An unabashed tourist and her family explore the world one holiday at a time.
After a very frustrating morning, we had a pleasant afternoon in the town of Monterosso while waiting for the boat. We had lunch in a crowded pub, wandered the streets looking for souvenirs and dipped our toes in the warm Mediterranean water. By the time the boat finally arrived, the morning’s worries were forgotten. ...
The cover is what first caught my attention. As some readers may know, Gareth and I visited the Finnish Arctic Circle in 2012 in the hope of seeing the Aurora Borealis. Unfortunately, although we had a fantastic time, the pyrotechnics of the arctic sky was obscured by a perpetual cloud cover while we were there. I left Finland with a...
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...
