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Back Home
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  • About
    • Privacy Policy
  • Trips
    • 2023
      • 2023 Germany
      • 2023 Poland
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    • 2022
      • 2022 Veneto
      • 2022 Tresco
      • 2022 USA
      • 2022 Narrowboat Adventure
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    • 2021
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      • 2021 Wales
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      • 2021 Southwold
      • 2021 New Al
    • 2020
      • 2020 Round the World without flying
      • 2020 Lapland & the Baltics
      • 2020 Tresco
    • 2019
      • 2019 Salisbury & Bath
      • 2019 Morocco & Gibraltar
      • 2019 Paris
      • 2019 Cardiff, Wales
      • 2019 Corsica & Sardinia
      • 2019 Tresco
      • 2019 Catalonia
      • 2019 India
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      • 2019 Ludlow
    • 2018
      • 2018 Iceland & Germany
      • 2018 Stockholm
      • 2018 Malta
      • 2018 Gran Canaria
      • 2018 European Tour in Alan
      • 2018 Romania & the Danube
      • 2018 Southwold
      • 2018 First trips in Alan
      • 2018 Purchasing Alan the Motorhome
      • 2018 Other
Altbier and clocks in Düsseldorf

Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th March 2023 This trip has a complicated history. We originally planned a three day trip to Bruges in December 2021 with our friends Liz and Martin. However, just as we were about to depart, an incomprehensible rule was introduced which prevented people from staying for more than 48 hours in Belgium without taking a Covid test. We were never entirely sure how this was meant to restrict the spread of the virus but we did not want to break the rules and risk having to pay for our own accommodation to isolate. Our Eurostar tickets were non-transferable so we could change neither the names of the passengers nor the route travelled. We therefore decided to leave Belgium early, spend one night in Lille, in France, and book new tickets to travel home from there to circumvent the rule. This left us with two return tickets from Brussels. Robert has been repeatedly deferring these tickets ever since but our time has run out and it was a case of ‘use them or lose them’. So here we are, on a trip planned to take in Düsseldorf, Bonn and Maastricht, returning via Brussels. As will become apparent in […]

01 2023 Germany

Altbier and clocks in Düsseldorf

Published 26/03/2023
Crakow3

Sunday 5th February 2023 MrShuttle again sent a confirmation of the time of we would be picked up for our visit to Auschwitz and as we would be leaving before breakfast the hotel provided us with a packed lunch each in a brown paper bag. It included such shiny green apples that we felt it must be someone’s job in the kitchen to polish them. Auschwitz is about 70km from Kraków and on board the coach we watched a video about the camps. Auschwitz: a single word synonymous with genocide which conjures up the worst that mankind can do. A single word known the world over. Far from being a single place, Auschwitz was in fact a vast complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps consisting of Auschwitz I, the main camp or Stammlager; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and death camp with purpose-built gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben as well as dozens of sub-camps. A single word cannot convey the sheer scale of the site and we both struggle to describe the enormity of this place and therefore sometimes, below, we are indebted to better minds than ours for their words. Robert has visited […]

07 2023 Poland

Auschwitz

Published 09/02/2023
Crakow2

Sunday 5th February 2023 We planned to go to the Wieliczka Salt Mine in the morning and Oskar Schindler’s Factory Museum in the afternoon. The Wieliczka Salt Mine is about half an hour’s drive outside Kraków and Robert had booked a guided tour through MrShuttle to include transport and entry to the mine. The evening before, he had received a text confirming the booking and telling him what time we would be picked up from outside our hotel. Fortunately, this was later than expected and would give us plenty of time to have breakfast. We were picked up promptly at 09:00 and driven by car to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It briefly seemed to us as though this must be a very quiet time of year for tourism if there were only going to be the two of us on the tour. However, once we arrived at the mine entrance [see below] we were joined by a minibus full of other MrShuttle customers all waiting for the English-speaking tour. Salt or sodium chloride [NaCl] has been extracted at this site since Neolithic times. The surface water was such a highly saturated salt solution that it was undrinkable and was effectively […]

