Today we returned to Valletta where we hoped to see the Grandmasters Palace and the armoury but they were both closed. We went for a walk down Merchants Street to the end of the harbour to Fort St Elmo. This is partially used as the police academy but I managed to get through a hole in the fence to get some unobscured shots of the fort and harbour. We then went to an audio visual presentation called The Malta Experience. The approach to this is through a long tunnel from the waterfront. This movie is on a large widescreen with a commentary in fifteen different languages. This lasted for about 45 minutes and gave an excellent insight into the history and future of this island. After the presentation we went to The Sacra Infermia. This was ... read more

Today we had a very quiet day and just spent a bit of time around Mellieha village. We also spent some time around the pool just soaking up some rays. We did a bit of shopping in town, bought some scratchies (winning €5) and just wandering around doing the touristy thing. In the evening we had dinner out at an old mill in Mellieha. This mill was built during the time of the Knights of Malta and so dates back to around 1600. The meal was extremely enjoyable. I had Norwegian Salmon with a pernod sauce and Gina had pan fried rabbit. The fish was good however some of the rabbit was a little tough. As I said, a quiet day but lots more to come tomorrow when we plan to go to the old capital ... read more

This is our first full day on Malta and we are going to Valletta, the capital city. Valletta is built on a peninsula with the Grand Harbour on one side and Marsamxett Harbour on the other. There are couple of parallel streets down the middle of the peninsula and all the right angle streets head off steeply down to the harbour, or in Valletta’s case, the fortified battlement walls. The panoramic view above is off The Grand Harbour and is approximately a 200 degrees view. We started off by walking up the hill from our villa at Mellieha. It takes about ten minutes and it’s uphill all the way. There are very frequent buses to Valletta from here and we bought a 7 day pass for €13.98 each. This is a good value ticket as it ... read more

Today is our last full day in the UK before we fly off to our holiday in sun in Malta. We did get away a bit later than we anticipated as we weren’t sure what the traffic was going to be like. Being the last day of a long weekend we expected the traffic to be a lot heavier than what we encountered. We said our farewells to Robin and Jean and Kelly also came to see us off. The trip down the M1 to London was uneventful and we arrived at Wally and Maureen’s in the late afternoon. Three of us went to the local supermarket while Wally went to the pub, where I joined him a little later. We had a lovely dinner and Gina then got everything packed ready for the flight the ... read more

Today is not very nice. We woke up to find it raining and very grey and cool. Originally we were going to go shopping at Tesco and the various stores around the Reebok Stadium precinct but decided to head off straight to Huddersfield instead. We travelled over the M62 in pouring rain. During this part of the trip we actually crossed the highest motorway in the UK at Saddleworth Moor. A high point in a crap day. We carried to Huddersfield and I took the wrong exit for the second time in two days. Such is life. Anyway, we went for a round about drive and ended up at Robin’s place eventually. Strangely enough, we went through the town that we were having dinner at later that evening - not that we knew that at the ... read more