After my wonderful week in the sun-kissed land of Andalucia, I took a bus from Seville to Lagos on the south coast of Portugal (monday 29th June), which included an unexpected stop at the border crossing so that two Portugese police officers could board the bus and check everyone's passports; while a sniffer dog was dispatched to check the baggage hold for anything suspicious - which he must have found since one of the passengers onboard then had to open her suitcase so that the inspectors could search for anything untoward! Meanwhile one of the officers chastised me for saying 'si' when he asked me if it was my first time in Portugal; because in Portugal the word for yes is 'sim' - though I discovered later that the 'm' in 'sim' is silent anyway, so ... read more

So in my last update I was about to head from Marseille in the south of France to Barcelona in the north-east of Spain, continuing my route alongside the Mediterannean Sea, in which I had swum at six different beaches in the past six days! Now usually I take trains everywhere in Europe, since even though I don't have a Eurail pass I can usually get reasonably cheap fares by taking slower regional trains from town to town. But since Spain only seems to have high-speed, full-priced trains, I was left with little choice but to take buses between cities; and since the major cities like Barcelona, Madrid and Seville are all about four- to five-hundred kilometres apart, I decided to take overnight buses in order to avoid wasting valuable daylight hours stuck on a bus, ... read more

After having successfully disproven the theory that all roads lead to Rome, I ended up finally taking a budget flight there instead, from Catania in Sicily (monday 1st June). And what a flight it was - from the moment I took my seat to the moment I left the plane, there was a little shit screaming his lungs out in the row behind me! And although the first thing I did when the 'fasten seatbelt' sign was turned off was grab my iPod and turn it up as loud as it would go, this tactic unfortunately only worked for a short period in mid-flight, while during the take-off and landing I could do nothing but shove my fingers as far inside my ears as they would go! Why screaming children can't be stored in the luggage ... read more

After my six-and-a-half hour train journey (sunday 17th May) from Munich in the south of Germany to Venice in the north of Italy (via Innsbruck in the west of Austria), I finally arrived in the fabled city of canals set in the middle of the Venetian lagoon; which is attached to the mainland only by a man-made strip of land six kilometres long and just wide enough for a highway and some train lines, and separated from the Adriatic Sea (part of the Mediterranean) by a spit of land only about one kilometre across. Upon arriving in Venice I was immediately amazed by the sight of boats whizzing up and down the Grand Canal directly outside the train station; but even better was yet to come when I checked into the guesthouse I had booked for ... read more

Well every story needs a conclusion, so this is mine... After saying goodbye to the latest in a long line of dear friends on thursday morning the 4th of September, I left Sue's place and headed out to the airport for the first of my three flights from Zurich to Stockholm to Oslo to Bergen. I must admit it felt a little strange arriving back in Bergen, since it was the first time in three months that I had arrived in a town that I was already familiar with. But it was definately nice to be back in the beautiful little harbour city that I had grown so fond of previously, and despite Erika having moved to Paris two weeks earlier, it was great to see Nina's smiling face again - especially since we had tickets ... read more