Thanks for reading my short blog from my trip to Samsun in Turkey. This was my first time in Turkey, with Samsun being a city on the northern coast against the Black Sea. The City has a population of 700,000, that increases to 1.35 million when expanded to the Samsun province. Quite a large place for somewhere I never heard of before… Nowhere near Istanbul and the southern coast housing popular holiday destinations for Brits such as Marmaris, Antalya and Bodrum.

Introduction

For recent posts I use a linear write up template that provides information of flights/accommodation, getting around, costs, what I did and didn’t do. I’m not going to do that here, as let’s be honest, likely viewers are never going to go themselves. Therefore, I’ll mix everything up or leave stuff out altogether.

Day Zero – Armenia home

It was a hectic start to the duo of games that will stretch four days. After finishing work on a Friday, the sun was shining in Cardiff and it was a sellout crowd expecting Wales to continue our decent start with the ultimate goal to reach Euro 2024 in Germany next summer.

We lost 4-2, convincingly, to a team 70+ places below us in the world rankings. I’ve thought of a few words to describe the result, perhaps sobering, a wake-up call, but I’m going to stick with embarrassing. Armenia played well but they should not have been allowed to.

Hope suddenly turned to dread playing a much better team in Turkey the other side of the weekend. On the plane over one bloke said “welcome to hell” (referring to the stadium atmosphere I hope). I laughed this off, as he’d obviously never been to Cambrian Road in Newport on a Friday night.

Escaping the stadium as soon as we could, I was lucky to get back to Newport at 10:30pm for a few hours kip before the trip tomorrow.

Day One – Travel to Samsun

Bloody Stansted! As usual for football away trips I went with my friend Peter who was happy to drive for the first leg. Leaving at 6am we arrived at one of my lesser favoured airports in time for our flight to Istanbul. Stansted has a really good airport lounge (and a Spoons) but given that a lot of the crowd were off on proper holidays and the £30 lounge fee, I came prepared with sandwiches. Baggage control is more depressing than a Tory party conference.

The flight to Istanbul (SAW airport not IST) took around four hours. Istanbul was very busy, security had horrible queues, but once in departures there was plenty of cheap food outlets, seating and smoking area. Lucky, as our flight was ultimately delayed by 3 hours (£350 compensation pending I hope), meaning we spent 5 hours altogether here.

We didn’t get to Samsun until just before midnight. And it was absolutely pissing down. Only Wales could play Turkey in June, with the weather worse than back home!

We stayed in a Hampton by Hilton hotel, out of the city but close to the stadium and airport. The hotel was as expected for a 4*. What initially was meant to be a quick £3 beer turned in to over half a dozen talking to strangers-turned-friends, Tim and Tom. Bed at 5am local time. A long 21 hour day with an hour nap!

Day Two – Exploring Samsun

Believe me when I say that I tried A LOT to find some touristy stuff to do for our 2 days, with poor results. The top of one “things to do” lists started with a museum on an non-extravegant boat, followed by a hike/lake miles out of the area with no day trip coaches, and a statue of a bloke on a horse (commemorating Turkish independence).

Not a lot to go on. Undeterred, we headed to a beachside bar that was going to host the Wales pre-match party. This trip took up to half and hour, yet the taxi fare was only £6 to my delight.

Too early for a beer, we chose a coffee shop instead overlooking the sand and sea. Most shops and cafés don’t sell booze, being a Muslim country. Afterwards we tried to work out the tram system that does not appear on Google Maps. The hotel didn’t tell us this was an option either. The tram cost £0.34 one ride, has only one back-and-forth route for simplicity and got us within a 15 minute walk of our hotel, following a pitstop in Samsun Central for a walk along the parks, another independence monument (pic above) and seafront before lunch.

The nearest tram stop to the hotel was fun. Dropped off in the middle of nowhere among farm animals, trying to find and then access our large building, avoiding a noisy and fast 6 lane road.

Later in the evening we headed back to the beach intending to have a few beers now the Red Wall (name for Wales fans) were in full voice. After a single double-vodka I could tell I wasn’t feeling the blaring music coming from the bars, agreeing to go for some really nice food in a fish restaurant. I’m not a foodie but Pete really liked it. I was happy I tried anchovies for the first time, as well as the total cost of £61. The same back home would be easily double that given food quality and location. We got a taxi home, managing just the one beer before bed.

Day Three – More Samsun and Matchday

A huge reason why I didn’t fancy a session last night was because I wanted a swim in the sea. I like swimming, I don’t do it enough, and it was something I’m pleased to say I did. It was supposed to be thunderstorms all weekend but it was another day of hot sun leaving the hotel around 6am for the 30 minute drive.

The beach was completely deserted thankfully. The sand was free of rubbish, water cleaner than expected and I had a real relaxing hour contemplating what my usual Monday mornings are like. Back in time for breakfast, feeling very Carpe Diem.

Another bonus of exploring the tram line yesterday was that we found a few other bits to do, namely a cable car located between the city centre and beach area.

The cable car wasn’t much to write home about and only a small ascend, although once we got to the top paying £0.27 for the privilege, there was a nice viewpoint and cafe where we stopped for a Fanta. Nothing says sunny plus holiday more than a bloody Fanta.

Back on lower ground, we had a walk around another park area with a cool statue of an Amazonian warrior between two Lions. Apparently a tribe used to reside here many moons ago. Bit far innit? Lunch was a small backstreet greek restaurant off the tourist route. Unsurprisingly we were the only foreigners here, but we we’re spoilt with a kebab lunch that cost just £11 for two, including sides and drinks. I felt guilty paying so little. The kebab tasted like in the UK, why wouldn’t it, but made more presentable and not a ripoff.

Back at the hotel, 6 hours to kick-off, I had to seriously consider my initial plan of yet another cross-city travel to the beach/bars pre-match, knowing it would be far away from the ground, loud and busy (FML I’m a sad boring old man).

Still, after a needed hour kip, I enjoyed four or five beers before getting the short taxi to the ground, the 17 May Stadium. Home of Samsungspor, champions of Turkey’s second division a few weeks prior.

There was a healthy atmosphere outside the ground. Getting in was fine, passing no less than 3 bag and body searches. Nowadays it is not often I visit larger grounds, so I liked being high up in a netted corner with most of the other 1,300 contingent. That’s a lot of people, spending lots of money, going somewhere completely random, to watch 90 minutes of football.

…. And what a fucking shambles of a performance we were treated to, losing 2-0 without providing acceptable competition. It didn’t help we had Joe Morrell sent off in the first half. Not to mention Turkey also had a penalty saved and 2 goals cancelled by VAR.

We cannot attack let alone score. The players bottle it rarely playing to potential, manager tactics for either plan A or nonexistent plan B are shit. I’m not going to talk much about my opinions as I find it hard to articulate myself. It is however, hopefully the last game our manager Rob Page will be in charge of. I’m writing this early on Day Four, so I hope he’s gone before our next game in the Autumn, we’ll see.

The Turkish provided a terrific atmosphere. Even their stupid phone torch light show bollocks didn’t wind me up (that much).

Getting back from the ground was a challenge. There were free buses put on for the majority who wanted to go in to town, but we were only a 10 minute ride away. We got kept in the ground for 45 minutes after the game. By now the trams were no longer running and we would never have been able to book a taxi given the traffic.

After some perambulation, we decided to walk 40 minutes back. We were confident that the route was safe but quickly changed for a shorter route, walking along a slippy hard shoulder against 70mph incoming traffic, with only a phone torch and a white bucket hat to help us be seen by countless lorries. I was disappointed at this lack of judgement (stupid fucking thing to do). We both have been to enough places to know better. I felt very selfish towards my fiancé who was nice enough to finance some of the trip for my birthday.

Thankfully, we got back to the hotel safe, had a single beer amongst supporters, rightfully miserable and angry, getting to sleep at 2:30am.

Day Four – Home

I couldn’t believe how tired I was today. It was Tuesday and I don’t think I had over 3 hours sleep in one go since Thursday night. Grateful that our hotel was so far from town, the 5:30am taxi only took 10 minutes to the very very small airport for our transfer to Istanbul.

Not much really to cover from here to home. I did want to mention that I was sat next to ex Cymru footballer and radio pundit Iwan Roberts for both flights. He moved to a spare seat between his colleagues on our long flight to give Peter and I extra room. Such a nice gesture and it was appreciated. Even budget airlines seem VIP when you have a spare seat next to you!

I arrived home in Newport at before 9pm, so just the 18 hours A to B today, with Latvia plans already underway. Thankfully it’s another new country, so I’m not going just for the football. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for visiting! Since my most recent post in date order (Disneyland) I have also finished off Lisbon in February 2022 and Milan in April 2022. You can view that by using the menu above, or scrolling down (for like, forever) if you’re on the homepage.

Overview

Stockholm is the largest and capital city of Sweden, one of a group of countries that make up Scandinavia. Although a member of the EU they keep their own Krona (SEK) currency.

A cool stat early on is that the Stockholm area (archipelago) includes an incredible 24,000 individual islands! The main city area itself has 14 islands of varying sizes so you are never far away from water or a bridge!

What is Sweden famous for? Having given this zero thought, off the top of my head I’m going with IKEA, ABBA, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Vikings. Sweden also ranks amongst the happiest places to live in the world. A fun fact that regularly pops up on my Duolingo lessons is that the most common language learnt by people in Sweden is actually Swedish, mainly because of the amount of refugees taken in. 90 percent of Swedes can speak English.

Stockholm is only a 2-3 hour flight from the UK and also on popular European ferry routes. It borders Finland and Norway. Like these countries, Sweden is sparsely populated in difficult terrain especially in winter. Around 10% of the 10 million population lives in the capital.

ANOTHER fun fact (fucking hell three already) is that although Denmark doesn’t have a land border with Sweden, you can reach it by a road bridge! Where else can you say that? Let’s make a start else your heads going to explode with all this overwhelming information.

Ok just one more… Depending on when you visit will greatly affect not just the weather but also the amount of sunshine. Visiting in May meant we had sun from 4am to 10pm and even overnight it was never completely dark. In contrast, winter has very little time before sunrise and sunset, although it’s a little far south to miss out on sunlight altogether, unlike northern parts of Scandinavia. Luckily for our week, the sun was shining every day without any rain, but it does get breezy by the waterfront.

Flights and Accommodation

We flew from Birmingham with RyanAir that was incredibly cheap at £67 return. We did have a bit of a balls-up with the luggage that added a few quid on but that was our fault and not RyanAir squeezing every possible penny out of you after buying the airfare as per.

For the first time we booked an apartment instead of a hotel. We will definitely consider it again! The “ApartDirect Hammarby” was a great introduction getting used to the extra space.

The rooms were supplied with bed, kitchenette, living area (all in one room) with a separate bathroom including a washing machine. We booked the apartment first before considering the potential savings on breakfast. Our luck was in as there is a Lidl within a four minute walk.

This saved us money every day for breakfast that we would easily pay £20 per day in a hotel. We spent about £70 at the supermarket in total, although this included two Strawberry punnets at £7 each… Oops my currency conversation was not strong in that instance!

Getting Around

Bus, tram, metro, train and boat are all provided by SL and included in a travel card. For 7 days this cost us just £30, a bargain!

Transport is frequent, on time, safe, clean and easy to understand. Google maps worked really well integrating timetables. Boats are less frequent, like one every 30 minutes. We only caught one for novelty value, other times we never considered them to be time saving.

There are several ways to get to the airport. It was sad to know on arrival that the Express train was not in service due to it derailing, I think only two were injured which sounded like a miracle.

In addition to the express train, you can also catch the normal train, several coaches or obviously a taxi. We decided to use a Flixbus and cost just £10 arriving and £6 on the way back. Flixbus are kinda’ the European version of National Express, they have recently started operating in the UK too.

It took 30-40 minutes on the coach from airport to the central bus station, also part of the central train station. The coach was to eventually end up in Hamburg, Germany, so try not to nod off…

Costs

Our trip went from Sunday evening to late Friday evening. Flights were only £67 per person return and the apartment came in at £320 for 5 nights. We struggled to find a decent hotel for this price and considering we had kitchen facilities, and how nice the room and area was, I consider it very good value.

Travel costs covered above for public transport. The only Uber we caught was £8 for a 6.5km trip at midnight, so that wasn’t bad. When we travelled out of Stockholm, to Uppsala, we needed to buy an add-on to our travel pass that was £8 each.

Food will be expensive unless you stick to street vendors and fast food like we did (outside our apartment). A McDonald’s meal is around £7-9. We did enjoy a Max Burgers, similar to McDonald’s. One night we did have a Chinese in a restaurant. Two dishes, two drinks and a spring roll came to £32. There are a lot of Asian cuisine places that do an all you can eat buffet for around £25 each so that could be an option of you need filling. I didn’t have a beer but prices seems to be cheaper than expected, £6 in the hotspots, £4-5 elsewhere.

Hmmm what else… A bottle of coke will set you back around £2.50, bread £2, milk £1.50… in general grocery shopping is more expensive than in the UK. We didn’t buy too much else.

The museums and attractions we visited were priced between £10 to £25 per person. I didn’t have a problem with that.

We spent roughly £700 whilst there, meaning the trip total was around £1,150 for two people. This could have been trimmed a bit without luggage fees and sensible supermarket purchases, or eating at the apartment more instead of fast food.

What we didn’t do…

Early on in the trip I was worried about how big this section would be, as the size of Stockholm can be a bit overwhelming. Thankfully I write this without any regrets of missing out. I would have liked to have caught an ice hockey game, but no dice. And by dice, I mean fixtures.

Stockholm has a plethora of museums, so of course we didn’t visit them all, the thought alone fucking terrifies me. The ones that stick out (we missed) are the Nordic History Museum, Fotografiska photography museum and Skansen that is a outdoor museum similar to St Fagans in Wales. We visited the other good ones I hope!

