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Homeward Bound
Well, today we crossed the English channel back onto UK soil and in a few days (after the car has had a service and MOT) we will start to make our way back ‘home’. This is an interesting concept for us as we sold our house before we left and so the caravan really has been our only home for the past year. We are returning to the same area, although we will set up home in a different street and a different town. And we all have very mixed emotions about it. In so many ways we don’t want our current life to change: we have loved having the…
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Poland: Wroclaw – It’s All About the Dwarfs!
After Krakow we headed west and towards the city of Wroclaw. You may have heard of this place because it was European City of Culture in 2016. What you probably can’t do however, is pronounce its name correctly. ‘Rock-law’? Nope. ‘Vrock-law’? Nooooo. ‘Vrock-lav’? No again. The problem is that, for non-Polish people, it’s pronunciation is nothing like you would expect based on the letters you see, so it is actually something more like ‘Vrots-wahv’. Got it? No, we didn’t either and ended up throwing out several different possible pronunciations every time we referred to it, finishing up with ‘…or however you pronounce it!’
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Poland: Being Captivated by Krakow
Krakow is a beautiful, medieval city with a central market square, cobbled streets, elegant houses and countless legends. But it is also so much more than that and its interesting layers were slowly revealed to us as we toured the city.
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Poland: Getting Thoughtful in Katowice
Leaving the Czech Republic behind, we crossed the border into Poland, heading for Katowice. Once again there was no border to speak of, but all of a sudden the motorways were visually very different. For long stretches there were high barriers on each side presumably to cut out the wind or noise or both, but they definitely restricted our view and made us feel quite penned in. Where we could see out, the landscape of this part of southern Poland is very green and is dotted with the features of the heavy industry and coal mining that have dominated the economy of this region for centuries: mine heads, slag heaps,…
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Czech Republic: Brno
From right next to our small campsite (Camping Hana) in the rural town of Veverská Bítyška, we were able to get a boat down the Svratka River and across the 10km-long Brno reservoir to the outskirts of the city and from there a rickety tram into the centre. It has to be one of the most pleasant ways to arrive in Brno! The boat has an electric engine and so the journey was quiet and peaceful – it was as though we were just gliding through the water, surrounded by birds and fish, drifting past castles and watching people out enjoying a dip in the cool water. All along the…
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Getting to Know the Czech Republic
Driving from Vienna to Brno From Vienna we headed north towards Brno in the Czech Republic. Now, Brno is the Czech Republic’s second city, after Prague, and Vienna is obviously Austria’s capital city, so you would think that a decent road would connect the two, would you not? Think again. Whilst the road leaving Vienna is good quality dual carriageway and the road arriving in Brno is a good quality multi-lane highway, there is a big section in between where the road is narrow, with only one lane in each direction. To be fair, it looks as though they are in the process of building a new road, but for…
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Touring the United Nations in Vienna: Review
We spent three days in Vienna, exploring the city and visiting a number of its great attractions, some of which I wrote about here. But the thing that all of us enjoyed more than any other was our tour of the United Nations. The United Nations – what is it? The United Nations is an international organisation that was founded in 1945 by 51 countries. Its aims were (and still are) to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations and promote social progress, better living standards and human rights.
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Austria: Vienna
The first thing to say about Vienna is that the number of attractions and things to do and see is huge! The city has so many historic buildings, palaces and museums that you could spend weeks here and still only see a fraction of them. So, we did what any responsible parent would do when faced with an overwhelming choice of possible options: we let the children decide! And this actually turned out to be an interesting and revealing exercise because, firstly, what they picked was nothing like what we would’ve chosen, and secondly, they came up with two places that really got us thinking and debating about the world…
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Slovakia: A Day Trip to Bratislava
Slovakia The spa and campsite we stayed at in north west Hungary (Lipót Thermal Camping) was only a short distance from Slovakia’s capital city, Bratislava, so we chose the coolest of our days there (still about 28 degrees), to go and explore what it had to offer. And we loved what we found.
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Enjoying the Water Slides and Spa Culture at Lipót Thermal Resort, Hungary
We had a tough few weeks after we left Budapest. We have all enjoyed excellent health during this whole year so far, but unfortunately in Budapest Andy picked up a nasty cold and, much as he tried not to share it with the rest of us, we are living in such close proximity to one another that it was almost inevitable that we would all succumb to it at some point. The other factor is that it has been scorching hot. The temperatures have been in the low 30s Celsius now for weeks and it is starting to wear us down. It saps our energy and sometimes we don’t want…
