Category: Uncategorized
-
Dublin: Slán go fóill
Our time in Dublin was split into three parts: our initial stay before touring the Wild Atlantic Way, our time after that trip and our final day between Belfast and our flight home. Much of our time here was spent in the second stage of our visit. We stayed at Ariel House, a B &…
-
The Giant’s Causeway
Before we left the north of Ireland we wanted to visit The Giant’s Causeway, its most well known natural site. We found a bus tour with stops at a few other spots along the way while leaving us a couple of hours to explore this landmark. The drive north west from Belfast along the Irish…
-
Belfast
A prelude: Scene: Connolly Station, Dublin. Rich and Robin are waiting to board the train to Belfast. Robin goes off to find a washroom. Rich waits on a bench with the luggage. The train pulls in and passengers arriving from Belfast disembark. A man in a blue track-suit and carrying a small duffle bag does…
-
Glendalough,Wicklow and Killarney
In between days exploring Dublin we opted for a day trip on one of the giant coach buses that blanket the country of Ireland. This was to the Wicklow mountains, with a morning stop in Glendalough, a monastic settlement in Wicklow National Park, and an afternoon visit to the medieval town of Kilkenny. Both stops…
-
Mighty Craic in Connemara
Connemara is a beautiful area to the north and west of Galway full of picturesque and peaty landscapes, beautiful lakes and dramatic mountains. Or so we were told. We had our worst weather of the trip during our visit there: misty cloudy conditions punctuated by driving rains and gale force winds, weather which Stevie delightfully…
-
Moher Cliffs and The Burren
We left Spanish Point early to see “moher cliffs”, the Cliffs of Moher to be precise. As the second most visited site in Ireland (more on the first most visited in a future post), the cliffs can be overrun with visitors on mega bus tours from Galway and Dublin, so Stevie wanted to take advantage…
-
Hiking, Herding and Cliffs
We left Dingle relatively early to fit in a couple of hours of hiking before we were due at a local farm for a sheep herding demonstration. Our destination was Annascaul, a spectacular river valley of “commonage”: land held in common ownership by local farmers for the purposes of grazing livestock (sheep in particular). This…
-
Dingle and Slea Head
We were in charming Dingle for two nights and certainly could have stayed longer. We stayed at the Dingle Skellig hotel, a sprawling modern spot built to accommodate bus tours just a few minutes walk from the heart of town. Great breakfasts, cow and sea views out the windows, laundry service. Ticked a lot of…
-
Killarney National Park
Killarney National Park is the second largest in Ireland, after Wicklow in the east near Dublin, and is about 1/6th the size of Killarney Provincial Park in Ontario. We spent our day on the way to Dingle exploring a few more spots in the park that we were unable to see earlier, including the grounds…
-
Kerry and The Skelligs
Vagabond, the company we are using on this 8 day tour of The Wild Atlantic Way, have what I would describe as a free range travel approach. There is a lovely place for us to sleep each night, breakfast is provided, and a loose itinerary is presented for the day. Within that structure, however, we…
-
The Beara Peninsula
We came to appreciate the value of a small bus tour in a four wheel drive vehicle with a seasoned and adventurous guide on our day touring the Beara Peninsula. As the crow flies, we didn’t have far to go between Gougane Barra and the town of Kenmare. On Irish roads, it turned into quite…
-
Dublin to County Cork
We left Galway for Dublin to meet up with the Vagabond tour we were taking around the Wild Atlantic way. More on that in a bit. Dublin was absolutely packed with Americans in town for the Aer Lingus College Football “Classic” between Texas Christian University and North Carolina. The only reason this really mattered for…
-
Galway
“Well, I took a stroll on the old long walkOf a day-ya-ay-ya-ayI met a little girl and we stopped to talkOn a fine soft day-ya-ay And I ask you, friend, what’s a fella to do?‘Cause her hair’s black and her eyes are blueAnd I knew right then, I’d be takin’ a whirl‘Round the Salthill Prom…
-
Villa Sonia Botticelli
Where to start? We started talking about a university friends reunion in Italy to celebrate over 40 years of friendship and the 60th birthdays for most of our group a few years back. Serious planning got underway last summer. The consensus was that we wanted to rent a villa in Tuscany for a week, and…
-
Firenze
At one point or another on this trip, all ten of us squeezed in a visit to Firenze (Florence). Whereas most of the group fit this in before our villa week (more on that week in the next blog post), Sarah, Ian, Robin and I went to Florence immediately after, which I must say produced…
-
Tuscan Towns
One of the wonderful features of Tuscany are the numerous, impossibly picturesque small towns which pepper the countryside. This short post covers some of the ones explored by various members of our group during our villa week, in addition to the larger towns of San Gigmanano and Siena. Greve in Chianti One of the larger…
-
Siena