There are bloody loads of churches to visit is that’s your thing. There are lots of boat tours where you can explore the city from a different viewpoint, you can even kayak! I would have liked to explore the Djurgarden island in more detail, this area is where the museums and theme park is but the rest of it looks like a huge park.

Additional day trips could be made to Birka, Sigtuna or Vaxholm. I’d be surprised if these would be better than our visit to Uppsala.

Our hotel was also over the road from a ski centre. Although it operates as a grass slope in summer I’m sure it would be better to go in winter.

Itinerary

Day One – Gamla Stan, Royal Palace & Avicii Arena

Technically our journey started on Sunday afternoon so we’ll call that day zero. We arrived at the airport at 10pm and got to our apartment around midnight after our FlixBus and Uber combo.

Waking up a little later than planned on the Monday, we first popped to Lidl to pick up some breakfast for the week. Once packed away and cereal consumed, we headed out.

Not really knowing where to go first, we decided to go to the tourist central, an island called Gamla Stan. The ‘old town’ was fascinating and similar to other European cities with its narrow cobbled streets, quirky boutiques and countless cafe’s.

On the tram here we figured that the Royal Palace in Gamla Stan had their daily changing of the guard at 12:15pm, so that was really good timing. We enjoyed the parade for about 20 minutes in the sunshine. I say enjoy, without wanting to offend, it does all seem a bit daft to me. However, it attracted a big crowd who I’m sure enjoyed the pompousness of it.

It was a short walk from here past an obelisk tribute to King Gustav III and down to the waterfront. You could walk for eternity around the circumference of land with the aid of the odd bridge. We will visit Gamla Stan again later on.

Although we didn’t have a set plan for the week, we did want to do things as soon as we could, just to be safe as we’d expect to find loads of other things we would want to explore whilst here. Therefore, our next stop was slightly south of the centre to a large entertainment complex. This area includes restaurants, a shopping centre, the 30,000 seater Tele2 Arena and the Avicii arena formally known the Stockholm Globe Area prior to the musicians untimely death in 2018.

The Avicii Arena is cool as its the world’s biggest spherical building! It can house a multitude of events such as concerts and is home to two ice hockey teams. For us though, we were interested in the ‘SkyView’ lift that would take us up the outside of the building for the best views over Stockholm.

I appreciated how the platform was able to go scale the curved shape whilst still keeping the walking platform flat. This remains an enigma now. It wasn’t something I achieved whilst playing with Lego.

From the top you had a view of the main centre albeit not really suitable for good photos. I did take the opportunity to have a photo with the football stadium in the background (Sweden v Wales would be a great trip if you have deep pockets).

From here we continued to have a brief look closer to the stadium before getting the tram back to the hotel for some lunch and I’d be lying if I didn’t say a quick snooze.

We really didn’t do a lot else on the first day. I did spend some time trying to organise the rest of the week, which meant booking a few things. We had a nice stroll around the local neighbourhood before going for a Chinese nearby and an early night.

Day Two – Boat tour, Djurgarden & Vasa Ship Museum

I think one of the must do’s in Stockholm would be to take a boat tour to explore the archipelago. There are a few day trips worthy but the most popular one seemed to be a three hour cruise to Vaxholm and straight back.

The tour, provided by Strommer was £30 each and left at 10:30am. This gave us plenty of time to find out where it left (harder than it sounds with hundreds of boats waterside!). We got there early, so I was a bit miffed when I noticed I’d been in the wrong queue. Thankfully, we found a seat outside to get the best out of the view. Half an hour in to the trip we had 3 blankets between us so dress warmly for this. The folk inside who didn’t brave the breeze, either had a posh meal (with limited view of the whole point of going on the boat??) or downstairs looking through small windows.

The tour provided running commentary of sights on the way, such as museums, the theme park, several embassy’s of other countries, the worlds most efficient water sewerage system (y’know, the usual) which was less frequent the further we sailed. Still, it was pleasant to see all of the summer houses on small islands that looked like something from a Disney movie. Many of these houses are only used in the summer due to their lack of insulation and access issues as the narrower areas can freeze over.

Just after an hour we arrived at Vaxholm to drop a few passengers off who were locals or wanted to stay for a few hours. There didn’t seem much to see there apart from the Vaxholm Fortress. The fortress didn’t really get a good review. Built to provide a defence for attacking ships, over time enemies weaponry became more powerful and easily penetrated the building. That, and the gap became too small for a lot of vessels and they just chose another route instead! I agree that it is better served as a house for the museum as it currently is today.

Once back in Stockholm, we visited Djurgaden , a large island of mainly park, woodland and the aforementioned theme park, museums and embassy’s.

Museum-wise, you really are spoilt for choice here. Vasa ship museum, Nordic (cultral history) museum, Viking history museum, Skansen open air museum, the ABBA museum, an alcohol museum, the ‘museum of wrecks’, a diving museum, Liljevechs art exhibition… and probably more but I’m fed up of listing them now.

We did try (note: try) to have an e-scoot around the island first but as a lot of the cycle paths ran alongside roads I don’t think Mikayla got over 2kmph before we gave it up as bad idea.

Instead we chose a museum over an ice-cream lunch, which was an effort for me as I am hard to please with these things (museums not ice cream) – and decided on the Vasa Museum which topped a lot of lists we reviewed.

The Vasa Museum is dedicated to the Vasa warship that was built in 1928, only to sink just 1.3 kilometers in to her maiden voyage. What is deserving of the ship to have such a museum, is that the ship was raised after 333 years, the biggest effort to lift such a large vessel and bloody hell is it well preserved.

The museum spans four floors and only at the bottom can you truly get a grasp of how big the bloody thing is. I thought the museum gave easy to understand information about it’s subject, but I was confused by the fact that there is no real direction to follow.

That was enough for us for day two, apart from tea at a Max Burger joint – better than McDonald’s I must say!

It came to me before bed that night… We spent the day visiting a castle that couldn’t defend itself and a ship that couldn’t float! A win for celebrating disappointment!

Day Three – Uppsala, City Hall and Sunset

We do like a day trip somewhere when going somewhere for 3+ days and on this occasion, we chose Uppsala. I cannot get my head around that it’s the fourth biggest city in Sweden (Gothenburg and Malmo are 2 and 3) as it appeared very small, especially the centre, yet Wikipedia tells me there are over 177,000 people living there.

Uppsala was very quiet and peaceful when we visited. It is located 70km north of Stockholm, so about a 40-minute train ride.

There were a few sights we wanted to see on our short trip, which started off with Uppsala castle. We didn’t want to investigate this too much but it provided a good view of the area and had some nice gardens surrounding the area.

Uppsala University, more specifically the Carolina Rediviva library up next, practically next door to the castle. The university itself is the oldest centre of higher education in Scandinavia. The library was rather modern inside and busy with students. I don’t know why but I was thinking of something like the Trinity College in Dublin!

The library did have a small exhibition though. The centrepiece of this was definitely The Codex Argenteus or ‘silver bible’, originally containing 4th-century translation of the Christian Bible in Gothic language. Quite fascinating.

Next and our final stop before lunch was the Uppsala Cathedral, again a short walk away. Apparently, the style of the church is French Gothic. I’m going to put my own style on the building and call it ‘nice’. I liked the look of the brick and the symmetry of the building, that did look domineering with its two spires. The cathedral is the tallest church building in Scandinavia.

You should already be aware I am not the slightest bit interested in most religious aspects of religious buildings, although it was hard not to appreciate the architecture inside.

Lunch was rudely interrupted by a flock of birds swiping a portion of my fries…. But I’ve told myself not to return to that tragic event. By the time we got back to Stockholm we had time to enjoy a few hours walking around by the central station and City Hall.

For the sunset, we travelled slightly off the beaten track to a place called Skinnarviksberget. I found out about here on a small travel blog I’ve since been unable to relocate. On top of the rocks that we’re tricky and a bit unsafe to ascend we enjoyed the sunset at 9:45.

The photo below with the air balloon in the background is a personal favourite of the trip! Now experts on the buses and metro we were home in no time to watch most of the Europa League final on the tele (i.e. Kay went to bed).

Day Four – Nobel Prize museum, Abba museum and Grona Lund

Another sunny morning for our last full day around Stockholm. We did initially consider a £70pp boat trip to a place called Birka, where you can experience the ‘old way of life’ in Sweden, but with costs starting to be of slight concern and time we decided to look at alternatives on our doorstep.

One thing Mikayla fancied was the Nobel Prize Museum, so with nothing better to do we headed back to Gamla Stan.

The museum is located in a popular square yet there was very little queue for the 10am opening. We paid for our admission and was offered a free audio guide starting at 10:15am. The below photo shows a track featuring all previous winners, hundreds of them, that slowly circle the room of the museum. I found this a little pointless as you cannot read the text and it would take hours to complete a full cycle. Luckily the screens dotted around are much more convenient.

The audio guide was really good, presented by a gentlemen that obviously knew what he was talking about and shown interest in the subject. The guide was only 30 minutes long, which I appreciated, and covered the history of Alfred Nobel, the six prize categories, how you get nominated for a prize and the award ceremony.

The exhibits were limited due to the size of the museum – again I didn’t mind this! – but did show a few designs that were well-known or fascinating if not both.

The tour ended letting us browse through the computerised registers with some displays such as the transistor radio, the first form of penicillin, a piece of the berlin wall, an armband from the Red Cross in WW1, as well as more sensitive items such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, the Euro (plus the EU itself) and invention of plastic.

I did think of how I could one day win the prize. Apart from services to alcohol consumption on Wales away games I couldn’t think of much, even then I’m not sure if that would fit in to a category of Literature, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Economic Services or Peace…

Leaving the museum we had some time to kill as our tickets to a theme park were not until 4pm in the afternoon. We took a pleasant walk from Gamla Stan to a small island housing Parliament (Riksdagshuset) to a garden Kungsträdgården before going underground to go back to our apartment for lunch, a £3 ready meal from Lidl!

Something else I should pick up on here that populated a few ‘things to do’ lists I came across, was simply to visit multiple tube stations as so many have artistic interiors and could be seen as art galleries in their own right. Personally we didn’t seek these, but the ones we came by including the above in the Kungsträdgården metro station was a lot more pleasing than the usual theatre posters and endless tiling.

Our break for lunch was short and sweet as we finally decided to visit the ABBA museum before the theme park, primarily to take some photos to show the mother as the band has been around or a large part of her life. I’ve also bagged a few birthday gifts for her from the shop so I hope she’ll miss this sentence when she is forced to read it!

A bit pricey at £25 each but just about good value. As with many other museums the exhibits were neatly organised in a small area and you couldn’t go anywhere without songs playing, supporting their motto “come in walking, leave dancing”.

I’m not the biggest fan of ABBA myself, so I was happy to learn about the formation from the band, their rise to stardom singing Waterloo to win the 1974 Eurovision song contest, their many years of fame and ultimate separation.

One piece that did stand out was the below picture providing the words for Chiquitita. Before paying attention to the lyrics and accompanying text from Bjorn, I never noticed how powerful the message is contained in the song. Already one of my favourite ABBA tracks, I think this escalated it to the top and get’s Chrissy’s coveted ‘banger’ label.

Right then, let’s get to the theme park stuff!

I’ll say from the start I’m trying not to over-write about this place. “Gröna Lund” is a theme park in the same area as the collection of museums including ABBA so it was only a few minutes walk here. I think the park only opened for summer maybe the week before so it was very busy with adolescents giddy and hyper on sweets (or weed and cheap cider, who knows).

What I found most fascinating about the park was that it is in SUCH a small perimeter, guessing the size of six football pitches? And in this small space, you have loads of rides, stalls, food outlets. The picture above shows FOUR rides that all were very good. The rollercoasters intertwined that well, it would make the wires at the back of your TV jealous.

For £25 an adult, the park allows entry, unlimited rides and two ‘fast-passes’. We didn’t spend a krona above the entry fee, but did notice the prices were very reasonable for refreshments (relate back to my shit €16 pizza in Disney).

I’m also going to sound over-excited about the quality of the rides. Although I only went on five, had I had free reign or be arsed to queue a little there were at least 10 rides I would have enjoyed. After much deliberation I honestly can’t think of ten at Disneyland.

First up was ‘JetLine’ using my pass, a good coaster without any loops but very pleasing for starters. With people still piling in to the park I decided to join a short queue for the “big-fucking-swingy-thing” ride called Eclipse. I’ve been on these types of rides before in Chessington and Prata Wien (Vienna) but this was the tallest. Cue questionable looks at the four thin chains that was going to support me.

No. I wasn’t allowed to have my phone on me during the ride.

Yes. I was willing to sacrifice the phone, other peoples safety and a potential telling off to provide you with the best possible coverage of my trips.

Weeeeeeee…

Back down to Earth (device in hand) I next tried the “fucking-weird-looking-spinny-thing” coaster called Insane.

Now rides rarely properly ‘scare’ me, I’m not exactly gonna die am I? But jeez this one took it out of me! Simply following the track would be an ordeal itself, but you’re actually going along the track in a spinning bloody ninja shuriken. That and the fact I had to remove my hoodie just to fit on the the ride, I wobbled off just happy I hadn’t given birth to my intestines. Bravo. I haven’t been on millions of rides, but I think that’s my favourite for uniqueness.

The penultimate ride was the “fucking-high-free-fall-droppy-pole-thing” called Ikaros, seen on the right of picture. By the time I got fastened in (just about) and going up, I was just getting over the last ride. Once at the top of this, the ride was considerate enough not just to drop you down, but to first place you flat facing the ground. And go. People my size really shouldn’t be plummeting towards ground level at 90kmph, glorified seatbelt or not.

