To lands of ice and fire, with Fred. Our home for thirteen nights, "Black Watch" ready for the next leg of her journey. And the better looking members of our party... This is what greeted us when we entered our cabin and immediately threw us into a panic. During the trip we would pass a major milestone - our fiftieth wedding anniversary. On a previous cruise we had witnessed the sort of thing that can happen if one allows Fred Olsen to…
Spain: from north to south. We arrive in Portsmouth and are delighted to find our official guide there to welcome us. What a fine figure of a man! After lunch In "The Spice Island Inn, we boarded the Pont Avon, the Brittany Ferries flagship, sailing from Portsmouth to Santander, where we would arrive just over twenty four hours later. Several warships were in port... ...including this one. The Pont Avon arriving at Santander. Santander has a ferry service to Portsmouth and Plymouth.…
Round the Baltic with Fred. It was the passage back from New York to Southampton on the Queen Mary that undermined our prejudice against cruising. We had seen the effects of several large "blocks of flats" parking themselves outside Venice or Dubrovnik for a few hours. This did not seem to us to be "proper travelling." (We suffer from a form of inverted snobbery which sees "proper travelling" as requiring some effort and hardship - long waits on…
So we bought ourselves a Swiss Railpass... ...which is easy enough to do on line. You can choose a three, four, eight or fifteen day pass which allows complete freedom to travel on any train, bus or ferry with other concessions on mountain railways and museums added. Switzerland has the best and most integrated transport system in the world. In Switzerland there will be no rattling along in primitive, overcrowded, two coach "Pacer" trains, which make no attempt to…
Taking the Orient Express...and no sudden deaths! To be entirely accurate, we did not follow the original Orient Express route completely, nevertheless we succeeded in getting to Istanbul from London, almost all by train. Setting an early precedent for Michael Portillo to follow, our party began the journey at St Pancras on the Eurostar to Paris. In our party there was myself, Long Suffering Wife, a Fellow Worker with whom I shared some hard times and his Charming and…
A journey to Hamburg As one gets older, some things that used to be possible cease to be possible and the world seems smaller and more limited. This is not always due to increasing infirmity... Not many years ago it was possible to take a ferry from Rosyth to Zeebrugge, another from Newcastle to Gothenburg - later the destination changed to Bergen - and from Harwich to Esbjerg. All these have gone. Only Newcastle and Hull have…
