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.
Read MoreOne 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.
Read MoreBeing raised in Australia seems to instil a fascination with snow and all things cold, stemming from a complete lack of exposure to sub-zero temperatures. Winters are by no means warm, but snow simply does not fall at low altitude, nor does the temperature remain below zero should it happen to drop there, so something that is “naturally” frozen is very novel. Possessing the near-polar opposite climate is Norway, and in particular, northern Norway. The Norwegian landscape, characterised by spectacular fjords and soaring mountains, has always been one of the places that I dreamed of visiting. With the winter break offering an opportunity to travel and my desire to experience “a real winter”, Norway seemed like a great option. More than this, the frozen landscapes of Arctic Norway offer many experiences which simply cannot be found anywhere else. This trip was always going to be cool.
Read MoreChristmas 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.
Read MoreWith the Christmas period come the Christmas markets. The Germanic tradition of selling local arts and crafts, notably toys has slowly and surely become a commercial exploit. Appearing in every city and primarily selling bulk manufactured goods or food, they have been losing their charm. Some regions have been banning markets or limiting what can be sold in an attempt to ameliorate the situation, most notably limiting the number of food and drink vendors, with certain markets being comprised solely of mulled wine vendors.
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