The final ride, “the-one-with-fucking-loads-of-twisty-loopy-bits” called Monster, I think is quite new and probably the fan favourite. Using our last fastpass I waited no more than five minutes. Not much in the way of photos of that, sorry I was too busy enjoying myself. A list of all rides can be found here.

We could have stayed for a few more hours, had dinner, queued up for other rides but I was more than satisfied. I did intend that night to make a start on this blog but blame Harry Potter being put on Netflix. We did however catch the public SL boat on the way home…. really wasn’t very time saving, but its a boat, on holiday.

Day Five – Wandering before home

Our flight home wasn’t actually until 11pm today so we did have a full day had we needed it. The luggage was a bit of a pain…. we could either leave it in the hotel, unsecured, away from the centre or pay up to £30 to store it at the central station. I wasn’t pay the equivalent of ten pints for that.

As luck would have it today was the earliest and freshest I had awoken, and given our disastrous attempt at getting Kay on a scooter earlier in the trip, I decided to leave her be and go for a ride for an hour.

We didn’t really do much on the Sodermalm island throughout the week so I followed the cycle paths along the waterways to Fotografiska, a place with several art exhibitions that is included on a lot of to-do lists, but not for us.

I was up two of those bloody plinths 12 hours prior….

Choosing a different route back, it did confirm what a pleasant area Stockholm is. Many places have a serious lack of affordable housing but I noticed the City is particularly difficult to reside in for work or study without rich Mummy and Daddy.

Bags packed, homemade beans on toast for breakfast and confirming we had checked out, we caught the tram for what felt like the 50th time in to the centre with no real plan.

After picking up our souvenir (Christmas tree decoration as is common practice for us) in Gamla Stan we headed back to the Royal Palace on to the Nobel museum, simply to take a photo of two buildings that appear to be ‘the photo you have to take’. Expensive cafe’s? OK. Done though.

Another walk past the parliament building, we found this small restaurant called “McDonald’s” for lunch* and headed to our last minute thing to do, the Swedish History Museum.

*The only reason we had McDonald’s was because we hadn’t had one already, like it may be some form of achievement or world record in years to come! The spicy nuggets with Korean BBQ sauce though! Delish.

Anyway, the museum. It was OK. It had areas for the prehistories, Viking era, a timeline of Swedish history, medieval art and a ‘gold room’.

By now, I’ll be honest and say I was a bit museum-ed out. Thankfully the tour came with a free audio guide so I was able to slowly wander around and listen rather than read every little plaque.

The gold room was the thing I was looking forward to the most so we left that room until last. I can tell you that it housed 52 kilograms of gold and 200kg of silver, but a lot of that was jewellery, coins and scraps (this is why I’ll never get a job as a museum guide folks).

A journey allllll the way back to the apartment to collect our bags, then allllll the way back to the centre to catch our FlixBus, before we knew it we were through security waiting for our plane. Worth noting the airport shops etc shut around 8pm. You’re left with a toilet and a water fountain, not to be confused with each other.

Thanks for reading!

For our first trip of 2023, we were spoilt with a trip to Disneyland Paris with Mikayla’s family. Writing this now, I realise how much of a good time I had, even though at the time I may not have fully noticed. Disney has this aura where you can shut yourself off from the outside world. It’s not magic, but it’s close.

This write-up will be a bit different to usual. A big difference is the lack of costs, as we were fortunate enough for Mikayla’s father to fund most of the trip including minibus hire, Euro Tunnel, hotel and park tickets as part of a Christmas gift for us all. As it was such a generous offer, I am not going to investigate likely costs.

If you haven’t been before and thinking of going, you may wish to have a look at an interactive version of the resort map which may help you understand me. In addition to the main Disneyland park, there are the Disney Studios (a theme park in it’s own right), a Disney Village housing shops and food outlets, and a vast area to house their hotels, train station, parking etcetera.

Getting there

We were a gang of eight making the drive from Newport to the Parisian outskirts, including a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old. The decision to hire an 8-seater minibus was a superb one. The back of the bus even had room for a small table that made lunchtime a LOT easier. I forgot the name of the vehicle but (without having to drive) it felt rather luxurious.

This trip was also my first time using the EuroTunnel. This was much quicker than I expected at around 45 minutes. You are in separated carriages housing about 5-6 cars. There are no refreshments or smoking areas but there are toilets at either end of the train (god know how long that could be to walk!).

Accomodation

We had booked one of the Disney “Cars” themed on-site hotels called the Sante Fe. The resort has several hotels ranging from 2 to 5 stars. Our 2-star option was perfectly adequate and great for the kids. I especially appreciated the 20-minute walk to the park in the mornings, a safe walk along the tree-lined river spotting the odd Koi Carp (I think) until you reach the Disney Village.

You can stay outside the park in the small villages. Weigh up cost vs convenience.

Sundry costs

In terms of costs whilst you are at the park, they are in line with what you would expect (i.e. not cheap!). For a decent meal combo in the park you are looking at €15-17…. Snacks, hot and soft drinks on their own around €4.

I did have breakfast in the hotel on two days at a cringeworthy €21. The breakfast was all you can eat, had a really good range of hot and cold offerings, but I don’t tend to eat a lot in the morning and therefore was always going to feel I didn’t get my moneys worth. Definitely worth sneakily prepping some rolls, pastries and fruit so at least you can feed yourself for lunch to. In fact, if you are able to smuggle a decent amount away, the price doesn’t seem that bad for two meals.

The food in the park ranges vastly in terms of value for money. The one night we had a mediocre Mickey Mouse shaped pizza with dry garlic bread, whereas the next day we had ribs, chicken portion, sausage and chips for the same price. To be fair, the latter I actually thought was decent value bearing in mind it came with drink. That place was Cowboy Cookout Barbecue in Frontierland.

We had two vegans’ in the group and they did have to suffice with very limit options. Non-meat eaters with big appetites may struggle.

You ARE allowed to bring your own food and drink to the resort. This potentially could save you a LOT of money. Be aware that your hotel may not have refrigeration facilities and supermarkets in France can be more expensive than we are used to in the UK.

It was a bit disappointing that fountains providing free drinking water are closed over colder months, with no alternative available.

The parks and rides

The main park is split up in to several areas and the attractions are linked with the lands. Discovery land has a space theme incorporating Star Wars and Buzz Lightyear. Fantasy land is suitable for the younger children with Dumbo, Alice and Wonderland and Peter Pan. Frontierland and Adventureland I thought were quite similar, with decent rides named after Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean. Something for everyone.

Each area has plenty of small rides, shops, photo ops with characters, food outlets and restrooms (and smoking areas). In the middle of all of this is Cinderella’s castle, an impressive structure that is home to the evening light show and fireworks.

The Disney Studios is similar but smaller, maybe a bit more fun for older children and adults considering a lot of the area is dedicated to Marvel. When I last visited some 25 years ago, I don’t know if Disney Studios even existed, but I’m sure we didn’t go there. I seen a plan for future development for this area and if it looks anything like the pictures, that itself will be another reason to go!

I was going to rate each of the big rides, but now can’t be arsed, so I’ll say Thunder Mountain was my favourite, although a special mention for the new Marvel Flight Force due to being a good ride without long queues.

TIP: Although we thought we went at a quieter time of year, some of the queues were a nightmare; 1 to 2 hours at peak times. If you are going just for the day, I would seriously consider investing in a fast pass that allows you a queue jump for each of the big rides once. They cost an extra £100 or so – which is bollocks – but you don’t want to be spending over half your day in a queue for a few 2-minute rides.

Aside from the rides there are loads of shows and interactive stuff. We didn’t see any shows but we did enjoy a relaxing half hour drawing session with a Disney Artist. My Mickey Mouse attempt looked as though the poor bugger has just got back from a weekend on the beer with me. I’ll stick to Photoshop.

Anything else?

Nah, not really. Everyone’s trip will be unique and I’m not going to tell you how you should enjoy your stay. The best suggestion I can give is to go for 2 or more days.

I’ll just dump the rest of my photos…

Thanks for reading.

I was lucky enough to visit Brussels for the penultimate Wales Nations League game of the campaign. This was a very short trip, and I don’t think I would have considered a post, if not for the fact that I would forget I had even went in a year or so!

We only had one night and less than 24 in Belgium’s capital city, but remarkably this was longer than my previous visit… a 23-hour day trip back in 2018! However, we did all of the touristy stuff on that trip, so please check that out here: Sprouting up in Brussels, August 2018.

We had an early start catching the National Express to London before getting to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar. Thank goodness it was an early start, as I forgot my bloody ‘important’ bag (I have NEVER done this before!!) which meant my poor mother, giving me a lift at 3am, had to rush back home 5 miles, then back in to town! One this rare occasion, the coach was a little late and I even had a time for a ciggy to relax before boarding.

Thankfully for Peter’s ticker at least, the rest of the journey was at a relaxed pace. We checked in to our hotel, actually inside the EuroStar train station and had a walk into town, a good 30-minute walk.

Once we collected our match tickets and arrived at the main square “Grand Place” we had an expensive beer, enjoyed the sunshine and let the busy tourists hurrying by get on with it.

Hydrated, I moved on to the designated Welsh Fans area a few minutes away. It was a glorious few hours before kick off with sunshine, banger after banger bellowing out from the speakers and plenty of beers purchased from the supermarket down the road, to avoid being taken advantage of by the Irish bar charging £7 a time. I remember there was an article in the Belgian press bigging us up as we all cleaned up litter after ourselves before the game, but it is worth mentioning the sizeable police presence should be commended for their hands off approach, letting us be a little silly, but not out of hand, leading to absolutely ZERO trouble… again.

The game itself was OK. Belgium went 2-0 up before half time before big Kieffer Moore bundled in a goal to give us hope. We had the Belgians so scared they resorted to timewasting and although we did end up losing 2-1, it was another promising performance, against the best team in the world at the time, before we headed to the World Cup (we won’t mention that.)

After the football, the trip was exiting as going back to the hotel via a kebab shop, ready to catch the 6am train home the next morning. Don’t forget to check the link above for some actual content!

For one of our most memorable trips, and our first exploration of the African continent, I shouldn’t be starting this ten months after our visit, not least because I finally got my arse in gear and became engaged to my fiancée on the trip! One excuse to put off this post was the sheer amount of bloody photo’s taken, 90% of which were of some stone triangles, but I’ve managed to sift through those so I can start writing bollocks.

Overview

Cairo is the capital city of Egypt and is one of the top ten most populated cities in the world, the highest in Africa. It is worth noting early on, that whilst the Pyramids are only a 20-30 minute drive away from Cairo, they are actually based in Giza, itself a city in its own right with a population of around 9 million.

Obviously, Egypt is very hot, so going in the middle of August was a fucking masterplan. The heat was relentless at times, rising up to 35°, you really don’t notice much in the way of shade or breeze.

A lot of people may have been to Egypt for all inclusive stays at resorts such as Sharm El Sheikh. Many of these resorts are located on the red sea, bloody ages away from Cairo and the Pyramids, so a visit from these resorts will be 7 hours each way unless you can get a one-hour flight. Just make sure your coach has air conditioning, yeah?

When you think of Egypt you think of the Pyramids (sorry Mo Salah), but there are areas of historical significance throughout the country, mainly near the banks of the River Nile, the longest river in the world.

Flights and Accommodation

We booked the trip using Expedia. We used Expedia for quite a few holidays over the years, but recently I’ve noticed it can be a lot cheaper buying flights (SkyScanner) and accommodation (Booking.com) ourselves. In this case I assume the price was competitive, with some extra peace of mind. The total for British Airways direct flights from London and our hotel were £1,307. I haven’t got the breakdown but I imagine most of this price was for the flight, as I recall the hotel being very, very cheap – £14 a night rings a bell.

The hotel in Giza we used was called the “Pyramids View Inn” and offered an in-room balcony and roof terrace with TERRIFIC views of the Pyramids and Sphinx. We also enjoyed the nightly light show, avoiding the fee to otherwise enter the grounds.

The hotel was great in terms of service and location. Staff were very helpful organising trips and we also had our own driver, Ibrahim, who grabbed us from the airport and took us on day trips. Unfortunately though, our rooms air-con was useless, therefore it was ridiculously hot – unbearable in the evenings. Looking back now I don’t want to make a big deal about this as the positives outweighed this, choosing to remember the bloke who always looked so delighted to serve us breakfast on the roof terrace each morning filling us up with fruit, bread and freshly made falafels.

Giza was rather rough and disappointing outside the pyramid grounds, and further away than expected to Cairo. Bunch that with no air-conditioning, we booked the 4* Safir Hotel for 2 nights during the week in central Cairo. At around £100 per night, we had a sizeable breakfast buffet, a swimming pool and freezing air in the room!

If you visit the pyramids, I highly recommend you base yourself in Cairo and just have a day trip to the wonder of the world.

Getting Around

Cairo itself has a metro system that is currently being expanded to Giza, but at present public transport is very limited. Thankfully, outside of our day in Giza and use of Ibrahim for day trips we only relied on taxis in Cairo. We quickly remembered of this small company called ‘Uber’ who offered a great service in Cairo costing pennies per trip.

Something else important to consider, that doesn’t really fit anywhere else, is your mobile phone usage. O2 or EE offered nothing affordable, so we researched buying a SIM at the airport. There were a few options available and we were satisfied with our Orange SIM costing about £20 for 40gb of data. I think this would last for a month if needed.

Costs

I’ve already covered flights and accommodation. Food can range from dirt cheap to UK prices depending on where at what appeals to tourism. Our Nile Cruise was about 40 quid each and included a great meal, salad buffet, entertainment and hotel transfers. Entrance to the pyramids was £12-13. Crazy.

For our day trips we used the hotel and their driver. The prices on their website were extortionate compared to TripAdvisor and the like, although they were more than happy reducing their prices by over 50% to match. Alexandria drive and tour cost about £80 including a nice meal, the same as our final day dotting around some sights. A free benefit of having our driver meant we were a lot less hassled by locals.

