We were in Verona for one full day (two nights) after arriving on a Sunday: on Mondays, most tourist sites are closed. This curtailed our site-seeing somewhat. It was also incredibly hot, which also affected our interest in climbing up anything for viewpoints (hills, towers, cupolas – to name but a few). Verona is famous…

Tirano was surprisingly nice: a wide variety of eateries, pretty ‘casco antiguo’, fantastic setting (all the mountains) and (probably) some interesting history.  We would like to do this route in the winter and would be perfectly willing to stay here first and go in the opposite direction. Well I would, at any rate. The slow…

From Grum it goes down,  down and even more down.  Sometimes it is steep,  sometimes it is less steep.  But it is always DOWN. Leaving the station, the train goes round the first of many sharp bends and twists. The route is steeper on this side than then other,  and it’s obvious that this is…

This ended up being too long, so I have split it at (more or less) the Swiss border. Expectation management is an important life skill; I didn’t do well at that on our journey to Zurich.   Zurich=Switzerland=mountainous/beautiful – isn’t that right?  After the boring central section across Germany the previous day, I had rather built…

We were looking forward to these train legs as we would be following along the Moselle and the Rhine. The Moselle did NOT disappoint. Leaving Trier, we trundled through lots of greenery, with deeply red earth showing here and there where the fields had been plowed, contrasting the bright blue sky. Colour, sun, first class…

When considering the Roman Empire (or civilization or culture), Germany isn’t the first place that springs to mind. Well not for me, at any rate:  I mean, Roman… Rome … Italy.  That  would be my logical progression.  However, Trier was the first city (Roman or otherwise) in Germany and the capital of Imperial Rome on…

No-one wants to read an overly wordy blog (well, at least one member of my family doesn’t). So I am glad that the issues with the VPN, the laptop, the hotel WiFi AND my inability to save a first draft did for my first, purple prosy, attempt. We left early Wednesday, walking to the station…

Arguably, as many as possible! As a proud sufferer of ‘Imelda-complex’, I am a bit of a shoe-whore. There was that one holiday where we ended up in a Colorado town that had a discount shoe outlet. Shoes (and NICE shoes) were between 10 and 20 US dollars. I mean… why not? I ended up…

You thought I was going to say ‘Job’ didn’t you? Be honest, you did. Given my age, probably not an unreasonable assumption. Sadly, it’s ‘trip’ (and the classic film will probably be of more interest than this section). Should you NOT be interested in how we managed to make our choices, feel free to move…

Retirement was not something that I had considered particularly deeply. We had vaguely discussed retirement but felt slightly too young (and too interested in our professions) to bite the bullet and go the whole hog. So instead we made plans for a long trip to fill up the time between the end of Roger’s ‘official’…