Showing posts with label travel tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel tips. Show all posts

Tuesday 14 May 2019

Exploring Lanzarote

When the sun comes out at this time of year, I want to lie outside and soak up rays like a solar battery. This year, I got an early charge when we flew to Lanzarote for a week's stay over the Easter holidays.

Swimming pool at Princesa Yaiza hotel, Lanzarote
One of Yaiza's many pools
We took a family suite at the hotel Princesa Yaiza in the Playa Blanca resort. The hotel was vast and we were tucked away in a distant wing (the family zone) but there was lots to keep us entertained. As well as three swimming pools and numerous restaurants in the hotel complex, there was the 'Kikoland' sports facility, where we got addicted to paddle tennis (a cross between tennis and squash). We could also walk to a pretty (if busy) beach nearby.

Wednesday 5 September 2018

Making memories in California

Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz
Credit: William Lam
When I was a career gal, I worked in New York for about 18 months during the late nineties as a financial journalist. As well as embracing the American work ethic, I spent my generous British holiday allowance travelling around new England, upstate New York, Puerto Rico and the sultry New Orleans. The one place I never managed to visit was the West Coast, despite picking up a guide to California from my local Barnes & Noble. Over the years, Highway 1 has taken on mythical status - it was the vacation that got away...

Tuesday 3 July 2018

Midsummer madness

Spanish folding handheld fan
Fan-tastic for staying cool on the sit!
Hot, hot, hot... This is summer,  someone told me the other day, so let's stop calling it a heatwave! But blazing sunshine, sleepless nights and sunburn - can this really be England? I'm even running out of clothes to wear. My lightweight summer wardrobe is too 'capsule' to cover so many consecutive days of heat. The washing machine is on full pelt while my slacks and summer cardis haven't made it off the hanger.

Wednesday 6 June 2018

Foreign fields

Travel diary
WWI sites in Belgium and France

Every evening in the Belgian town of Ypres, people of all nationalities gather at the Menin Gate to remember the young men who died in the Great War. At eight o'clock sharp, a group of buglers sound the last post to commemorate more than 54,000 missing Commonwealth soldiers. Their names are engraved on the honey-coloured walls, interminable lists of men who went missing in action. They died in the fields around Ypres, but their bodies have never been found or identified. 

Menin Gate, Ypres, Belgium (The Last Post)
Crowds gather at the Menin Gate
This ceremony has been performed every evening since 1928, apart from when Ypres was under German occupation during the second-world war. I attended with my family one Sunday in late May at the beginning of a half-term trip to visit the sites of World War I. The aim was to enrich the kids' understanding of the war, although I think we all came away with a deeper sense of what went on during this terrible period of history, viewed by some as a European civil war.

Thursday 7 September 2017

Greece: a taste of the good life

The long days of summer are shortening and the sun has lost its satisfying sting. My kids are back at school and, after a month off, I have prised open my laptop once more. I just love the summer - walking the dog in grassy, overgrown fields, coasting down the river in the late afternoon and al fresco suppers (occasionally) in the garden. Most of all, I love escaping to the Continent for a few days and savouring life in a Mediterranean climate with olive groves, swimming pools and warm, turquoise sea.

This year, for the first time, we holidayed in Greece, near the small town of Horto on the Pelion peninsula, a hooked stretch of coastline between Athens and the northern city of Thessaloniki. The region is part of the mainland, but it felt like an island with its steep, windy roads and wraparound views of the sea. We rented a villa set in two acres of olive trees and perched on a hill above the Pagasetic Gulf, a lagoon-like sea. Five days into the holiday, I would still glance out of the kitchen window and stop dead in my tracks to drink in the view.

View of Pagasetic Gulf, Pelion, Greece
The mesmerising view from our villa