06 2023 Poland

Meeting St Kinga, Pankiewicz and Schindler

Published 09/02/2023
Krakow1

Saturday 4th February 2023 Matilda was delighted to wake up and realise that she had been successful in the Wimbledon Ballot for the 2023 Championships and had been offered tickets to the Men’s Singles Final. There was a brief period when she thought this might have been a scam but logging in to her account she found that the ticket offer was genuine. Her initial reaction of “Woah, that’s quite a lot of money,” was quite swiftly followed by “Wow this could be my one and only chance to do this”. One off the bucket list. Having confirmed with Robert that he would be her ‘plus one’ if no one else more interested in tennis, strawberries and Pimms could go with her she accepted and paid for her tickets. Matilda then spent most of the train journey from Warsaw to Kraków smiling to herself and is now really looking forward to July. We first came to Kraków together in 2016 before the inception of TravellingHerd.uk when we also visited Warsaw [see previous blog] and so we had already seen some of the major sights including the Royal Castle and Royal Cathedral. Having settled in to our hotel we set off, […]

05 2023 Poland

Art Nouveau in Kraków

Published 06/02/2023
Warsaw Uprising Monument

Thursday 2nd and Friday 3rd February 2023 The station building at Gdańsk Głowny [below] is quite splendid. Unfortunately, it is also being renovated so our plan to find a convenient place for coffee and breakfast while we waited for our train to Warsaw was thwarted. Instead, we had quite a long wait on the platform in the cold. Matilda wished she had put on her thermal underwear. Fortunately, as we were travelling first class we were offered complimentary hot beverages and a choice of meal which would be prepared to order with fresh ingredients. We both opted for salad with ham, pear and blue cheese which was definitely fresh and very tasty. After disembarking in Warsaw, as we left the train station we saw the imposing Pałac Kultury [Palace of Culture and Science] which was a gift to the people of Warsaw from the nations of the USSR and was built between 1952 and 1955. Matilda was convinced that she had gone up to the observation deck before and it was not until a little research revealed that it is remarkably similar to the Latvian Academy of Sciences in Riga that she realised her error, and that she had been […]

04 2023 Poland

Warsaw – the failed Uprising against the Nazis

Published 03/02/2023
Solidarity

Wednesday 1st February 2023 We planned our walking route to the Europejskie Centrum Solidarności [European Solidarity Centre], taking in some of the ‘must see’ sights of the city. This included the Golden Gate which formed part of the old city fortifications and was the inland entrance to the Trakt Królewski or royal route of Gdańsk. Almost 90% of the city was destroyed in WWII and when the Polish came to rebuild, there was understandably some fairly strong anti-German feeling: the people did not want to spend money and effort on recreating old-style Germanic architecture. Instead, other European influences were drawn on, in particular the Flemish-Dutch connection from the time of the Hanseatic League and much of the old town now features traditional Dutch style gables. The Targ Węglowy or the Prison Tower complex was originally part of the Ulica Długa Gate and was built as part of the medieval city fortifications. The tower was added to several times to make it taller and, presumably, more imposing but when new fortifications were built between 1571 and 1576, it no longer formed part of the city’s defences and the smaller building was used as a courthouse and torture chamber while the tower was used as […]

03 2023 Poland

Solidarność, the Gdańsk Shipyards and Hewelion the lion

Published 02/02/2023
Gdansk

Tuesday 31st January 2023 Our research had revealed that although the European Solidarity Centre is closed on Tuesdays, the Museum of the Second World War was open so we decided to make this our first cultural stop of the visit. Our route took us past the Gdańsk Crane, which is rather less iconic when covered in scaffolding. Robert wanted to sample breakfast at one of the well-known bar mleczny [milk bars]. Originally subsidised by the state, they provided affordable food for the people but with the fall of communism and the consequent removal of the state subsidy in Poland many were forced out of business. Some have nevertheless survived and Bar Mleczny Neptun is recommended for providing flavour as well as real value for money. There was no queue when we arrived and the very obliging man behind the counter helped us to make our selection and then translated our order [see Dish of the day] for the cashier. Having eaten breakfast, we walked along the Stara Motława waterfront towards the museum. This took us past the Gdańsk sign on the opposite bank, still sporting a festive Santa hat. The Museum of the Second World War opened in 2017 in purpose-built accommodation and a statue […]

02 2023 Poland

A nation betrayed – the Museum of the Second World …

Published 01/02/2023
It’s still Christmas in Gdańsk

Monday 31st January 2023 As we were waiting to to go through security at the airport, Robert modelled his Travel Hack #2. [Travel Hack #1 was the use of a vaporetto ticket instead of the electronic door key to ensure that devices continue to charge when you are our of your hotel room.] Travel Hack #2 is the use of a lanyard to transport your liquids [hands free] until such time as you have passed through security and can safely pack them away in your luggage. Matilda thought he just looked foolish but, ultimately, accepted that the hack worked. Unfortunately, having landed at Gdańsk Airport, we had an inauspicious introduction to the Polish railway system. The ticket machines on both platforms at the airport station were out of order but we were told by some helpful people waiting for the same train that we would be able to buy tickets on board. As rail enthusiasts we naturally had absolutely no intention of fare dodging and when the conductor walked through the train past us, Robert asked to pay only to be fined £20 for travelling without tickets. Apparently we were meant to pre-empt this by going to the first carriage […]