The entrance Visa in to Egypt cost 20USD each. We tried and failed to do this online using the shit website wasting $40, but ultimately you can just walk up to a counter on arrival, pay cash and get the stamp in your passport.

Things We Didn’t Do

As I’ve called this an Egypt trip, I suppose I have to cover the whole bloody country? I’m not going to do that.

Luxor was the obvious omission, but this isn’t really doable even over 2 days given the distance. The big thing to see here are the tombs that make the Valley of Kings.

If you stay on the north coast or Red Sea there are great opportunities for diving. There is endless desert but a lot of areas are dangerous either due to climate or dodgy characters.

A new, likely to be EPIC Egyptian Museum is crawling towards completion, which will be located in Giza. After numerous delays, we were told the opening was expected to be autumn 2022, but 9 months later it still hasn’t been completed. They have however started painstakingly transporting artifacts by road from the existing museum in Cairo. I wouldn’t fancy driving precious cargo that’s 5,000 years old.

Itinerary

Day Zero – Engaged!

We arrived at Cairo airport early afternoon following our 5 hour flight. We were pleased to find our driver after a delay sorting our phones out and made the 40-60 minute drive to our hotel.

The route took us along a flyover through Cairo. I felt unsettled at the amount of people living in half-finished or half-demolished buildings.

Once we arrived in Giza there were no high rise buildings, but were treated to countless camels and horses sharing and shitting all over the road. After a few brow raising side streets we arrived at our hotel on the doorstep on the pyramids main entrance.

Due to my planned evening activities I was pleased that the room was expected, having a small balcony outside our 2nd floor room. After a quick rest and a wash we started getting ready for some food on the rooftop.

I can’t recall what exactly I said to Kay to prompt her to draw the curtain and come outside, but there I was on one knee, 10 years later than I perhaps should have, kneecap under immense pressure, asking the love of my life to be my wife.

She said yes. Obviously. She’d been banging on about it for years! Still, I felt some relief and was a very proud man.

The ring debacle itself deserves a paragraph. I tried to measure her finger a few times whilst asleep before going full fuck-it mode guessing the size. Although I ordered her (our?) ethically sourced diamond well in advance, there was a delay in sending the order. It finally arrived the evening before our trip and by then I already packed my late grandmother’s wedding ring to act as a short term backup. Ultimately it all worked out. She likes the ring more than I thought she would, which makes me smile. And she hasn’t ‘lost’ it yet!

That evening we went upstairs for some photos and food before enjoying the pyramids light up as they do every evening. The show wasn’t much to write about. I would be lying if I hadn’t already chosen my social media post to our social channels… “A wonder of the world… and some pyramids”.

Day One – Giza and The Pyramids

Well it would be rude to not to visit the Giza Plateau first thing, considering the entrance was less than a minute away from our hotel. Energised after breakfast, we arrived as the site opened (I think around 8am) and it wasn’t very busy, although we later knew that there is a separate entrance for the influx of coaches that visit constantly.

The initial incline was assisted by walking past the famous Sphinx. The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human and the body of a lion. It was built around the same time as the pyramids, meaning that it’s incredibly over FOUR AND A HALF THOUSAND YEARS OLD!

You couldn’t get up too close to the lion-man thing, so we proceeded, attracted like a moth to a flame, towards the largest pyramid on site, The Great Pyramid, the only wonder of the world that has remained largely intact. I felt inferior up close to the 138 meter structure, though I didn’t start confirming it is indeed made of over 2 million blocks.

We had a walk around the pyramid, joining the hundreds of day-trippers flowing off their coaches. On one side of the pyramid you could access a chamber for a fee, although my height and width didn’t really feel suitable compared to the size and length of the tunnel. I’m not claustrophobic but I’d hate for the local fire brigade to chop the roof off to get me out!

It was around this area we started getting pestered by the locals trying to make a living, flogging anything from drinks to cheaply made souvenirs. To be honest, this was constant in Giza to the point where it could be quite distressing and off-putting. I’ve had some experience in similar situations but even I became quite frustrated after the 30th approach, going from no thank you, to a firm simple NO, to just ignoring communication attempts.

You do need to be mindful though, that a stone throw away from the Pyramids there are people and families living in poverty, it’s obvious walking around the area. You really cannot blame them for trying to put food on the table.

Anyway, it ultimately wasn’t a big deal, as we toured around the outside of the smaller Pyramid of Khafre and Pyramid of Menkaure. I thought I’d be writing a lot more about such a sight, but you can find out so much more if you want elsewhere. For us, having been in the heat for the morning and our water bottles dehydrated, we slowly headed back to our hotel for some shade before lunch.

Years before I went to Egypt, I remember being astounded by the fact there is a Pizza Hut 30 yards away form the pyramid site! Think about how many pictures you have seen, including mine, and you have been completely oblivious to the fact that if you took a photo of the pyramids from another angle, in the background you would have a huge city clearly in view! Getting such a photo confirmed Pizza Hut as our destination for lunch.

Shamefully after lunch we decided to avoid the peak temperatures in the hotel, whilst I watched the first home game of the Newport County 2022/23 season. There really wasn’t much else to see in Giza. And we lost.

That evening we searched for somewhere to have food and a little exploration of the area. We noticed there was a Marriott hotel about half hour walk away and hoped that there would be somewhere nice for tea there.

Google Maps worked really well getting us to the Marriott, but the streets it took us through certainly showed us the hidden side of Giza. I haven’t been to the favelas in Brazil, but I thought it may be similar. Rooms that I suppose were cafes of some sort had locals who could not stop staring at us in our bright clothing and Panama hats. How could we be so far off the beaten track, ten minutes away from somewhere that is visited by 14 million people a year?!

I wouldn’t say that I ever felt in danger, but it was very uncomfortable. Finally, after about 20 minutes we reached a highway that was close to the hotel, and indeed there was a restaurant nearby where we were treated to a mixed grill, some side plates and some fancy desserts, maybe totalling £30 with drinks. Ignoring the relentless honking of taxis thinking we were lost, we made our way back the way we came (I was full of food and tired at this point) in the darkness, a little more climatised to the onlookers by now.

We arrived at the hotel early enough to arrange a day trip tomorrow. We had another four nights so we really needed some things to do outside Giza, aiming to stay as little as possible hear outside the normal-ness of our hotel.

Day Two – Alexandria day trip

Alexandria is the second largest city in Egypt and the largest on the Mediterranean. By road it takes around 2.5 hours, there are no trains.

Thankfully we had our hotel Driver – Ibrahim – and his old but reliable car to show us around. There wasn’t much to share in regards to the drip along the ‘Cairo-Alexandria Desert Road’, although Ibrahim did mention a prison whilst passing. I have scoured Google Maps trying to find this, and if it’s the aerial view of the “Correctional and Rehabilitation Complex in Wadi El Natroun” as I think it is, it looks more like a suburb in Desperate Housewives than a prison complex in the middle of the desert!

Anyway, we got to Alexandria. This is why I should either be writing notes or writing the blog sooner than 12 months after our visit, as remembering the names or locating the sites on a map is going to be tricky….

Our first stop was the Catacombs of Kom El Shoqafa, easy enough to recall.  Here was a small site, football-pitch size, with a few stones on exhibition that led to a circular stairway to view the catacombs themselves. Now you’ll need to research more yourself for the history lesson, but I will tell you that the tombs were only re-discovered in 1900 when a donkey fell in to an access shaft!

Considering the site is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages, you could feel a bit underwhelmed. However, remember we were ar the Great Pyramids the day before, so forgive me for making comparisons.

After a short drive through the busy city streets we next headed to…

… *fucking hell why didn’t I take a photo of a sign…*

… *gives up and Google’s things to do in Alexandria….*

The Serapeum of Alexandria. Yeah that’s it. The Serapeum was the largest and most prestigious of all temples in the Greek quarter of Alexandria.

The Serapeum was built in the 2nd century BC during the reign of the Egyptian king Ptolemy II. It was a symbol of the power and wealth of the Ptolemaic dynasty. The temple was decorated with many statues and reliefs, providing valuable insight into ancient Egypt’s history and culture.

The main sight here within this ancient Greek temple is the Victory Pillar, erected in 297 AD (AD unofficially meaning after baby Jesus).

The Serapeum was one of the most important temples of the ancient world. The Romans destroyed it, but its ruins are a reminder of the lost civilization of the Egyptians. I pinched that off a website, unfortunately the sites we visited this morning could all do with a bit more information boards. This area especially could benefit from a small audio tour, it is only now I note they also had catacombs as part of the area.

The area was also once used as part of the Great Library, which we’ll come to in a bit.

Our third stop completed the trio of ancient sites. Kom El Deka was a small neighborhood containing houses, baths, halls and a Roman theatre.

Kom el-Dikka is the largest and most complete above ground archeological site in Alexandria. It provides large amounts of archeological evidence of urban life in Roman Egypt, including early villas and their mosaics, and late Roman public works.

As you’d expect the area is today largely remains, and the theatre area has obviously been upgraded – when we visited, preparations for a concert were being installed. Thankfully this area contained a map of the site and enough information to enjoy a walk around for an hour.

Those three sites cost around £3 each to visit. We could have spent longer at all three sites but we did have a lot to fit in during the day, and knowing that we were due to visit the Library at some point, may not have appreciated the significance of the site.

The library was up next. Today the library is a modern building accommodating students and tourists alike, but the history of Alexandria and libraries are vitally important.

The Great Library of Alexandria was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world. Alexandria came to be regarded as the capital of knowledge and learning, in part because of the library.

Many important and influential scholars worked at the Library during the third and second centuries BC. Some examples of works are the first library catalog, a bloke who managed to measure the circumference of the earth (just a few hundred kilometers off – good effort!) and the inventor of the steam engine.

There is a story that Julius Ceaser burned the library during the Civil War, although there are arguments whether this was on accident, caused by the burning ships in the dockyard, or whether it was set on fire at all. I’m not getting in to that argument. I’m just thankful we have books today as nothing gives me greater joy than dusting our own little library of Mikayla’s 700+ collection.

Our final stop before lunch and our drive back was to the Citadel of Qaitbay. I’m really struggling to go in to historical detail at this point, but the fortress was built in the 15th Century. The citadel can be viewed all along the seafront and Ibrahim provided a good history lesson and significance of the site, another reason why it shouldn’t take me a bloody year to write this.

The site itself was a good visit. We walked through the courtyards and walkway along the coastal wall before entering the building itself providing pleasing views of the city and the Mediterranean. Ultimately the walk up and down the stairs may have been one too may, as from here tendonitis set in, gradually getting worse until the end of day four.

At least it was lunch next! Included in our tour price was a lunch that we didn’t think would be too much, so we were pleasantly surprised to be treated to some local fish, fresh calamari and all the trimmings!

The long drive home was not much to talk about. I remember watching Man United lose their first game of the season on the tele, and my feet were throbbing, so we were pleased to get home just before sunset, passing the yet to be completed new Egyptian museum.

The museum has faced several delays. Ibrahim mentioned they expected to open later that year in November 2022. That didn’t happen. Although seeing the caliber of British PM at the time you can’t blame them for putting off an invite.

Another issue is moving thousands of priceless artifacts from A to B. I wouldn’t want to be the driver who has Tutankhamun’s death mask on the back seat!

Day Three – To Cairo & Nile Cruise

Well done for making it this far. Very little in the way of history stuff today! Overnight we both agreed we needed a bit of luxury and to visit Cairo.

We booked our lift to Cairo and decided on a hotel. As we weren’t going to wake up to THAT view, breakfast, air con and (to heal the hooves) a swimming pool were all necessary.

We booked Hotel Safir to the east of The Nile. This came in at £100 a night but worth every penny.

We checked in early as possible and I won’t forget the absolute bliss of the air-con anytime soon – it was freezing. We ordered burgers to the room and had a chill before hobbling down for a swim. In the water I thought loosening up the joints were doing wonders but within minutes of getting back to the room the pain returned.

Feeling rather fed up and extremely worried the affect this will have on the rest of the trip, we had nap in the hope I might miraculously feel better in an hour or so.

This wasn’t the case but we had to do something. We found a Nile Cruise with dinner on somewhere like Viator that seemed a good shout at £30 each. It also provided a taxi service to the boat so walking would be minimal.

This all went to plan. I didn’t really know what I was expecting but I instantly knew this was a good shout when we boarded the boat. Shortly after setting sail we could enjoy the cold salad buffet followed by our selected meal from a number of options. It wasn’t Michelin star but was very enjoyable.

Alongside the meal and the opportunity to go outside and see the city from the Nile, the entertainment was also very good. Following a couple of singers we had this bloke who… spun around loads… lit himself up (not on fire)… spun a bit more…. Quite a spectacle and impressive.

This was followed by a belly dancer – also a sight to behold, before disembarking into our taxi for the ride home and the best night’s sleep in memory!

Day Four – Cairo Museum and Cairo Tower

It may have been the wonderful breakfast that made me feel a little spritelier this morning. This was very welcome as I knew we would be spending the best part of the day walking around the Egyptian museum – it wasn’t going to be small.

An oversight until now was the realisation of some small transport company called “Uber”. The hotel-booked taxis were not expensive, but the Uber’s we used were so cheap. You’re talking about a few miles trip stuck in traffic for 20 minutes costing £2-3.

As expected we were greeted with a lot of tourists at the security gates in to the museum but there was no long delay in the intense heat, it wasn’t long until we were inside, not having one fucking iota of where to start. We decided on ‘clockwise and then the bit in the middle, then upstairs’.

I’ve got about 120 photos from the museum there were that many pieces that were either interesting or really old or both. The statue above is the ‘Seated ka-statue of King Djoser’ and is the oldest known life-size Egyptian statue. Found in a chamber in 1925, the thing is believed to be over FOUR AND A HALF THOUSAND YEARS OLD.

