Antwerp

Antwerp

Doing a fair amount of travel, I am on all of the SNCF spam mailing lists, which is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, when the Thalys sale starts, you can be ready and pick up return tickets to almost any destination serviced by them for under 40€. Thanks to one of these sales, I found myself with a weekend in Antwerp, a city that to me at the time, aside from being a historically important place, was known primarily for diamond-trading and fashion.

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Montpellier and le Cirque de Mourèze

Montpellier and le Cirque de Mourèze

One style of travelling is to not make any plans and just see where the wind takes you. At the other extreme, there is planning everything down to a tee months in advance. I would place myself in the latter category, but with elements of the former. For instance, travel destinations are typically chosen many months in advance and planned out carefully, and likewise as soon as it is possible to purchase train tickets, they will be purchased. This has the benefit of saving a lot of money, but also gives you the “looking forward to an adventure” sensation. However during the adventure, we are often flying by the seat of our pants. So sometime during autumn, a mid-winter trip to the south of France was booked with the assumption being that we would escape the freeze of the north. As we were saving some other destinations in the south until spring/summer, we chose a location with equal length train trips from Geneva and Paris and ended up with Montpellier. When the time arrived, as the winter had been extremely mild, the “escape” was not to be the jealously-inducing weekend that we expected, but it would be a welcome adventure nonetheless. The region has some amazing landscape, so we decided to spend half our time out and about, and the other half exploring the city.

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In and around Paris

In and around Paris

Christmas had arrived, however our plans to go away over the break had been thwarted and pushed back until the New Year, so it was holiday time and we were in Paris. To make the most of the time, we organised a set of day trips which had been on my itinerary for a while. Two excursions were within the city, whilst the other three were a bit further afield.

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