June 2003 The cheap airlines hadn’t quite made it to town at this point, so getting there was a bit more of a challenge on a budget. As a well read guide book sums it up, “Ljubjlana is just a house and Slovenia a village”. It’s not a hard country to negotiate your way around, so how hard could it be to get there from Italy on the train? The answer unless you are the daily express from Venice is more difficult than you would think, as there is a tiresome detour via Trieste. We spent a hot stopover night in [View Full Entry]

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October 2003 Zagreb - another dot on the travelblog map, but cheating a little bit I fear. Zagreb was only the eventual destination of this trip, but it was more of a circle of exploration courtesy of the by now usual cheap flights from Ryan Air. The parameters of the trip were the start point of Klagenfurt and the return journey from Graz 8 days later. The whole concept of the trip was in the hands of the punctuality of our chosen airline - a delay and we weren’t going to get much further than Klagenfurt by the end of Day [View Full Entry]

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February 2004 The main reason anyone ever goes to Arizona is to see the world’s biggest hole in the ground — and that is a mistake if they explore no further, because they’re missing out. Arizona generally seems to mean just one thing to the masses - the Grand Canyon. The world’s biggest and most beautiful hole in the ground pulls in over 5 million visitors a year, who arrive, gasp in awe at the size of that hole in the ground and then leave. We can relate to this, because that’s exactly what we did way back in 1989 when [View Full Entry]

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Spring 2004 Valencia has something of a reputation of being the real deal Spanish experience - a proper big city without the hordes of tourists that have overrun such as Barcelona. The food, the nightlife and the football were also reputed to be up to the mark. In between the above of course there has to be something else to do during the day - other than sleep off the previous night’s excess, but more of that later. We got a taxi straight to the hotel from the airport, although that was arguably an unnecessary extravagance and set off in search [View Full Entry]

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Spring 2004 It’s grim up North … or so the saying goes! The reality is of course a million miles away, with more and more people finding out for themselves. We’ve been to the places on this blog more times than we could ever recall - but very rarely with a camera. York itself is a mix of the medieval and shops - a place to stroll and get your self a bargain Mulberry at the factory shop, visit the Minster, the Castle or the Jorvik Museum if that is your thing. Alternatively, find a hostelry serving the excellent York ales [View Full Entry]

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June 2004 Euro 2004! This was the one - the tournament we were going to win. There were steady signs of an improvement under Sven, we were almost on his home patch - well he’d been boss of Benfica and he still had his villa in Estoril - and the boy Rooney was going to come into his own on the big stage. Well that was the theory…. and the practice was … err, very different. The tickets transpired to be the easy part with a combination of the direct applications to UEFA and working out the possible group combinations. We [View Full Entry]

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October 2004 After leaving “Germany”, the next stop on the Namibia circle was Cape Cross about 80 miles north of Swakopmund. In 1486, Diogo Cáo, an early Portuguese explorer, erected a cross on a small rocky outcrop along the desolate and forbidding wastes of the Namibian skeleton Coast. It was battered by sudden squalls and fierce windstorms, blasted by shifting desert sands, baked by a relentless sun and shrouded with dense fogs for about 4 centuries before the coming of the new colonists. Meanwhile somebody else had claimed the area for themselves - the cross now a replica is [View Full Entry]

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October 2004 Welcome to Namibia - our first African experience. This was getting away from it in the truest sense of the description. We’ve been to emptiness before - outback Australia and the deserts of the Western USA - but Namibia is the king of the destinations if you want to be away from everybody else. Windhoek International Airport is only international in the sense of you can fly overseas. There didn’t appear to be too many formalities awaiting us as we landed from Frankfurt early one morning in the Namibian spring. We were taken into the centre of Windhoek to [View Full Entry]

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November 2004 The pictures do the talking on this blog. [View Full Entry]

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November 2004 Krakow, listed by UNESCO as one of the 12 great historic cities of the world way back in 1978, is probably the top destination in Poland if it’s art, architecture, history or just plain drinking that you are after. If you’re on a stag do and don’t give a f*** about the country’s past, Poland’s ancient seat of royalty contains a vast wealth of treasures inside its heavily fortified walls that can’t fail to inspire. The ensemble that is Wawel, perched on top of the hill of the same name immediately south of the old town, is by far [View Full Entry]

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