I could do a blog on the museum content in its own right (don’t worry I won’t) but you get the idea. The highlight of the museum was unequivocally the Tutankhamun exhibition displaying the famous death mask – one of the best-known works of art in the world.

I’m going to be a bit naughty here. The exhibit were quite strict on people taking photographs of the items, although I couldn’t really see why. I get that with art such as the Bayeux Tapestry flashes can do damage but in this otherwise dark room bright lights shone on the pieces. To give me a bit of instruction-following, instead I decided to just start a video with the phone around my neck. The screengrab of the Tutankhamun’s mask was never going to be epic, but it’s a keeper! Of course everyone else just took quick photos when the stewards were not looking. It all seemed a bit over the top but rules are rules?

This was towards the end of our walk around so by the time we visited the animal section (the photo is a mummified crocodile) we heading back out into the heat.

We sat down for a refreshing juice near what would be deemed to be the actual centre of Cairo, the Ramses II obelisk in the centre of El-Tahir Square (actually a really busy multiple lane roundabout.

From here we decided to visit “The Hanging Church”. This was actually our first trip on the metro. The metro was not too difficult to manage as there are only three lines. Work is well underway of stretching one line to Giza within walking distance of the pyramids. This will be SO convenient for tourists who don’t want to spend a few quid on a taxi or day tour. I think a one-ride pass was 20p.

Getting off at just the third stop we were right outside the area that includes the Church among several other churches, towers, a cemetery and the Coptic Museum of ancient Egyptian Christian Art.

I cannot recall if there was a fee to pay to enter the Hanging Church (Google states it is free) but do remember how comfortable the pews were giving me short relief of persistent pain in my foot. Trust me I really haven’t banged on about the pain as much as I should be.

The Church gets its name from being suspended over a gatehouse passage. I didn’t expect it to be hanging over a cliff edge but found the story behind the name a little underwhelming, being able to have a slight glimpse of a tunnel.

That was pretty much it for the daytime activities, taking the metro close to our hotel was easy but exhausting so we had a few hours in the hotel.

That evening we enjoyed an Uber to one of the islands in the Nile to Cairo Tower. Although located in relatively green area of the City, the area around the tower was more modern and upbeat. We bought a ticket with a specified time on but it was still a bit of a wait once our slot came to catch the lift to the top. The tower is made of concrete and at 187 meters was the tallest structure in Egypt until 1998.

The view from the top was worth the wait, changing the concrete and dusty daytime Cairo in to a colourful landscape of lights with the sun setting in the distance. In terms of actual sights, not a lot was obvious to the eye, with most laminations belonging to big corporations or hotels.

That was about that for the night. I think there was something on at the sports stadium on the island so the taxi back took a good hour to go 3 miles. We must have had something for tea but for the life of me cannot remember, so it could not have been that good!

Day Five – Cairo Citadel, Markets and back to Giza

Today was a little easier on the feet. After breakfast and check-out we caught an Uber to Cairo Citadel, a little out the way from the centre.

The main attraction here was the Mohammed Ali mosque, but as it was quite high up I was more interested in the views. I’m delighted of the photo below just about picking up the pyramids in the distance. I like that the photo demonstrates both that the pyramids are NOT in Cairo, yet nor are they in the middle of nowhere like many would assume.

From here we wanted to check out one more thing before heading back to Giza for the rest of our trip. The markets were prevalent on several to-do lists and our guidebook but there are so many in a close area I cannot really remember which one we went to. The area we left our Uber was probably in the middle of several streets, so we chose one to have a walk through before lunch. Disappointingly we chose a street that was for the majority dedicated to clothes and linens. I’ve also found it bemusing in several markets how there are so many stalls all selling the same things, and here was no different. As a local would you visit the same one, or chop and change to support everyone? Who knows.

It was a bloody nightmare from the other end of the market trying to book a taxi, but we did use this time to identify that we had yet consumed a McDonalds. We can’t be having that no matter how disgraceful the need to have one actually is.

The food tasted as you’d expect, taking the opportunity to buy more than usual to benefit from the cheap prices. Afterwards, we pretty much got a can back to the hotel and got a buddy Ibrahim to collect us as take us back to our B&B in Giza.

That evening, and our final evening tomorrow, we visited a few other B&B / hotels near ours for tea, all with similar rooftop terraces. We clocked on the first night that our place simply bought food from neighbouring hotels and added a percentage on, so there was no need for the middle-man.

Day Six– Sakkara & Memphis day trip

By the time we finished off breakfast for our final full day we were pleased that we seen enough of things we wanted to, whilst not contempt to simply hang around Giza. Luckily our hotel offered another day tour to the south of Giza and Cairo. So, we jumped in with Ibrahim once again and set off to our first destination of Saqqara.

Saqqara has a number of pyramids but the most visited is the Pyramid of Djoser also referred to as the ‘step pyramid’. If you’re keeping up Djoser was the fella portrayed on the 4,500 statue I photographed at the museum.

The sites we visited today were A LOT quieter with tourism. Whilst this enabled us to explore the area easier (without the locals flogging their gear), the sites still offered little in the way of information boards.

We had a quick stop somewhere else to marvel at the hieroglyphs – unfortunately I cannot recall or locate this site but it was remarkable to see – before moving down to Dahshur to see two further pyramids.

In amongst all of the baron dessert it was interesting to see the countless date tress from site to site. Hundreds of thousands of them all looking ready for picking no doubt proving a vital income for those whose land they reside on.

Sneferu’s Red Pyramid was interesting as it had an entrance way. The photo suggests it wasn’t that far up. But it was. It was a big bloody group of stones. We decided against going in the small tunnel and needing a rescue to get back out, so moved on shortly down the road to our final pyramid of the trip!

Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid looks a bit like The Great Pyramid from Wish, although it may be due to poor mathematics, changing from steps to smooth edges and believe to be finished off like this due to instability. The aforementioned Red Pyramid was Sneferu’s next attempt, so at least he learnt from his mistakes.

Away from pyramid-hopping, we ended the trip visiting Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt. Along with the pyramid fields that stretch on a desert plateau for more than 30 kilometres (19 mi) on its west including the famous Pyramids of Giza, they have been listed as the World Heritage Site Memphis and its Necropolis. The site is open to the public as an open-air museum. So that is where we went.

Located in the museum were loads of more artifacts (forgive me for completely giving up on history and archaeology lessons now, I usually skip museums on other trips!)

I do have to mention the focal point of the museum though, a ginormous, 80-tonne statue of pharaoh Ramses II. It was found in 1820 face down and partially buried in a swampy area – it’s a bit bloody hard to miss… It lies face up in the building erected specifically to house and protect it and visitors can circle the colossus pharaoh from the ground level or up above on a viewing balcony.

I should note that each of the sites we visited did require cash entry fees. These were so low though, about £2 each, I think Ibrahim just included it in the price. What a lad.

There we go then. A really good way to spend our last day. On the way back Ibrahim was nice enough to pop to a local shop and get us some sugar cane juive to enjoy and OH MY GOD having never tasted it before or since the trip it was bloody delicious! I’m actually looking to see where I can buy some now but it won’t be as fresh as then.

One final sunset, meal in a neirbouring hotel and sleep attempts whilst is was fucking roasting.

Day Seven – Home with my Fiancée

Leaving mid morning we had one final breakfast enjoying the freshly fried falafels that I miss, before heading to the airport home to see our friends and family.

… after a quick stop for another sugar cane juice of course!

Well done, you have made it to the end! It is now September 2023 at the time of writing this, but it has been a joy for us both to reminisce about our time where my favourite person in the world became my fiancée. Thanks for reading.

Thanks for visiting. If you are reading this when first drafted in January 2023, you will notice several incomplete blogs from the last 15 months covering Lisbon, Milan, Egypt and Brussels so I will try and get those done in this lifetime.

Overview

Paris is the capital city of France and although there are many tourism options in the country, Paris knocks them out of the park with both sights to see and statistics, with nearly 20 million international travelers per year making it the second most visited city in the world after Bankok (according to here, that lists NYC in 7th?!).

Lucky for us Paris is less than a 90 minute flight away from Bristol airport thus flying there is one of the cheaper destinations. Paris is also reachable by car/ferry and the EuroStar. Some packages to Disneyland no doubt offer a short trip to the City central areas too. On this occasion we flew with Easyjet to Paris Orly, staying in an Ibis Budget (very budget!) hotel that was a little too far away from the centre being the penultimate stop on one of the metro lines. Not to worry, as it was completely adequate, considering our last trip, to Egypt in August, had us in a hotel room with no aircon!

Getting Around

It’s worth noting Paris has two main airports that link to the city, Orly and the busier Charles De Gaulle. We arrived at Orly and decided to catch the express train to the city. This wasn’t as easy as you’d expect, as you have to get off at Antony (nowhere near central) to be able to use the public transport network in to the centre. We flew out of Paris at CDG, by the end of the trip we were more confident using public transport but still had to buy an additional ticket to get us as far as the airport.

Once you’re in Paris there are many ways to get around. I didn’t quite know the difference between the Metro and the RER trains that seemed to do the same thing, plus you have ‘normal’ trains located at several points. We really enjoyed using the bus transport though, which was on time and not as crowded as you would expect – less convenient than the hop-on-hop-off services but included in your travel pass. eScooters are popping up here too, but getting around using the river seems limited as the tours we seen started and ended at the same place. The travel pass will set you back around £22 each for three days, but you’re going to get your money’s worth.

Things we didn’t do

Our time in Paris worked out to be around 3.5 days. We thought this was ample with our style of holidaying; marching around during the day with time to chill in the evenings. As you will see below we certainly got a lot of stuff ticked off. The major thing we wanted to see but couldn’t were the Catacombs. Once we looked to book tickets they were all sold out so make sure you book in advance.

There were a few things to see, which we did, but didn’t bother going inside such as the Musée d’Orsay, Les Invalides, Père Lachaise Cemetery where Oscar Wilde’s tomb is located. You’re unable to go in to Notre Dame whilst they are rebuilding it still. Get yourself a decent guidebook for a more comprehensive list as there are undoubtedly lesser known worthy sights. If you visit Sacre-Cour basilica be sure to go up to the dome for the best views (unlike us – see below!).

Obviously Disneyland too, which is about as much Paris as Legoland is London. I’ve been there once, Kay’s been umpteen times and we are due to go again early 2023 with family (update, been). I reckon if you had a week in Paris you could at least fit in a day trip, but I would advise at least two.

Costs

For two people our flights were £132 with hand-luggage only. Our hotel was £148 for 4 nights, which although a bargain, we should have forked out a bit more to be a little more central.

Monday morning to Thursday evening cost us in the region of £700 spending money including transport and attractions. Most attractions are £20-25 per person and a 3-day travel pass is about the same but travel altogether was £100 or so considering airport transfers and the additional day pass we required. Worth noting we really cut back on expensive food (six fucking snails cost 16 euro like) so add a good few quid if that’s your thing.

Generally, things like snacks and drinks are similar to London prices so there shouldn’t be any major surprises. We didn’t have a beer, known to be really expensive, but I reckon it depends where you go for that too.

What we did

Day One

Prior to the trip we already bought tickets for the Louvre on day 1 and the Eiffel Tower on day 3. Thankfully our flight was early morning, so we had plenty of time to work out the public transport systems and a rest in our hotel before getting to the Louvre.

The Louvre is conveniently located in between two metro stops, and on street level it’s a case of following the crowd until you arrive in the open space in the middle of the palace buildings and the famous glass pyramids.

Although we booked a specific time the queues were horrendous even this late in the afternoon. There seemed to be two queues, one for pre-booked and one for tickets on the day, both taking it in turns to enter. Not ideal when there were hundreds slowly getting in, but luckily it was dry and we had no urgency. We entered around an hour later than our time slot so certainly something to take in to account if you’re expecting to squeeze in a visit.

You should know I’m not really one for art or museums but I was taken aback by this place. It was absolutely huge. As well as the surrounding buildings shown above, there’s a massive amount of underground passages, plaza’s and a whole shopping center too.

You could easily spend all day looking through the galleries and exhibits but of course the main attraction is the Mona Lisa. Conveniently tucked away enough so you have to see a few of the other bits on the way beforehand, it was located in a large hall, looking out of place considering how small the painting itself is. Still, there was a constant stream of probably 500 people tripping over themselves to try and get a decent photo. To be honest my pic above was from about 30 yards after a LOT of image editing!

Getting that done and dusted meant we could take a more relaxed approach around the rest of the museum starting at the Venus de Milo. Or the lady with no arms if you asked me prior to our visit. This has a fascinating back story if you care to look. We proceeded to wind our way through the rest of the exhibits especially enjoyed looking at sections from Egypt (why aren’t these in Egypt… sigh) and Iran.

Leaving the museum we managed to find a cheap spot for dinner in a Chinese fast food type place on our way to the second and final plan of the day, Montparnasse Tower.

This was quite high up on to-do lists we reviewed but approaching the office block you wouldn’t have really thought so. The entrance and reception were rather gloomy, not somewhere linked with a nice restaurant and great rooftop views of Paris 210 metres up. That, and the drizzly weather made the visit not the most pleasurable, but as it was our first decent view of big Eiffel, we were content before returning to our digs.

Day Two

After having a lot of bread and ham for breakfast (i.e. continental breakfast for fussy eaters) we headed out on what we planned to be a day sight hopping with no reservations.

The first stop was the famous Moulin Rouge cabaret venue. Could we go there? Yes we Can-Can! (sorry). I did consider buying tickets for a show and whilst the reviews are great, considering the cost amounted to 50% of the whole trip I’ll think about it next time.

Next up traversing the metro network was a visit to Ille de la Cite (guessing that translates to Island in they City) where the famous Notre-Dame cathedral is based. After a quick gaze at the 13^th century gothic Saint-Chappelle, we followed the swarm of tourists to the square outside Notre-Dame.

