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...
St Martins Lane: a luxury boutique hotel in Covent Garden
What’s the first thing you do when you enter your hotel room? Bounce on the edge of the bed? Check out the mini-bar? Eat the complimentary biscuits? If you’re a blogger or you’re into...
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...
Happy Anniversary Trish Takes Five
Five years ago I started writing my regular weekly column, Trish Takes Five, in the Lincolnshire Free Press. I suppose I should get myself a gift for my 5th anniversary. If it was a...
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...