01 2023 Poland

It’s still Christmas in Gdańsk

Published 01/02/2023
Manchester

Thursday 12th to Sunday 15th January 2023 We were delighted to be invited to Staffordshire to celebrate the long-awaited wedding of Liz and Martin, two very dear friends who have shared several of Travelling Herd’s adventures. Duncan and Phil [who regular readers may remember provided Matilda with a very welcome bath during our Narrowboat Adventure #4] invited us to stay with them the night before the wedding. It was a real pleasure to be able to catch up before the ceremony and Matilda particularly enjoyed meeting fellow wedding guests Jo and Paul face to face for the first time, having previously only met them over Zoom during lockdown. Long standing friends and their partners were seated together at the reception and the years and miles just slipped away. When Robert and Matilda first met [towards the end of 1989] Liz and Martin were a couple and we [along, we suspect, with many of their other friends and relatives at that time] expected them to become husband and wife. Life can be unpredictable and they went their separate ways. Two marriages, two families and two divorces later, we have finally borne witness to what many of us knew to be true – they were […]

01 2023 Manchester

A wedding, a museum and the smallest ‘bar’ in Europe

Published 29/01/2023
Veneto Ventures #7:

Thursday 6th October 2022 We had a stressful start to our journey to Gruyères as Robert received an alert that the train we had booked would not be stopping at Montreux where we were due to change to catch an onward connection. However we decided to board the train we had booked to go at least part of the way. The on-board announcements also made no mention of our scheduled stop but fortunately when Robert went to check with the guard he was told that all would be fine and we would be able to make our connection as planned. The route from Milan to Montreux passes along side Lake Maggiore . . . . . .and through beautiful mountain scenery. From Montreux we travelled to Montbovon and then on to Gruyères where we were greeted at the station by the potent and mouthwatering smell of chocolate and the prospect of a long uphill walk [below right]. The main purpose of our visit to Gruyères was to visit the HR Giger Museum and Bar. Hans Ruedi Giger was born in 1940 in Chur in Switzerland and there is another ‘Alien Bar’ in Chur which was closed when we tried to visit […]

07 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #7: Xenomorphs and fondue

1 Comment
Published 08/10/2022
Veneto Ventures #6:

Tuesday 4th and Wednesday 5th October 2022 We had to hand Caprice back at 09:00 on Wednesday morning and we agreed that we would return to the boatyard on Tuesday to make sure staff could check the engine time reading and we could settle up any paperwork the day before as we had a train to catch. There is a speed limit in the Laguna which the small motor boats and taxis seem to disregard totally. Even in the middle of the night, small boats would speed past, creating a disproportionate amount of wake. We were frequently awoken by Caprice being aggressively bounced and buffeted against the mooring dolphins so violently that it seemed as though we would surely break loose or capsize. As Liz commented, “We really rocked in Venice:” But not always in a good way. As we left the waters of the Venice navigation. . . . . . Martin, as Co-Captain, once again took charge of the mooring ropes . . . . . . and we went back through the lock which separates the salty Laguna from the fresh waters of the River Sile. Thankfully, the damage deposit was returned in full. Engine hours are […]

06 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #6: L.O.V.E. in Milan

Published 07/10/2022
Veneto Ventures #5:

Sunday 2nd and Monday 3rd October 2022 Burano looked even better in the Sunday morning sunshine. We planned to go to the Venetian Ghetto on Sunday to respect the Jewish Sabbath. We took a slightly circuitous route via Arsenale as we hoped to get closer to the Building Bridges sculpture. Unfortunately we weren’t successful but our walk back took us through a park where we enjoyed seeing the turtles in the fountain. Still making the most of our vaporetto passes we travelled past the Palazzo Ducale again [it always merits a photo] on our way to the Venetian Ghetto. On 29 March 1516, the Venetian Republic created the first ever ghetto on a small island in Cannaregio, the north-western sestiere of Venice. Within a week, the residents were removed and replaced by the Jewish people already resident in Venice at the time. Initially the Venetian Ghetto was connected to the rest of the city by two bridges that were locked overnight and only opened in the morning at the ringing of the marangona, the largest bell in St. Mark’s Campanile. The Jewish community itself had to pay for the Christian guards who ensured they did not break the overnight curfew. There are […]