The cathedral was severely damaged by fire in April 2019 and scaffolding and cranes have been ever-present since. This was a shame, as although I tend not to make a hobby out of going inside churches etc, this would have been one to tick off. It’ll probably be closed to the public for some time yet I thought.

Still, the square outside was vibrant with tourists and street performers and it was a good point to try and get a candid (definitely not candid) photo of my admiring the building – didn’t quite make the cut for the blog!

From here we crossed the Pont Nuef, the oldest standing bridge across the Seine. We were close our next stop, a big park called Jardin de Luxembourg and decided to walk for a change, a good choice to stop an appreciate the Saint-Michel fountain before heading onwards south to the park.

There’s a ‘funny’ story about my visit to a public toilet here but I won’t bring that up on behalf of the elderly lady I may well have traumatised. (If you’re reading this, sorry, but the sign clearly said WAIT UNTIL THE TOILET FINISHES FLUSHING BEFORE ENTERING THE CUBICLE, in an array of languages.)

Approaching the park from the east, after an Autumnal walk along a tree lined path the area opened up with fields, flowerbeds and a man-made lake enjoyed by families sailing remote control boats, with the Eiffel tower visible above the skyline. How wonderful.

We enjoyed the views for a while once we planned our next steps. Lunch obviously, we hadn’t eaten for at least 3 hours(!), so found an independent burger joint. On the way we also stumbled across our first of two Statue of Liberty’s on the trip. The one based in the park was to commemorate those who lost their lives on 9/11.

For the afternoon I had a real treat planned for Mikayla; to drag her around no less than three sporting venues in succession. Although outside of the centre, but still easy to access by the metro. Conveniently, these are all based within a 30 minute walk

First up was Roland Garros, the tennis venue, the French Wimbledon if you like. Although closed as no events were on, we were able to walk close to some of the stadiums. Whilst not confusing both of us stating names or numbers, the first court was peculiar due to the fact from the outside it looked like some sort of greenhouse in a botanical garden. Once we peeked through the railings we could see the court dug quite deep in to the ground with 5,000 seats surrounding it. I didn’t count each seat but no way was there 5,000 seats there looking at it from the outside!

From here it was a short walk to the 15,000 Centre Court, understandable the largest and outstanding building in the complex. Sadly, the external gates were as close as we could get. I’ve not been to Wimbledon so can’t comment on any similarities but did think it would have a similar relaxed and pleasant vibe that SW19 tends to portray.

I had done well differentiating from my beloved football to go see some tennis stuff, but that was nothing compared to the next stop, a bloody rugby stadium! In defence, it was on the way to the football ground….

The 20,000 Stade Jean-Bouin is a mixed-use stadium and primary home to Rugby Union team Stade Francais. Why a team of that name don’t play at the Stade de France is anyone’s guess but there we go. The stadium itself was fascinating due to two sides being absolutely massive with this strange webbed cladding on the outside. You wouldn’t be blamed for mistaken this for better-known Parc des Princes, that was our next stop.

The Parc des Princes is home to French champions Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and holds 48,000 people, yet looking no bigger than the aforementioned stadium literally next door. More importantly, this was were Wales beat Northern Ireland to progress in to the quarter finals of Euro 2016, two games before I started on the Wales away game bandwagon.

A token selfie outside the main entrance alongside the likes of Messi, Neymar, Mbappe et al and refusing to pay for a stadium tour, we walked around the circumference of the ground, not getting the slightest peak in to the stadium bowl or the pitch. A bit different from our Milan San Siro visit in April where they had a large viewing window inside the club shop! The stadium is quite easy on the eye considering it’s a big lump of concrete.  

If you’re not in to your sports, you’ll be glad to know that we then headed back in the centre.

We caught a public bus (included in the travel pass) towards the Champs-Élysées, perhaps the most well-known street in Paris that runs between The Arc de Triomphe and Place de la Concorde.

The Arc de Triomphe is quite spectacular in stature when you’re close to it, in between any of the twelve radiating avenues that approach. Surrounded by a god-knows-how-many-lanes-because-there-are-no-markings roundabout the only was you’re *supposed* to enter the central area is through an underground subway that doubles up as a ticket office should you wish to venture up to the top of the arch.

At the arch itself, there didn’t seem to be a lot to do apart from marvel at the monument, get out the way of people’s photo’s, and tut at the families who decide to run from the roundabout through multiple lanes of continuous traffic.

At the other end of the avenue is the Place de la Concorde, identified by an Egyptian obelisk decorated with hieroglyphics towering 23 meters. Incredibly this is believed to be over 3,000 years old.

The square is the biggest in Paris and beginning in 1789, the Place was a central stage for the events of the French Revolution. In October 1792, the first executions by guillotine in the square took place, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Thankfully, today the square is rather more peaceful, giving an opportunity to enjoy the fountains, impressive buildings and of course, the Eiffel Tower popping up in the background.

At this point we realised that we kinda’ done everything we wanted to do for the day, but with sun just starting to fall felt it necessary to fit at least one more thing in before returning to the hotel. Thankfully, Mikayla remembered something she looked at prior to the trip and 5 minutes later we were on what was hopefully the right bus to Sacré-Cœur. This ‘something’ we didn’t really plan to visit is in fact the second-most visited destination in the City!

Sacré-Cœur is a basilica in the northern area of the city 200 metres above the Siene. Built quite recently in 1914, its appeal is not only that it is the Church of the “Sacred Heart of Jesus” but certainly the views it offers across the City. I can’t honestly think of another hill we walked up in the city!

As soon as we decided to visit, we know that time was against us as I really wanted to get a panoramic photo of the city at sunset. Once we stopped off at the bus I probably walked/dad-jogged faster than I had for many months trying to reach the summit in time. You’re talking about a good 15 minutes here and up hundreds of steps. Once arrived at the viewing platform I was pleased that it was still light enough, but the sun had already set and to my dismay the view offered no view of the Eiffel Tower as it was too far to the right thus behind buildings and trees! What the?

Still, the views were worth taking in, with Montparnasse tower sticking out amongst the otherwise very flat area of central Paris.

I have since found out that if you enter the basilica, you can visit the dome at the top, that does indeed provide an unbeatable view of the city landscape. We didn’t bother due to the crowds and increasing darkness. This was one regret for the trip and I’m a bit scared to tell Kay! – there’s always next time…

That was that for day two.

Day Three

This morning was the big one, our visit to the Eiffel Tower! Before today we hadn’t been that close to the tower so was able to gaze in awe at one of the most recognisable structures in the world. I think we saved some time by pre-booking our tickets and time-slot beforehand, but seem to recall even if the website is sold out of tickets you can still visit on the day, capacity dependant.

After an initial security check, we entered in to the tower grounds and waited for our specific time to be called. A further queue and security check and we were good to up the list to the second floor a paltry 116m high, to start queuing for the lifts to the top at 276m. I should state that although it was VERY busy, and the queues did take some time (an hour-ish), they were constantly moving. On the second floor you already have brilliant views to admire whilst waiting.

The lift (cage) to the top could be quite scary to a few people but never at any point did it feel unsafe. Remember millions of people make the same journey every year. The lift stops in a inside windowed room and it’s a few stairs to the outside platform. Aside from the views, the top also houses an insight to Gustave Eiffel’s office, toilets and a champagne bar.

The views at the top were nothing short of incredible, I’ll let the photo’s do the talking.

Whilst waiting for the lift back down, the queue winds around the inside room, indicating the direction and distance of countless countries and Parisian sights.

Back at the second floor, we decided to descend by the stairs. You can buy slightly cheaper tickets to walk UP the stairs from base to second floor, but I really wouldn’t advise it. 674 steps even going down was a dizzying episode without stopping. By the time we reached level ground we needed 5 minutes so that our legs started working again!

You know some things you go to see, you leave a bit disappointed? This was not one of them.

The next activity practically fell in to our lap as we exited the tower grounds along the Siene. We considered a boat tour along the river and agreed now was a good of time as any. We used a company called “Bateaux Parisiens” that seemed to be the only one in the close vicinity but there are obviously more a bit further afield from what was our location.

The cruise was pretty basic going up the Siene for 30 minutes before doubling back. It took you under several bridges including the most ornate Pont Alexandre III, a celebration of the relationship between France and Russia…. That has not aged well in 2022….  

The tour did require using their website on your phone to listen to the voice guide, which prevented picture taking, but couldn’t complain with the €16 cost. May have avoided it if it was pissing down as I doubt the inside area offered similar views.

After a busy morning we certainly deserved a hearty lunch. However, my wonderful fiancé moaned on a considerable amount of occasions to try some snails for lunch. I said there was no point as she wouldn’t like them. We compromised. We had snails for lunch.

Finding an upmarket café in an area between the Eiffel Tower and Hôtel des Invalides we were ‘treated’ to six fat snails in a garlic and butter dressing.

With Mikayla giving it the billy-big-bollocks and me being a gentleman, I insisted that she went first. As soon as the slug hit her tongue I could tell she was thinking “fuck, he’s going to say I told you so…”.

My turn next. Once I was able to actually use the tongs and fork combo correctly (ish…) I bravely chewed mine rather than swallow. The garlic taste overwhelmed whatever a snail is supposed to taste like, thankfully, but yeah, they were fucking atrocious, the texture, just what is the point?

The problem, we looked like right dickheads now. Ordered 6 snails for €16, tried two then left. Nope, I persuaded myself to have another two or three whilst simultaneously frowning at Kay for forcing me through such torture.

We paid the bill and I went to get a portion of chips from the kebab shop next door.

We’re still engaged.

French fries devoured we had a wander over Pont Alexander III bridge and caught a bus to start a round up of a few bits we would do itlf we had the time.

Slightly tucked away from the tourism hotspot on an island a little further down (or up?) river from the Eiffel Tower is another Statue of Liberty, larger than the park but still micro in comparison to NYC. My memory of these moments include getting an email with our wedding quote! How exciting (and expensive…)

From here we checked out an area named La Defense, visible from the tower earlier in that day, travelling the end of a metro line to get there. We were greeted with what I describe as an uber modern mini city with shopping complex, offices and flats.

It was cool to walk through the car free central street looking ahead at the boulevard that linked this area to the Arc de Triomphe. Although we were knackered by know, the other side of town from our hotel and with one stop left our our final evening.

… which was to visit the Eiffel Tower area at night to take a few pictures. We just about caught the hourly event where the tower glitters for a few minutes. Very nice.

Day Four

Our final day was a bit of a ball ache as we had to check out of our hotel early and didn’t think we’d have time to trapse back for our bags, thus lugging them around with us.

It started off quite pleasant as we metro-hopped to Nation square (above) and Bastille (below).

At this point Mikayla disclosed that there was a cool little book store she wanted to visit, she had yet to mention in previous days or when we walked right bloody past it! Still, as the days went on we had a preference to use the buses and it wasn’t far away.

Sadly when we got there we didn’t really have enough time to queue so travelled the short distance near the Hotel de Ville, the current Parisian city hall.

The main purpose of the day however, was to visit the Palace of Versailles. The palace is on the outskirts of Paris and it took a bit of homework to find out how to get there. I would be happy to recommend our choice, taking the metro line 9 as far as it goes to Pont de Sevres and then get a frequent 30 minute bus to the front gates. We expected to pay extra for the bus, being out of the zones but didn’t have to for reasons I care not. You can also get the RER to the palace, but I’m unsure if you have to pay extra on top of your day pass. Or walk. The world’s your oyster (which I have also tried since the snails and writing this. That was a dreadful decision an’all…).

Anyway, at the palace. It started raining whilst waiting to get in. That wasn’t fun with all of our luggage on our backs. The palace and surrounding area is stupendous in size and you would need a full day to see all the area, that we didn’t have, so just focused on the main palace.

I really don’t want to give a history lesson here so to sum it up before the next picture….

The palace and grounds were built and lived in by the French royals until 1789 the French people, living in squalor finally had a guts full and BOOM, the French Revolution. Since then the royals are no more and the area has been in the public domain since. Power to the people.

Walking around the ridiculously posh and oversized rooms in the palace, I think they done well to keep that “you’re taking the piss out of us” vibe that led us common people to kick off all those years ago. Gosh, imagine if the UK had such an over the top equivalent palace or sorts during a cost of living crisis?!?….

Did you spot the sarcasm?

Anyway, we’re nearly done. A soaking walk, bus and metro back in to the city to catch our final route to Charles de Gualle airport.

… With a pit stop at the Stade de France on the way obviously. Quite a structure I have yet to enter. I’ll wait patiently for a Wales football fixture over a biannual Six Nations rugby meeting between the two countries, thanks.

Cheers for taking the time to read! I’ve done quite well writing this up only 4 months after I returned, finishing it off on a drive home from Disneyland Paris of all places!

And don’t bother with the snails, ya wierdo.

Sandwiched in between this and my Wroclaw blog was the small issue of Wales qualifying for their first World Cup in 64 bloody years! What a time to be alive.

I said that my Wroclaw blog will be short, but this one will trump that, with only having a few hours in Rotterdam before the game. Therefore, it’s a tad photo heavy but that’s less shit you gotta read from me.

Overview

Rotterdam is the second biggest city in The Netherlands about 35 miles south of Amsterdam. It has the biggest port in Europe, which was #1 in the world until Shanghai took over the title in the early 00’s.

Getting here

There are loads of ways to get to Rotterdam, with Amsterdam Schiphol only a few miles away, so direct flights from Bristol would be the easiest. The Eurostar also services Amsterdam and apart from jumping on a tube around London is probably the most convenient method direct from the M4 corridor.

Us, however had to be different. After a National Express to London before a train to Harwich, we caught an overnight ferry to Hoek Van Holland, which literally translates to the hook of Holland.

