Travels around the Continent
"A forest bird never wants a cage." (Henrik Ibsen - The Master Builder) [Without the confidence to plan any European adventures at the moment, I look back to another short trip I made last year.] Tuesday 7th May 2019My flight to Oslo was about an hour later than the one to Bologna earlier in the …
"Bologna is celebrated for producing popes, painters and sausage" (Lord Byron) [Had things been normal this year, I would have expected by now to have planned and booked a number of Europe Explored trips for the autumn and I would probably have written a blog post providing a preview of my plans. Instead, this month …
[Still unable to travel, I look back to another short trip I made a couple of years ago.] "How can you govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese?" (Charles de Gaulle) In 2018, I had already made flying visits to explore three different cities, while staying away for just one night. For my …
"On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite." (Emanuel Lasker) The Chess Train (Šachový Vlak in Czech) is an annual chess tournament organised by the Prague Chess Society since 2011. It has the …
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!(To a mouse - Robert Burns) As the prospect of any European travel recedes ever further into the future, I thought I would take stock on those trips I had originally planned for the first …
[In the absence of any travel being possible for the foreseeable future, I continue with another look back to a flying visit from a couple of years ago.] In Dublin's fair city, Where the girls are so pretty, I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone. This month's blog post recalls a two day …
"Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen" (Danny Kaye song) After my successful trip to Hamburg in April 2018, a month later I went to Copenhagen. Not only a new city for me, but also a new country, as I had never been to Denmark before. Wednesday 23 May 2018The flight to Copenhagen departed from Stansted over an hour …
A Journal of the Plague Year (novel by Daniel Defoe) This has been a difficult post to write. I normally start preparing each Friday morning's blog post two to three weeks in advance. I was due to depart on the first trip of my Europe Explored project this Sunday, 22 March 2020. However, due to …
"I might have been born in Liverpool, but I grew up in Hamburg." (John Lennon) I had for a number of years been exploring the cities of Britain travelling by train for day trips (or in the case of Scottish cities having one overnight stay). My personal circumstances precluded being away for longer. In 2018, …
"I'm sitting in the railway stationGot a ticket to my destination...Homeward bound" (Paul Simon) Monday 12th September 1983Not having a bed for the night on the train from Bucharest meant that I did not manage much sleep. At about 7am the train reached Timișoara, the city where six years later the Romanian revolution first began. …
Continue reading "Interrail 1983 – Part Four – Yugoslavia to London"
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