everything. Everything has to be the most beautiful, the most amazing, the most awesome. Fortunately, that’s pretty easy because everything in Iceland is amazing and everything about north Norway is amazing and everything north of the Arctic Circle is… More I didn’t like Bucharest
I’ve done two posts about my short trip to Tromsø back in February – one about searching for the Northern Lights and one about going out snowshoeing. This post is about my trip up the cable car. Tromsø is over two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle. This means the days can be short or… More Tromsø 2017: the cable car
I went to Bern, very briefly, as a student during my year abroad. I remember virtually nothing except that it was a hot day. While staying in Grindelwald recently, it seemed like the ideal choice for a day out – less than an hour from Interlaken, one of the big cities and it fitted the… More In which I meet the Bears of Bern
One of the things I hear most often (heard most often; it drops off when you reach your thirties and people have had seven or eight years to get used to it) as a person travelling alone in possession of both an X and a Y chromosome is You’re so brave! And of course, as… More Travel tips: travelling as a solo female
I’m going back to work on Mondays from next Monday, having worked Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday since Christmas, so I celebrated my last long weekend with a quick trip away. Prices for flights and accommodation to/in Iceland remaining obstinately high despite me checking two or three times a day, I resorted to looking at various local-ish airports on… More Another look at Kleine Scheidegg
I don’t know what it is about snowshoeing that has such a hold over me. I began wanting to try it when I was at the Altitude Festival in 2012 but I couldn’t fit it in my hectic schedule of snowboarding lessons, paraglides off snowy Alps and long evenings of comedy. I wanted to do… More Norway 2017: A snowshoeing triumph
Ice-climbing is the most physically demanding thing I’ve ever done. Harder even than extracting myself from the semi-vertical dog-leg squeeze I got wedged in at the bottom of Lionel’s Hole in the Mendips a few years ago. I was in Iceland, I was in Reykjavik and the bit of ice I was going to climb… More Ice-climbing: harder than it looks