Our beds were also here, a very quiet town that I imagine is seldom given a second look with tourists catching their ongoing transport to the bigger areas. The metro line took us straight to Rotterdam in 30 minutes or so. Our accomodation was a cute independent B&B called Hotel Kuiperduin and we had a perfect stay. They let us check in super early, breakfast was fine, and they even give us a key for the front door for our late night return.

Prices

The travel (coach, train, ferry) was ridiculously low at £179 return and general food and drink is similar to the UK. The hotel was £100 for the night, decent because a hotel in Rotterdam couldn’t be found anywhere near as cheap for some reason. Transport is obviously more efficient, and cheaper than home, a day ticket covering a vast area at €14. In Rotterdam I was paying €4 for 30cl of Heineken but couldn’t resist Strongbow in the Irish bar at £6 a pint (or £72 for 12, whatever way you look at it…).

Things to do

The general consensus was that Rotterdam doesn’t offer nearly as much tourism entertainment like it’s bigger neighbour. I was told this both before and during my trip. However, I’m not going to say this is true having only spent three hours in the city (without drinking). I did see the few things I wanted to during my stay – see below – but I’m sure there are other things to do if you had more time.

Edit: Having returned to this to update a few bits, I have realised I have tried to write about the Netherlands without mentioning windmills, cheese or flowers AT ALL. Deary me.

Itinerary – what we did.

Day one.

In short… Bus, coach, tube, train, ferry. The Stena Line ferry was really sparse with foot passengers but of course they make their money from the full capacity of lorries that boarded. The top bunk in an internal cabin was ‘an experience’ and the food was satisfactory albeit outraged at paying £3 for a bottle of water.

The ferry left at around 10pm and enjoyed a good sleep before arriving in Hoek Von Holland at 8am on day two.

Day two.

Here we go then. After disembarking the ferry we only had a 15 minute walk to our B&B through the sleepy streets.

By 9:30 we were back at the port to catch a metro directly in to Rotterdam, arriving at the Euromast at ten.

The Euromast is probably the one thing to do on your visit. The tallest building in the Netherlands. A tower with a viewpoint of 96 meters high obviously offered the best panoramic views of the city including Erasmus bridge over the New Meuse river. You can actually go further, up to 180 meters, but this was under refurbishment. I’m alright with heights but even that looked a little dizzying.

We had a quick beverage in the restaurant before heading further in to the city to collect our tickets for the game. First beer of the trip!

Perfectly located between my other to things I wanted to see, some 45 degree houses and the market, we had our tickets and completed the to do list all by midday!

The “Cube houses” are an arty design innovative thing, well known for their walls having a 45 degree angle. Why, or how practical this is, I do not know. Let’s leave that there.

The market hall opposite the funny looking houses is an imposing structure. Opened in 2014, it has a huge horseshoe facade and the largest glass-window cable structure in Europe filling in the gap.

I had a very tasty falafel wrap (for some reason I chose to be a vegetarian throughout!) in the market from one of the near 100 stalls and, whilst Pete went back to the B&B for a rest there was only one thing left to do: have a beer.

Behaving, I did have a stroll the a few shopping streets to pick up a magnet for Mum in the shadow of Rotterdam’s World Trade Centre.

Whilst sipping my first beer outside one of several kerbside restaurants, it was comforting to be tapped on the shoulder from some fellow Newport County supporters I knew a little and enjoyed a few lagers with them before inevitably crossing the road to the “fan pub” for the day Paddy Murphy’s, where it was absolutely bouncing throughout my five hours – my bank tells me 12 pints of strongbow may have enhanced my experience – before the evening game.

Hundreds of bucket hats bobbing up and down to Shakira? Very frequently. (Note: for context we’ve stolen (improved) her Waka Waka song and made it in to our World Cup song…). No photos from here but if you followed me on Instagram (@hownot2life) you would have been treated to a few videos.

The tram to the game was easier and less crowded than Wroclaw two weeks prior and I arrived at De Kuip, or the Feyenoord Stadion, well before kickoff. Thank goodness as I was so lost a helpful young lady eventually had to escort me through a sea of orange to the correct entry gate!

The stadium looked great bit in fact I thought it was really poor facilities-wise. You had to buy tokens to swap for food and drink, the beer was 0%, and for the first time ever the queue for the gents at half time was longer than the bar!!

The game itself (5th in 13 days) was one of the better ones. A valiant performance from our squad team ultimately lost to the Dutch after their 93rd minute winner, with Gareth Bale only equalising for us a minute before. Exactly the same scenario when we played the reverse fixture six days ago!

The atmosphere was very friendly. I did think the Dutch supporters were just expecting a few goals and offered little support during the game above flag waving, tragically scoring whilst their Mexican fucking wave was in its infancy. Urgh. The full allocation of Welsh fans were fantastic and it was a shame to be in a different area.

Finishing at 11pm, we had no time to waste getting one of the last metro’s out of the city, which we did successfully. Our pursuit of some late night scran however was never going to materialise but you can guess; I didn’t starve.

Day Three.

We enjoyed a simple but ample breakfast in the garden of our B&B. With a few hours to kill, we chose to have a good 30 minute walk to the nearby beach.

Whilst it was strange to be visiting a beach so close to container ships, cranes and the like, the Strand 2 beach itself was gloriously clean in the sunshine, spacious and just starting to populate.

Sadly no dip for me this time, as time was now getting on and it was time to catch our ferry (with a window in cabin = result) back to Harwich, then train to Liverpool Street, tube to Victoria, National Express to Newport and taxi to home without any major incident, getting in to bed at 3:30am.

Thanks for taking the time to read this jumble of words. Unfortunately this may be my last Wales away post for some time as I start from scratch trying to build my fan account up to a stage where I’m likely to get tickets through the correct methods. Qatar is not an option unless my numbers come out of a big glass ball on a Saturday evening soon. If anyone can help me out for Belgium away though…

This will be probably one of my shorter travel blogs as the main purpose of the visit was to watch Wales play Poland in the UEFA Nations League. The game was sandwiched between the end of the hectic 2021/22 season and just 4 days before Wales’ biggest game of my lifetime, the playoff that could see Wales reach their first World Cup since 1958 (edit: they DID bloody win an’all!!).

Overview

Wroclaw (pronounced Vrotz-wav) is Poland’s fourth largest city and lies towards the east of the country.

For Wales games I tend to let my friend Pete deal with all the booking stuff, obviously delighted when told we would be leaving at midnight to drive to Stansted. Stansted was as busy and miserable as expected. The £5 fast track through security was worth every penny. Although we were done with security at 4am there were already 50+ people in the queue for Wetherspoons. However, Stansted do have a lounge (starting at £26.50 per person) and offered comfort and a brilliant range of breakfast options including a full English, and beer, open from 4am.

The flight to Wroclaw took just under 2 hours and the Ryanair seating was uncomfortable as anyone over 12 stone knows only too well. I’m going to seriously consider not using Ryanair (and therefore possibly not going at all) for any trips over 3 hours going forward.

We stayed in the Campanile hotel that was roughly £20pppn and a 15 minute walk to the Market Square. Can’t complain.

Getting around

Wroclaw airport is 10km from the centre and a taxi cost around £15. We were perhaps overcharged but public transport options seemed confusing as the hotel wasn’t quite central enough to warrant changing buses/trams.

Wroclaw has a public transport network of buses and trams with a 48 hour ticket costing about £4.50. Unsurprisingly, e-scooters have arrived more some fun but I reckon everything to see is within walking distance.

Things to do

In short, head to the Market Square for a pleasant walk around. I’m not quite sure why you would visit Wroclaw for longer than a day but the city was enjoyable to wander around.

There are – of course – an ample amount of churches scattered around if that’s your thing and the river/canals make getting around that bit more picturesque.

What I haven’t included below that may be worthwhile is a boat ride along the river. Wroclaw also has a zoo. In struggling to think of anything after that!

As a side quest, Wroclaw have about 300+ statues of gnomes throughout the city, all rather chirpy and a trip hazard!

Costs

I’ve pretty much covered this section already, what I knew of anyway. In the Market Square food and drink were similar to UK mid-range prices but no doubt you could find places a LOT cheaper off the beaten track and mini-marts were a good source of snacks and soft drinks.

Itinerary – What we did.

Day one.

I’ll keep these short! We arrived at our hotel at 11am and after a quick rest headed to the market square for lunch. There were countless options for food here ranging from traditional Polish food to stalls to the Hard Rock Cafe and Burger King.

The buildings surrounding the square are well worth a mention, with the centrepiece being the gothic style town hall that doubles up as a museum.

We decided on a traditional restaurant for lunch that may have been the most expensive place there at £53. Nevertheless my steak and baked potatoes were enjoyable and a massive portion. Pete had a beer (and huge ice cream) whilst I had diet coke! Oh dear.

Following lunch we walked to a church that had a bridge 40 meters high connecting it’s two towers (going up on Wednesday – I do love a viewpoint) and the hotel where we needed to pick out tickets up after today, also taking the opportunity to buy a new pair of trainers. More about that humongous error in a bit.

Siesta time. Whilst it was my third nap of the day Pete was due a rest especially having to drive to the airport earlier. Slightly more refreshed we headed back out for tea, a very similar routine to earlier, but choosing a steak restaurant for dinner, that whilst looked posh, sorted us with an outstanding burger, chips, salad and a drink for about £11! More like it Christopher.

I need to mention the massive fuck-up with my shoes at this point. During my last two trips my trainers started squeaking with every pace and it was driving me mad! So much so, we popped in to a shopping centre to buy a new cheap-ass pair to get me through the next 2 days. When putting them on I decided to leave my old pair by a bin in case someone in need could use them.

Fast forward wearing and waking said new trainers for half an hour and my toes and heels were rubbing to such extend I walked back to the bin to swap them back over and take a £26 hit!

Unfortunately / fortunately the shoebox was now empty and some guy or girl has a nice comfy pair of used trainers as was my wish, whilst I spent the rest of the day walking like John Wayne.

Zero keen to do any more walking after dinner, I hobbled back to the hotel to layer up on plasters tomorrow before or morning excursion to Ksiaz castle. I’ve still got Tuesday evening and pre-pre-beers Wednesday to see a bit more of Wroclaw istelf.

Day Two

After a good rest overnight we shared breakfast with about 50 odd French children (over excited kids, first thing in the morning, yeah…)

Time to bite the bullet and try on the demon trainers, that initially felt a bit better thanks to no less than six plasters applied with surgical precision around my little toes and heels.

Today we were going on our excursion to Ksiaz Castle, about an hour train ride east of Wroclaw. The bright yellow but still elegant train station is a good walk from the main square so we decided to give the trams a go. All straight forward and our tickets for the train journey with reserved seats in a cabin were under £8 each.

Whilst our destination was the castle, there was no clear way of getting there without some homework. The castle’s website suggested that we get off at Walbrzych (don’t ask me to pronounce it) and get the local bus to the castle. We tried this, caught the wrong bastard bus, had to walk back to the station and decided on a taxi! I’ll keep Peter’s quote “a man who didn’t make a mistake never lived”… Although I really should know the difference between an A and an 8 by now, the reason for our accidental detour.

Our arrival also signalled me giving up on the trainers and reverting back to trusty flipflops, certainly NOT recommended for the uneven paths, caves and countless stairs!

Anyway, the castle. I don’t do history lessons but basically a line of family built the thing and it was passed down over centuries until the one lot spent more than they could afford and went bankrupt, thus (not quite) handing the keys over, leaving the castle to fall in to ruin.

The interesting part comes during World War 2 when the Nazi’s took a liking to it due to the location. During the war they (using prisoners in dire conditions) started building a series of tunnels underneath the castle. To this day historians aren’t sure what the purpose of the tunnels were but the theories range from a laboratory to a train station, to a bunker where the Nazis could hold all their robbed stuff, to a secure bunker for Hitler himself, using Ksiaz castle as a base to direct operations. The latter is backed up by an incomplete shaft that was intended to run from the tunnels to the main house some 50m above.

The tunnels were never finished as the Nazi’s ran off when the Red Wall arrived and only about 50 years ago did renovation work start to give us the attraction it is today.

Like I said, I ain’t no historian. I’ll try and add a link later on.

The caves/tunnels were a good tour minus the 200 odd steps down and up. Whilst the tunnels were monotonous, the audio guide and videos were interesting.

The tour of the house itself was lengthy and unfortunately a lot of the exhibits “this is what it would have looked like” but fascinating nevertheless. Especially with the gardens we were forced to walk around after leaving the gaff.

We well deserved our Aperol Spritz afterwards before hurriedly getting the train back to Wroclaw.

After a brief rest we returned to the market square for tea. As much as I tried to talk myself in to making a long drunken night of it, after three drinks I gave up and had an early night, match day tomorrow!

Day Three

Nailed being an adult last night! Another early one meant breakfast and out the hotel by 8:30. I had some time on my own this morning so decided to tick a few sights off.

First was Wroclaw St John the Baptist cathedral, somewhat tucked away amongst the narrow streets of the old town. A decent building but I didn’t go inside due to my shorts/flipflops combo. The last thing I’d want is God having a go at me, not on a match day. Without getting lost on the tram system my next stop was Centennial Hall.

Whilst the building didn’t interest me much, around the back was a “multimedia fountain”. To you and me that’s 300 fountains that on the hour perform to a classical number. I was here at 9:10 but decided to wait, sat on the grass, enjoying the sunshine and writing the day 2 section of this.

10am came and I was treated to Wagner: Ride of the Valkyries. The show was ok for 5 minutes. I think the performance adds lights in to the mix at night time that probably makes a big difference. I had a pleasant stroll and tram back central to pick the tickets up. It was very close to beer time! Beforehand I still had one thing to do, which was to climb up 45m to the Penitent bridge joining the two towers of Mary Magdalene Church. The walk was helped by making a fool of myself doing a few Instagram videos and the views from the top were worth the 247 steps.

