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Ending The Year
Well, happy new year to everyone, let’s hope it’s a good one. Given that you read our site, then it’s safe to assume you’re interested in travel; our best wish for all people interested in travel is that we are now nearing the time when we can get out and see the world again. For those who are hesitating to make a decision, we have travelled as much as possible during these last two difficult years and we haven’t felt any more unsafe whilst travelling than we have back home. We haven’t mentioned in our posts that we BOTH caught COVID (thankfully only very mild symptoms) – and we caught…
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Christmas Is Early
Well, it is in our house anyway! Once we’d made plans to be travelling again over the Christmas period, we decided to give ourselves our own Christmas Day, and Boxing Day come to that, on just about the only date left in our diary – December 9th. So here we are, 16 days ahead of everyone else, enjoying traditional Christmas dinner and drinks – although we haven’t gone as far as Christmas tree and decorations, which seemed to us to be too much of a waste of effort. Our diary has been full of visits to friends and family since our Vilnius trip, leaving us with a rather full diary…
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And So To Greece…..Minus One Backpack
Blue sea beneath the aeroplane changes to tarmac and painted lines as the end of the runway arrives and our excitement grows, we are almost there. But within what seems a few inches of hitting the ground, and just as we anticipate the bump of landing, the engines roar, the plane accelerates and we climb steeply back into the skies from being so close to landing. Something has obviously gone wrong and the passengers fall strangely silent. We are soon advised that the landing was aborted at the last second due to a tailwind stronger than the permitted maximum (17 knots as opposed to 10) and we are off for…
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The 2021 Obstacle Course Of Travel
Well, as far as we know, we are now on the verge of heading out to Greece, in fact our flight to Thessaloniki is tomorrow morning, Monday 19th. We say “as far as we know” because arrangements for travel are just not as straightforward as they used to be. Let us say first though that Greece is, at the moment, one of the easier destinations, with no quarantine on arrival and no requirement for a negative test as long as you’re fully vaccinated, but there are still a number of hurdles to overcome. First, our original intention of booking only one-way flights was scuppered by the new post Brexit rules…
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Run For Home: When COVID Began
Many travellers faced a panic run for home as the world shut down as the seriousness of the pandemic began to sink in. This is our own story of March 2020, when COVID began…. We walked hand in hand back from the deserted seafront and past the desolate locked hotels, trying to eke some romance out of the ghost town which surrounded us. Murky grey mists hung over the flat calm sea dotted with idle tour boats anchored out of harm’s way. As we turned the last corner towards the hotel, a figure in the street ahead was gesticulating wildly, arms waving in the air, his movements frantic. It took…
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Cleared For Take Off….?
It’s beginning to look like we’ve got lucky. We do seem to get lucky quite often, but this one is making us smile. If you read our post the other day, you will know that we booked flights a couple of weeks ago with the intention of getting away for the rest of the summer, but with travel restrictions of all kinds still prevalent there were some decisions to make in terms of destination. It soon became clear that Greece currently has the least amount of restrictions on visitors entering from the UK, comprising just proof of double vaccine and a passenger locator form, so we went with our instinct…
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Bring Me Sunshine
Our “best case scenario” for most of this year has been that by mid July, travel restrictions would start to be lifted and we just might be able to get away. We are very excited now that such a scenario is becoming reality – so excited in fact that we have booked our flights to get away for the entire summer. As of July we are now 19 months into our retirement, a retirement which was meant to be endless travel seeing as much of the world as possible but which instead has been…well, we all know the end to that sentence. In the end we were travelling for 148…
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This English Summer
As we sit trying to predict the next steps in the complicated and illogical rules on international travel from the UK, this non-starter of an English summer just makes our frustration grow and our sense of isolation increase. First we had the coldest April since 1922 in terms of average minimum temperatures, in fact the third coldest April since records began almost 140 years ago. After a cold dry April we were hit with wet May, during which many areas of the UK experienced considerably more than double the normal May rainfall, and the South East, where we live, was again well below average in terms of daily temperatures. And…
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From South East To South West And A Look At Traffic Lights
Friday May 7th and we now head back to Cornwall, this time for a full fortnight of walking the coastal paths and exploring different parts of this terrific peninsula. The slow arrival of Spring mentioned in our previous post continues to confound. On the long drive down here it is obvious that leaf growth is delayed by the continuing lower than average temperatures; frost prevails, cold winds continue and this week the media showed pictures of heavy snowfalls in Scotland. In fact, a ski resort which has been closed all winter due to COVID has now reopened with good snow – the first time the resort has ever been open…
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COVID: How Quickly Things Change
All of a sudden our Turkish adventure is coming to an end and we are now travelling back to England on Monday. As we headed off to Alanya this week, news was breaking that the Turkish Government were about to announce increased COVID restrictions, although at that stage all of the talk surrounded weekend closures. When the announcement came, the measures were much more far reaching, with an indefinite closure of all bars and restaurants and heavily restricted opening times for all other outlets including food shops. At the same time an 8pm curfew comes in and, although the curfew, rather counter intuitively, doesn’t apply to tourists, it’s clear that…
