After visiting the beautiful temples in Bangkok, of course we had to visit the Kao San Road – this is apparently described in The Beach as “the centre of the backpacking universe” or something like that.
The Kao San road is aimed at the backpacker market, with hostels, street food, and souvenir stalls mostly selling T-shirts advertising local beer brands (yes of course I got one, I am a cliche!). Continue reading
Ko Samui, a small island on the east of Thailand, was my first “beachy” holiday ever in my life. We designed this as a relaxing break between visiting Singapore and Bangkok. It was pure relaxation and just wonderful.
We had the best of both worlds, with the beach on one side and the town on the other side. The town was a thin strip of touristy shops, restaurants, and travel agents, plus a rather grand shopping mall and a couple of night markets. Continue reading
After our excellent Basketball Game in Memphis, we were really excited to go to an American Football game in Florida. This was “College Football” level, not the National Football League, but it didn’t matter to us.
The atmosphere at the stadium was electric and it seemed like the whole town had turned out to watch, dressed in full team colours. That’s one thing I noticed in America – everyone seems to own jumpers, scarfs, and hats for the local American Football team Continue reading
So… here we are – my third skiing blog. Following my Austrian skiing and French skiing attempts, I confirm that I have not improved. I’m still terrible and my bottom still has a fatal attraction to the ground.
We started the day gently with a walk in the snow (no skis involved) to take in the beautiful scenery of Alta, Utah. The crisp air, sunny blue skies and beautiful mountains conspired to create a very pleasant stroll indeed. Just when I thought this might be for me after all, I saw an infant ski class follow each other off a cliff one by one like lemmings (they were unhurt and delighted, I should add. I was not.)
We hadn’t packed full ski gear for this trip obviously, so it was just a matter of wearing normal trousers and a waterproof coat and hoping you didn’t fall over. Continue reading
When I was a teenager I read a series of books with teen characters called “Summer” and “Seth” in them. I probably shouldn’t admit that 😉 I can’t remember what the books were called, but they were set in the Florida Keys. I was transfixed by the descriptions of azure water, brilliant sunshine, and the wall of heat that hits you on arrival, and from that moment on I wanted to go there!
We drove along the Overseas highway, which ties the Keys together. We didn’t really have a plan, except that we wanted to get down to Key West at the very bottom of the Keys. We meandered our way down there, stopping to watch parasailing in a bay, and to grab food. We spotted some Pelicans and pulled over – these are very exciting to me as we don’t have them in England.
It turns out we had stumbled upon a really cool place called Continue reading
From Grenoble we had a series of day-trips to ski resorts. I had been skiing once before (see my Skiing around Salzburg blog) and although I’m not going to be signing up to the Winter Olympics anytime soon, I love the scenery. So I’m always happy to go up into the mountains. We visited the Tourist Information in Grenoble, which provided us with good information about the Ski bus. Basically ski buses leave Grenoble bus station at around 6am every day, headed for most of the ski resorts in the vicinity. It was well organised, convenient (apart from the 6am start 😉 ) and good value (the bus tickets plus lift pass cost around the same as the lift pass would cost on its own). I would definitely recommend it as a day trip if you fancy trying out skiing, but don’t fancy a full ski holiday. We had three separate days out at ski resorts around Grenoble; Chamrousse, Villard de Lans, and Les Deux Alpes.
Chamrousse
Our first ski resort was Chamrousse. We found the ski rental shop and I was pleased that there was a nice gentle baby slope right in front of it, with a drag lift.
Soon it was time to get on the chair lift to get to the bigger slopes. No-one could have predicted what happened next. To cut to the chase, I ended up lying across a chairlift, partly on a small child. I’m not proud of this Continue reading
In a vaguely sporty moment we decided to get a bus from Salzberg to a nearby ski resort. This proved more difficult than first expected, but we ended up trying two resorts, by public transport and a private bus.
Attempt 1: Werfenweng
Train from Salzberg to Werfen. Very good. Bus from Wefen to Werfenweng. Not so good. The timetable online was obviously out of date so we missed the bus and ended up taking a rather expensive taxi instead. The tourist office was helpful and gave us a new timetable for the bus.
Once we arrived at Werfenweng however I fell in love with the place. Cute ski chalets, a quiet ski resort, and lovely big baby-slopes (photo below). I had never skiied before and was surprisingly not like Bambi, but managed to actually ski. In amateur fashion of course, but what matters is I was on my feet not my bottom. I absolutely loved the baby-slopes, but when it was time to move on to a steeper slope, I found this way too steep. Nothing in-between.
Big Fat Tourist 