An unabashed tourist and her family explore the world one holiday at a time.
You may not have heard of the Cinque Terre before, but chances are you’ve seen photos of them. Five colourful little villages on the northeast coast of Italy, clinging to the cliff tops and mostly inaccessibly by car. The stuff jigsaw puzzles and fairy tales are made of. ...
We went to Tuscany for Florence, but it was Lucca we fell in love with. Lucca, with its tree-lined ramparts encircling the old city, with its attractive cathedral and sunny piazzas, and with the music of one of the great Italian composers wafting through its alleys. Lucca, with its gelatos! ...
Toom-ta-dum, toom-ta-dum, dum, dum, DUM! Gareth and I looked at each other. What was going on? We were sitting outside in the sun enjoying brunch at a little bar in the hilltop town of Orvieto in Umbria, Italy. It was a Sunday morning, and we had come early hoping that we might miss the masses who, like us, arrive in...
For our recent trip to Italy, Gareth and I decided to make use of the popular accommodation site, Airbnb, for the first time. We wanted to live like the locals and experience another side of Italy, one where we bought our groceries at the nearby market, made use of public transportation and generally pretended to be Italians. Well, we found...
One of my most vivid memories of Italy from our camper-car trip back in 1997 is of my father’s white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel as two painted lanes on the highway turned into five swarming lanes of Italian cars. There were no rules except “first come, first serve” and no regard for other road users. Almost all of the...
As always, the first question everyone asks after you’ve returned from a trip abroad is: “Did you enjoy it?” Of course I enjoyed our recent trip to Italy, but so many things went wrong this time that I sometimes hesitate before nodding. Here are a few things that happened to us that threatened to spoil parts of the holiday: We...
Before our trip to the Finnish arctic circle, Inverness was the most northerly point Gareth and I had ever been to. Since we were in the region again and had fond memories of our first visit, we decided to take a day trip from our resort in the Cairngorms National Park to this iconic highland city. Unfortunately, we didn’t plan very well...
As South Africans, we can sometimes be excused for thinking we have a monopoly on animals and game watching. After all, the Kruger National Park is world-famous and synonymous with the Big Five. In our preoccupation with lions, rhinos, elephants and other interesting denizens of the bushveld, we tend to forget that the world has so much more to offer....
Milestone birthdays should be special. After all, we’re getting older and, hopefully, wiser and that should be celebrated. For my 30th birthday Gareth and I went to Zanzibar, and I spent the day swimming with dolphins. We visited the Finnish arctic circle for Gareth’s 35th birthday, where we went husky sledding and snowmobiling, amongst other memorable adventures. My dad climbed...