On our last two trips to Tuscany we had a chance to visit the wonderful city of Siena. In August. In high 30 temps. With 10,000 other tourists. So it was a joy to have a chance to return on a beautiful sunny day in May with our friends, shepherded once again by Fernanda. Parking…
-
San Gimignano
Over the course of our week long stay at our villa in Tuscany we had plans to visit a few hill towns as a group. First up on the list was the hill town of San Gimignano. For Robin and me, this was our first visit to this spot even though we had seen the…
-
Lucca
Lucca feels like a bit of an oasis after the overtly touristy vibe of visiting Pisa. Not to say that there aren’t tourists here (after all, we were in Lucca for four nights!) but it just seems to have a more relaxed and settled feel than we experienced in Pisa. Lucca is best known for…
-
Pisa
We woke up Tuesday morning to threats of torrential rain in the forecast which put our plans to visit Pisa on our way to Lucca (where we had plans to stay for a few days) in some doubt. However the rain held off, which made our drive out of Monterosso a little less harrowing and…
-
The Cinque Terre
We had a lovely few days in The Cinque Terre with friends Lisa, Pete, Scot and Anne. The weather cooperated and staying in one of the villages (Monterosso) gave us a sense of the place in the early mornings and evenings that you miss if you are day-tripping in on trains. We saw the five…
-
Monterosso al Mare
We zipped to Florence from Bologna and picked up our friends Lisa and Pete. This involved a considerable amount of packing and repacking the “mid”-sized MG hatchback, but once we managed to fit everyone and everything in, we headed west to the Ligurian coast and Monterosso al Mare. We were using Monterosso as a base…
-
Bologna
“La Dotta, la Grassa, la Rossa” -motto of the city of Bologna In English, “the learned, the fat, and the red”, this motto sums up this quirky and charming city, the capital of Emilia Romagna. It also fits as a motto for our reunion with our university friends in Tuscany, but that’s a tale for…
-
Verona
Before we get to “fair Verona” you have to get into “fair Verona”, which involves an inordinate number of multi laned roundabouts. We were staying in the historic Castelvecchio Apartments in the Palazzo Canosso, which is a building dating from the 1500’s, and which sit right next to the Castelvecchio (old castle) complex on the…
-
Bardolino vs Valpolicella
We had to be out of our accommodations fairly early on our last day in Riva del Garda, so we decided to take advantage of the lovely weather and find a bench along the waterfront where we could people watch, smell the blossoms, take in the lake view and pretend to read on our e-readers.…
-
Riva del Garda
We have always been interested in exploring the Italian Lake District, and decided on Lake Garda for this trip. Lake Garda sits just to the west of Verona and runs into the solid and imposing mass of the Dolomite mountains to the north. We chose the slower route north from Modena, and were thankful for…
-
Modena, Italy
We arrived at our B&B in Modena wrung out from a long day of travel: a flight from Toronto to Zurich followed by a delayed connection to Florence where we picked up our rental car and drove the hour and a half north on the toll highway (a bargain at 10€) into Emilia Romagna, the…
-
Mijas Costa
We spent the bulk of our time on this trip to Spain staying in a one bedroom apartment at the Las Mimosas Beach Club in Mijas Costa, located between Malaga and Marbella along the Costa del Sol. This section of the coast is a favourite vacation haunt for Brits (the majority of visitors) and other…
-
Ronda, Setinel de las Bodegas and Gibraltar, or, “Two Towns and a Territory”
Our four weeks in Spain overlapped a little with our friends Mary Lynn and Garth’s stay here, so we decided to take a couple of days to do a little touring with them. Our first day saw us visit the white hill towns of Setinel de Bodegas and Ronda. We decided to stop in Setinel…
-
Cómpeta
The wonderful Robin MacPherson turned 60 (!) on this vacation, and we wanted to find a special spot to celebrate. Our original thought was to stay somewhere near the seaside town of Nerja, a place that friends Darren and Truus had recommended and which is often featured in guidebooks for this area of Spain. Nerja…
-
Cordoba
While much of this trip to Spain was to be dedicated to relaxing on the Costa del Sol, we did want to explore a few places that we had missed during last year’s visit to Andalucia. High on that list was the city of Cordoba. Cordoba’s roots in Roman and Moorish history are as deep…
-
Malaga, January 2025
Our four week winter trip to Spain was a relatively late decision. We have planned a big trip to Italy in May 2025 with friends we’ve known since university days, but a series of stressful events led us to book four weeks on the Costa del Sol in Spain. This trip was for relaxing, we…
-
The Seven Hanging Valleys Trail
We woke up to beautiful sunshine on our last full day in Portugal. After breakfast we checked out and drove down to the trailhead for the Percurso dos Sete Vales Suspensos, the so-called Seven Hanging Valleys Trail. If you google “Hiking in the Algarve” this trail typically comes up at or near the top of…
-
Lagos
