I remember my first overnight stay in Cambridge in 1981. I was lying in a small single bed in a hotel room near the river Cam, staring at the ceiling, listening to my mum...
Once is not enough: a second visit to Hotel Ylläshumina in Lapland.
Do you go back to the same place on holiday? There are so many destinations I’d still love to visit that I don’t often go back. I made an exception for Lapland and, in...
How to spend a few hours in Honfleur
I don’t know what possessed us to tackle the strenuous hike from the centre of Honfleur up to Mont-Joli. It was a sweltering hot day during the heatwave of 2018. I was unsuitably dressed...
Claude Monet’s garden in Giverny in summer
It was a hot, cloudless day at the end of June. Dougie and I had already spent the morning kayaking 15km on the River Eure, a tributary of the Seine. We changed out of...
An afternoon at the Gardens of Versailles
The first stop on our U by Uniworld river cruise this summer was Conflans-Saint-Honorine. We had boarded our ship, The B, in Paris the previous day and the ship sailed overnight down the Seine...
A day in Rouen – photo tour
Rouen was one of the stops on our U by Uniworld river cruise, The Seine Experience . Our ship was moored very close to the city centre, making it easy to freely explore during...
A Christmas shopping break in York
It was a spur of the moment decision to book a couple of nights away, mid-November, to start our Christmas shopping. I wanted somewhere that would put me in the festive mood, a city...
Mum’s Gone To: The Kelpies and The Falkirk Wheel
I seem to have a thing for sculptures at the moment. Recently I wrote about the artwork we found at Thorpe Meadows in Peterborough: 17 sculptures by the River Nene. Festival Boat might have looked a...