Category: Europe

A Few Chilled Days in Cómpeta, Spain

Unless you are extraordinarily lucky, having fun doesn’t just happen, you have to work at it. In Iceland that sometimes meant enduring cold and wet weather, getting up early with a full day’s schedule ahead of you, driving long distances, doing chores such as cooking and washing up, and every day packing up, putting up the tent and converting our van into our sleeping quarters. Every day. We had such an amazing time but it was time for some sun again and some downtime.

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Iceland – Driving the Ring Road in 2 Weeks.

We love Iceland and up until this years adventures it had been our favourite country, having visited twice before. What we hadn’t done however was travel the entire ring road around the island. July is, in theory anyway, one of the warmest months to go and so we decided to rent a campervan and venture all the way round. It was only fair that we gave Iceland a chance to regain its number 1 spot in our hearts, having recently been overtaken by both Costa Rica and The Galápagos Islands.

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Istanbul, Türkiye. One City, Two Continents.

How do you follow a blog on a place as unique and exciting as Cappadocia? Well, in short, with great difficulty. Well, if your next stop is Istanbul anyway. We rounded off our tour of Turkey with a visit to the vast metroplis, official population 15,190,000, though unofficially some say up to 24,000,000. We took a night bus from Cappadocia with Metro Bus, and with stops it was a 12-hour trip, arriving at 7.30am. As bus trips go it was ok and we managed to get some sleep and there were a few comfort breaks on the way. It cost 100 Turkish lira or £10.

The weather was normal for November, but with every passing day and with every mile we moved northwards, the climate grew colder, and wetter. In 4 of the 5 days we were there, it rained pretty much non-stop. This did, as you can imagine put some limitations on what we could do, however we were lucky in the first couple of days to have some sunshine and to see a few of the must-see tourist highlights, each of them sadly a little disappointing in their own way.

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Türkiye – First Impressions

I’ve been feeling a bit like a spoiled brat.

A little sullen because we are not yet in any of the countries I had my heart set on. Our plans were so grand, then along came COVID and everything changed. We were, no are, determined not to let it stop us though. Not that we had a great deal of choice given that a 1 year career break had been arranged, notice had been given to our landlord to quit our rented property, and the contract on our leased cars had expired.

We did however have to concede we just can’t go everywhere we originally wanted to, though as the eternal optimist, I remain hopeful that many of the countries we wish to visit will re-open their borders before the year’s out.

In years of talks whilst planning for our travels, Turkey had not been mentioned. Not even once.

And yet here we are.

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Travelling After the Travel Ban…What to expect

We booked a last minute trip to Zante after we heard that restrictions for quarantine were lifted in Greece. From our own research it appeared that Greece have managed well with Covid with only 4000ish cases. We were a little apprehensive of what to expect in terms of health checks and covid safety and so thought we would share our experiences to inform others.

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Vilnius, Lithuania.

Vilnius is the capital city of Lithuania and has a population of over ½ million people.  It is known for its baroque architecture and cobbled streets.  It is a bustling city with something for everyone from art, history, trendy bars and restaurants and street art.   It wouldn’t be right to see so much of Lithuania without a trip to the capital!

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The Hill of Crosses & Kaunas, Lithuania.

On our journey back to Kaunas we did a detour to The Hill of Crosses; located 12km north of the city of Šiauliai in northern Lithuania.  The origins of the place are unconfirmed however the original crosses were thought to have been placed during the November Uprising or the Polish – Russian war of 1830-1831.

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Nida & Raganu Kalnas, Lithuania.

We arrived at Kaunas airport just after 12pm, picked up the hire car and began our 270Km journey heading towards Nida,  a coastal town in the Neringa Municipality.  Nida is the westernmost point of Lithuania and close to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.  The motorways in Lithuania are in pretty good condition compared to the neighbouring countries we have visited.  Approximately 30 miles along our route on the A1 we stopped for some lunch at the Kavine 130 cafe.  It is a popular and fun stop and we had some giggles with the props outside.   It was a welcome break after our very early start. Continue reading “Nida & Raganu Kalnas, Lithuania.”

A winter visit to Ljubljana and Lake Bled, Slovenia

Slovenia, a small country nestled in the heart of Europe, is a hidden gem that’s waiting to be explored. From the bustling streets of its capital city, Ljubljana, to the serene beauty of Lake Bled, Slovenia offers a unique blend of nature and culture that’s sure to captivate every traveler. We arrived via Flixbus from Zagreb on a journey which took just under 3 hours from Trieste and cost 15 euros each. The bus arrived into Metelkova Mesto, the central station. We had 2 nights here but were excited to see what the area has to offer. Slovenia became the 38th European country we had visited when we went there in January 2020.

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Trieste, Italy.

For our New Year break we did a lot of research and wanted to visit Ljubljana, Slovenia and Zagreb, Croatia.  This incorporated a bus trip between the two.  Zagreb looked amazing for New Year and Ljubljana just looked really lovely so we decided we wanted to visit both.  Trieste was not somewhere we had planned to go; initially we had booked direct flights to Ljubljana with Wizz Air; unfortunately they decided to cancel their route there very last minute for us.  When we went to check on our flight status they had changed our flights to Prague! 

We had done a lot of research as to where we wanted to spend New Year and we were dead set on Zagreb so we found a work around…. We found we could fly to Trieste in Italy and get a bus to Zagreb and Ljubljana so with some rejigging we had the unexpected and delightful addition of visiting Trieste for just under 24 hours!

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