05 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #5: Cruising the Giudecca Canal

Published 05/10/2022
Veneto Ventures #4:

Friday 30th September & Saturday 1st October 2022 We had prioritised the places we wanted to see and decided that a three day vaporetto pass, activated at about midday, would give us the flexibility to go into Venice several times and also visit some of the other islands over a period of four days. Information displayed at all the vaporetto stops explains that ‘between September 15th and April 30th the local administration operates a Piano di Viabilità Pedonale [Pedestrian Mobility Plan]’ based on erecting temporary, elevated walkways in the case of Acqua Alta, or exceptionally high water. This phenomenon, caused by unusually high tides, used to occur approximately every four years but since 2000 it has become much more frequent as sea levels rise due to global warming. The temporary walkways are constructed out of the sort of staging that schools use for drama productions and these can be seen stacked around the city close to where they will be needed. The routes are apparently effective for water levels rising up to about 120cm but beyond this even some of the walkways may be impassable if they are either submerged or floating. Robert has met Cinza, a local Venetian guide, through […]

04 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #4: Acqua Alta in Venice

Published 04/10/2022
Veneto Ventures #3:

Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th September 2022 Leaving Chioggia, the day was overcast and windy as we crossed the Laguna, passed through the Moranzani Lock and turned up the Riviera del Brenta. Having passed through the lock, you have to ring ahead to the on-call teams to arrange for the swing bridges to be opened. At the first bridge, we met a pleasant Swiss family who had arrived in Malcontenta shortly before us and were waiting to be let through. We both assumed we had arrived during the lunch break. A member of the team arrived at the allotted time to open the first bridge electronically and once both boats had passed through he closed the bridge and drove to open the next one. We continued on up the canal in this way, in tandem with the Swiss family, leapfrogging the workman, who was joined by a colleague at one of the bridges which needed to be manually operated. As we waved goodbye to the workmen, we agreed to meet them the following day at the last bridge so that we could do the journey in reverse and head back to Venice. Robert suggested 09:00 but we were firmly told […]

03 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #3: Bridges, villas and celebrity lunches

Published 02/10/2022
Veneto Ventures #2: Observing the dolphins down to Chioggia

Sunday 25th – Tuesday 27th September 2022 Leaving Casier, we headed south, leaving the Parrocchia dei Santi Teonisto e Compagni Martiri towering behind us [see GoPro video below] and motored onwards towards Venice. Rain had been forecast but fortunately this seemed to have all fallen overnight and by the time we set off, both Captain and crew could enjoy the sunshine. At Portegrandi, where the River Sile meets the Laguna, we negotiated our first lock. The term ’we’ is used loosely. This lock, unlike those on the canals of England, was operated by a lock keeper and required comparatively little effort from the crew. The Co-Captain took most of the strain. Once on the Laguna, we passed several casoni with the fishing nets hung out beside them. A casone is a basic fisherman’s hut or peasant’s house in the Veneto, but as we would see shortly not all casone are equal and some are more basic than others. Our route took us past the picturesque island of Burano, which is famous for its brightly coloured houses. The bell tower is no longer vertical and from some angles the lean is quite alarming. le boat has its own dedicated berths on Burano and […]

02 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #2: Observing the dolphins down to Chioggia

Published 29/09/2022
Veneto Ventures #1: Collecting the Caprice

Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th September 2022 The year 2022 has been very nautical in flavour: having spent almost three months on a narrowboat; returned from America on the Queen Mary and island-hopped in the Isles of Scilly we are now heading to Italy to spend 12 days cruising the rivers, canals and sea around the Venice Laguna with two of our regular TravellingHerd companions, Liz and Martin. We have one night in Florence on our way to meet them and pick up our boat. It seems Robert is back to his old tricks again and has booked a hotel near the station we will be departing from in the morning. Sometimes this has resulted in us staying in some rather disreputable areas. However in Florence we find we are just in the suburbs enjoying a balmy evening with the locals. After checking in to our hotel, a short walk took us to the Pin Up Beerstrò bar next to the Cinema Flora. The charming waiter [seen in the background between us in the photo above] clearly had the measure of Robert. Having scanned the QR code so that we could peruse the menu, Robert found that the beer we […]

01 2022 Veneto

Veneto Ventures #1: Collecting the Caprice

Published 25/09/2022

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