When we woke up it was pouring rain. It rained solidly until noon, let up for a bit, and then, as we pulled into the town of Lagos, it came down in buckets. Just as we thought we might head back to Ferragudo, the rain stopped. Over the next five hours the skies alternated between…
-
Ferragudo and the Caminho dos Promontórios
Booking a spot in the off-season in Portugal’s famous Algarve was trickier than one might think. Our visit here was in the final stretch of a six week trip, and we really wanted something that would allow for some downtime and some coastal hiking. I had read a number of blogs about hiking in the…
-
Lisboa
Lisbon (Lisboa) is a city that feels lived in and authentically local. Despite the influx of visitors and its growing popularity with cruise boats, it has a gritty beauty rather than a glossy sheen of tourist polish. We had four nights and three full days in Lisbon and used one for a day trip to…
-
Sintra, Cabo da Roca and Cascais
We took one day while in Lisbon for a trip to Sintra, the nearby hill town that was the traditional escape for Portugal’s aristocracy and which is the location of the famous, fabulously weird Pena Palace. We jumped in on a small eight person tour which gave us access to a stop at the most…
-
The return to Malaga
We began our trip to Spain with an overnight in Malaga in early February. As many visitors to Andalusia do, we were using Malaga as a launch point to other places, in our case Sevilla. We went down to Malaga’s famous shopping and walking street, the Calle Marques de Larios that evening to take in…
-
Spanish Side Trips
Although we had decided to set up a base in each place we stayed in Spain (Sevilla, Granada, Ronda, Cadiz and Malaga for a minimum of four day at a time we worked in some side trips and day trips along the way. I already wrote about our hill town detours on our way from…
-
Cadiz and the Carnaval Chiquito
We are big fans of guidebooks when trip planning, and the Rick Steves series of travel books are typically some of the best. They are heavy on information and logistics and light on images and pictures, so they tend to be more comprehensive than many others. So it was a little odd to leaf through…
-
Jerez de La Fontera
Jerez de La Fontera is a town of a couple of hundred thousand people which lies 30 minutes to the north of Cadiz. It’s primarily famous for sherry and horses. We decided to make a day trip up the road for the horses. La Fundación Real Escuela Andaluza del Arte Ecuestre (The Royal Andalusian School…
-
Zahara and Grazalema
Based on the title, some of you might be under the impression that this entry is about Cinderella’s wicked stepsisters. You are wrong. First off, in the Disney version of the story, Anastasia and Drizella are the stepsisters. They didn’t even have names in the 1812 Grimm version. Secondly, the names in the title are…
-
Camino(s)
Earlier in the week I stopped by the local tourist information office in Ronda to see if they had any suggestions as to some day hikes that we might explore on our stay here. The tourist agent smiled, pulled out a map and began energetically drawing loops and lines on the margins of the map,…
-
Welcome to Ronda
The trip from Granada to Ronda was surprisingly seamless: a two hour bus ride to Malaga, a painless pick up of our rental car, a decent lunch (!) in the Malaga train station where the car rental place is, followed by an hour and a half drive into the mountains. We arrived in Ronda around…
-
Sunny Days in Granada
Our four day visit to Granada finished in sunshine as we had two glorious days of blue skies and temperatures in the mid to high teens. It was great weather for walking and exploring the city. Winters in Granada can be notoriously fickle with temperatures plunging below zero on occasion. We are only 30 minutes…
-
The Alhambra
Th Alhambra is the greatest remaining Moorish palace and was the last stronghold of Moorish civilization in Spain. It is the primary attraction in Granada, with more than 8000 visitors a day. Reservations are required well in advance and if you are ever going to splurge for a small group tour, this is the place…
-
Welcome to Granada
We took the bus from Sevilla to Granada, 25€ for the two of us. The ride involved a few detours due to construction but the highways were blissfully free of farm equipment. Our apartment was downtown in the historic centre, and we decided on taking the #33 bus from the main station into the core,…
-
Bario Santa Cruz and the city beneath the city
We had two days with some rain, a rarity in this city. It was certainly welcomed by the farmers who have been facing historic drought in Spain. One rainy afternoon I took a solo trip to the Museo de Belles Artes, a former home for the friars of the Order of Mercy which is now…
-
Food in Sevilla
Sevilla is blessed by access to incredible food: fresh fruit and vegetables as well as high quality meat and fish are readily available. The supermarkets are well organized and well stocked, and the neighborhood stores and daily markets provide access to accessible, fresh food as well. If you live in the city centre it is…
-
Plazas, Patios y Paseos
One of the charming aspects of Sevilla are the distinctive barios (neighbourhoods) that are within a short walk of the historic centre. Over the course of a few days we had the great pleasure of exploring a variety of areas with Darren and Truus, pausing in plazas (squares) big and small, wandering through markets, churches…
