A place to record, share and relive our travel memories
2024 started well for us as we headed off to Barcelona for a holiday on the 1st of Jan. We only spent about three and a half days there and enjoyed it. Barcelona is the kind of city where one can spend many more days. There are enough blogs and resources about what to do in Barcelona so I won’t try to duplicate that but will focus this post on (1) some…
Disclaimer: I have not been offered any incentive by the app developers, or anyone else, for this post. I use the paid version of this app myself, paid for by myself. The app developers, however, have offered me an offer code that the readers of my blog can use to get 1 free year of the app. Details are at the end of the blog. My family and I love holidays (who…
I first heard about a ‘beer hike’ in 2017, when we were in Munich for a holiday and I was chatting with a local at a pub. The concept of walking to multiple breweries spread across a few villages over a couple of days sounded quite appealing so it was filed away in the long list of ‘must-do’ travel ideas. The idea finally became a reality in 2023 when a friend and…
After many weeks of international holidays over the past few months, it was time for a short road trip within Ireland. A friend suggested Donegal where, if we were lucky, we could see the northern lights. As it turned out, we weren’t that lucky but Donegal is beautiful nonetheless and we had a wonderful time. A large part of that is attributable to where we stayed – The Lookout Budget Accommodation. It…
“Descend Fast”. Two words that I heard many times from my father when he would talk about the effects of high altitude on the human body and mind. He had been an instructor at HMI and a commandant at Indian Army’s High Altitude Warfare School, among the many things he did during his long and illustrious military career. The many documentaries I saw about mountaineering also drilled the same message in my…
We had originally planned an Ireland campervan holiday in Aug-2020 during the first Covid re-opening. We thought that a campervan would be a great way to see Ireland as international flights were not allowed and hotels were still not open. Apparently, many other people had the same idea so we couldn’t find a suitable campervan or campsites so we aborted the idea. We revisited the idea in 2021 and decided to give…
When someone thinks of Athens, chances are that the Acropolis is the first thing that comes to mind. The Acropolis is fascinating with many of the remains there dating back to more than 2,500 years ago. The earliest artifacts found there date as far back as the 6th Millennium BCE. Walking around Athens with the omnipresent towering presence of Acropolis almost feels surreal sometimes. Walking around the collection of ancient ruins at…
I started writing this blog soon after our holiday to Sri Lanka but forgot all about it, and after some time it felt too onerous to go back to a holiday many months ago and write about it. It was made even more difficult by the fact that we moved soon after to Ireland and got busy settling in and travelling around Ireland. More than a year later, a friend of mine…
Whenever I would hear “Cotswolds”, it would conjure images of quaint English villages among misty hills, of pies and scones, pubs and ales, and afternoon tea in a tea room. Our trip to the Cotswolds gave us all that and a lot more. Cotswolds doesn’t really lend itself to itineraries. The best thing to do is to plot some, or many, of the villages inside the Cotswolds AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural…
The UK has many beautiful places to visit. Apart from London, we had so far visited the Lake District, Scotland (twice) and the Cotswolds. Wales had been pending for a while and we finally made a trip there when the kids had a week’s vacation. We were lucky with the weather and spent a lovely 3 days driving around the Snowdonia National Park, taking in its stunning landscape, and enjoying the charming…