That first step back down was the start of “on the way to the pub” and shortly after had a lager in front of my watching the world go by, followed by lots more lager and pleasant brief chats with other fans, something I do enjoy.

Peter met up with me a few hours later and after one final stein we made our way to the tram that would transport us to the ground. Absolutely packed as expected but a pleasant mix of home and away fans, arriving early enough not to be in a rush, and get two points to enjoy whilst watching the game!

We had great seats for the game, something I’m not used to. We got chatting about the starting line up and made a throwaway comment about Jonny Williams ‘only playing because he has a good song’ to no response. You could just tell the person I was speaking to was his father! But we did have a good chat during the game and at the airport on the way home.

Oh, guess who scored our goal? Yep, Jonny bloody Williams. I was very pleased for Mr Williams Snr, and had to apologise not because of my comments, but as I missed the goal to pop for a ciggy!! All that way, all that money, to miss the goal! Thanks.

The game was a very promising performance from Wales’ second string / youngsters and although we ultimately lost 2-1, we did take the lead and deserved a draw. It was an enjoyable occasion and many Poles commented good game etc etc on our trip back.

This is kinda where it ends. Being super sensible we chose to watch the Scotland v Ukraine game in the hotel with a McDonald’s. We were back out the hotel at 4am to travel 2 hours to Stansted then FIVE hours drive home! But still in time for our World Cup playoff with Ukraine in three days. Thanks for reading.

Update: I did get home. I was in time for Wales v Ukraine, Wales won, Wales are going to the World Cup! Yma o hyd.

Thanks for reading about my trip to Milan! As with a few blogs in 2022, I am only getting around to writing in the summer of 2023 so there’s going to be some information I have either forgotten or I am guessing from my rather poor memory!

Overview

Milan is the second largest city in Italy after Rome, regarded one of the four fashion capitals of the world. Being in the northern part of the county, France, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Germany, Slovenia and Croatia are all within a manageable drive.

Thinking about what Milan is famous for apart from fashion and the number of tourist attractions, I can’t really think of much else apart from football, and my research tends to support this. However, it’s a very nice place and worth a visit, even if it won’t be in our top places.

A bit more on that statement. We did have a really good time, but with little interest in fashion and people watching in cafes, I think a day trip could have just about been sufficient! Before and after our trip we have been to Lisbon, Paris and Stockholm and each of these provided more things to do in line with what we like. Thankfully, what made the trip the best it could have been were our two day trips. That’s not to say you won’t love it, you’re just less weird.

Flights & Accomodation

For this trip we decided to give EasyJet’s holiday packages a go. Booking the trip was quite flexible with a range of hotels and prices to consider. Flights and hotel for 4 nights from Bristol came in at around £250-300 each. I expect now, 14 months later, it will be difficult to find something that price.

We stayed in a Best Western City hotel near the Lima subway station, quite central being a 15 minute walk to the main train station. The hotel was perfectly adequate for the price and offered a really good breakfast included in the price.

It’s worth noting that Milan has two busy airports, the one we went to had a direct train to the station (below) so I assume the other has convenient routes in to the city too.

Getting Around

Like other European cities, travel options are plentiful, whether using bus, metro or train. I can’t remember pricing more specific than it was good value. One pass allows you to use buses and metro.

From Milan you can also have some great day trips within a few hours train journey. You’ll see we went to Lake Como and Verona/Lake Garda during our stay, Turin and Brescia were also quite close too.

Costs

Again with this section, my memory is failing me a bit. It is safe to say that you can base the costs on London, with eateries being more expensive closer to the cathedral or posh areas. Museums that we considered and visiting the cathedral didn’t seem over the top. The trains to day trips were almost certainly cheaper than in the UK.

I do remember though, having our first Five Guys for years. That memory sticks not because of the food, but the fifty fucking euro price tag for two burgers, two fries and two drinks! I would love to say I learnt my lesson but we did the same in Leicester Square earlier this year.

Things we didn’t do…

Gosh, this list has the potential to be never ending. Instead, have a read through what we actually did and match that up with the countless recommended itineraries online.

Churches and museums aren’t our thing; there’s loads of them to explore. You’ll see that we did want to see the famous ‘Last Supper’ painting but you really need to book in advance to avoid paying silly prices with a pointless tour guide.

Day trip-wise in addition to our two good shouts, you’ve got Turin, several places around Lake Garda, maybe even Venice, where at a push you could stay overnight should your trip to Milan be a week or more.

For the travel box tickers, The tiny country of Liechtenstein is a drive away. I did check at the time but it wasn’t really doable as a day trip using public transport.

Itinerary – What we did…

Day One – First look around & San Siro stadium

As we arrived in to Milan quite early, we hoped to have a good walk around the city today, else we would have really busy days later on and have to do more on days we planned tiresome day trips.

The metro system was very easy to understand and with our travel cards purchased, we headed for the #1 attraction, the square containing Milan Cathedral, or Duomo. We’ll visit that on day four…

From here we aimlessly walked around for somewhere to eat, trying to find somewhere nice, Italian but not ridiculously priced, which we did, for a proper pizza (I can’t remember if it was too much or not enough cheese, so I’ll stick to frozen Aldi versions for now!)

After a quick search, we identified that the Sforzesco castle was only a few minutes away, followed by a big park, a monument and then a metro on to what was next.
You could walk through the gates of the castle, or in more detail called a medieval-renaissance fortress, to explore the area.

I’m sure there’s some type of museum or exhibition in addition to artwork by Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo…. My second favourite turtle. I can’t recall why we didn’t explore the building in more detail, but with the park peaking through the archway on a glorious afternoon this looked more appealing.

Being Easter the Sempione park was full of people getting some rays and playing sports. The park was busy yet peaceful as we walked through to the Arca Della Pace (arch of Peace) triumphal monument.

From here we wanted to travel a bit out of centre to one of the furthest stops on the metro, north-west to the San Siro stadium, home of football teams AC Milan and Internazionale. I had been to this ground twice, to see Manchester United play each team once…. Losing 3-0 and drawing 0-0. A rather ‘shit’ story about this ground a bit later on, but on a positive note, the stadium is one of my all time favourites. The first time I was up in the gods as the sun was setting, and I do love a spiral walkway on an arena! It will be criminal if they knock it down as planned, although internally it looks very tired.

We checked for any tours without success so could only really browse the club shop, though this did offer a peak of the pitch. I was also able to give Zlatan Ibrahimovic (albeit a cardboard cutout) a few minutes off being the hardest bloke in the stadium.

For the rest of day one, I can’t think of anything else worth noting. We went back to Duomo in the evening for tea, which was our horrifically expensive Five Guys and an ice cream.

Day Two – Lake Como

I’ve double checked that we did actually bugger off from Milan as soon as day two, gambling we’d have more to write home about (literally…) than digging for stuff to do in Milan. It was a good decision. We chose to organise the day around Lake Como ourselves using trains and boats, but I’m sure there are tours suitable.

The train to Varenna was picturesque but very busy, I think we had to stand up for the whole 140 minute ride. After a short walk from the station you get a first look at Lake Como and what a site it was! The lake is one of the deepest in Europe and set against the Alps.

We stayed here for around 90 minutes, walking to the small town of shops near the waterfront along very narrow paths and LOTS of tourists. I did search for somewhere to have a swim in the lake, but as nobody else were like minded, I thought better of it. Maybe a bit later in the summer or off the beaten path….

From here we caught a boat to Bellagio, which was even prettier than stop one, like…. Really fucking pretty. We didn’t consider stopping here for lunch thankfully, and the one takeaway pizza place had a queue that climbed the steep narrow streets. Instead, we had a nice walk around and sit down by the pier as we waited for our next boat to Como.

Como was much more populated, obviously as a city, making it easier to stroll around the waterfront and town area. As we were now rather parched, we first had some lunch, my first ever “poke bowl”, and then a walk around including the gothic cathedral. Sad I didn’t take more photos.

From here, we could get the train back to Milan. Quite straightforward, but bloody hell what a journey! Cramped, standing and roasting! The slight respite I had watching the last Newport County game of the season on my phone was constantly interrupted by no signal. This wasn’t the worst train of the trip.

All in all it was a wholesome day. I would go as far as being a must do if you have 3+ days in Milan.

Day Three – Verona and Lake Garda

Another day on our trip to Milan, another trip outside Milan. The plan today was to visit Verona with a swim in Lake Garda on the way back.

Having spent too long on crowded trains yesterday, we bought first class tickets (nowhere near UK fares) and had a comfortable few hours travel.

It would be hard to argue that Verona is mostly known for being the setting of Romeo and Juliet, even though that story was completely made up. We found enough to do between a lovely stroll for it to be a great idea.

From the train, Verona centre is a little trek of about 30 minutes walk. That’s why I got an escooter back whilst Kay walked on her own. Such a gent. We weren’t engaged then so… *shrugs*.

You know you’re in the right place when you see their coliseum. Obviously a lot smaller than Rome but still a cracking bunch of rocks. I think it’s still used for concerts and the like.

Walking through the small town we headed to Juliet’s balcony. Again, absolute bullshit, but a tourist magnet. The balcony looked recently renovated in a small courtyard with some gift shops and a statue of Juliet. A statue, where if you rub her boob you get good luck or some other bollocks. Hmmmm.

Bemused by that episode, before lunch we ascended Torre dei Lamberti. Oh I do love pretending I’m not so overweight and unhealthy by lugging myself up steps.

It was worth the effort and the stairs were a lot more accommodating than some… the cathedrals in Valencia and Prague castle spring to mind.

After an early lunch we went on to a bridge that was suggested, an opportunity for a cracking photo. From here we had a riverside stroll back and on to the train station.

Our day wasn’t over yet though. One of the stops between Milan and Verona was Peschiera Del Garda Sirmione station, minutes away from the famous lake. With my feet now starting to hurt (a common occasion throughout the year, significantly exacerbated when on busy trips), I was hoping to find a spot where I could have a dip in the water, ignoring the Porta Brescia fortress that would otherwise be of more interest. Again, similar to Lake Como, it appeared to early in the year for such activity with the pebbled beach deserted. The only ones populating the water were the birds, enough to put me off with their shit-anywhere policy.

We had some food again, mainly just to rest the kankles and wait for our train back to Milan. It’s here where I took the photo below, bringing back the nightmare of my first visit to Milan that I mentioned earlier in the blog at the San Siro.

As a young pup in 2008 I did not expect this for a loo, at half time during a Champions League semi final. Let’s just say I left the stadium one pair of pants lighter, and now always ensure I have a pack of tissues to hand. It’s not all girls and fast cars, kids.

On the way back to the station I did manage to give my feet a quick soak for some respite.

This was needed, as the 2+ hour train back to Milan was the worst in memory. It was baking and standing room only. I managed to sit on the floor for 5 minutes before it came even busier. I’m writing that sentence having a relaxed beer in a posh hotel in Turkey, appreciative that there’s probably some poor bugger on that train now.

One final point about Lake Garda, do your research and go somewhere nicer. I have no doubt some areas are on a par with our Lake Como locations. We just wanted to visit quickly to say we had been there.

Day Four – Duomo and some other bits

For our last day we planned to visit the cathedral and force ourselves to do a bit more in Milan. I’d like to say we had loads left to do having gone on two day trips, but nah, not really. We did try.

I would put a visit up to the Cathedral as a must do. We got our tickets with a really early timeslot and decided on stairs over the lift. Bear in mind I think the lift doesn’t go all the way up (check this). Thankfully the stairs were not that troublesome as you entered to high up on the side of the building, before a further climb where you’ll actually be walking on the roof!

You’ve got really good views of the square in front of you and pretty much all of Milan. The towering San Siro was a spec on the horizon (by the crane in the pic).

Aside from the views, the architecture and detail was a sight to behold, following the linear path after the roof, down towards the stairway that leads in to the cathedral interior.

FML I have to write about the inside of a church again…. Not my strong point. From what I remember, it was impressive inside but not on a par with the outside.

… and it had a lovely stained glass window. There.

The rest of the day wa spent visiting a few places, first by walking around after the cathedral and then a few buses or metro.

This included walking through the famous Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II fashion arcade. Might offend people calling it an arcade lolz. I did take a few photos of some of the garments on sale, but in hindsight I don’t think they’re going to benefit from further advertisement on my blog. I wonder if Gucci or Prada want to chuck us some money? Do they do anything in XXL?

Without making a purchase (shock), we seen more splendid bits of architecture towards a Leonardo Da Vinci statue, that was good timing as we made our was to the Santa Maria delle Grazie church, the home of The Last Supper, one of the most famous pieces of art in the world.

If you remember the start of the blog, this place was actually something we didn’t do. Unfortunately buying a ticket on the day is near impossible, unless you are willing to pay €40-80 on a pointless guide. The place only has two rooms!

What happens, I think, is that all the local ‘tour guides’ buy the tickets for a tenner… ALL the tickets… Then only sell them on TripAdvisor etc. with a probably rubbish and unnecessary person. If you really want to go, make sure you buy them as soon as you can in advance, or pay the premium. We were disappointed to miss out bit everything has its value.

Anyway, we took a photo and went to our last stop, the Monumental Cemetery. How cheerful. For obvious reasons I didn’t take any photos inside, but we enjoyed a final stroll before the journey home.

No issues I remember getting home. To summarise, we had a nice time, it wasn’t in our top 10, and it was made better by visiting Lake Como and Verona. If you’ve been to and loved Milano please share any useful ideas and I’ll update.

Thanks for reading.

After another European Covid rise over Christmas 2021, including a cancelled trip to Gdansk, I was very pleased to set off for the first trip of 2022!

(Note I started this blog in March 2022 but didn’t finish it off until May 2023!)

Overview

Lisbon is the capital city of Portugal. I have visited Portugal before for a brief trip to Porto to watch Manchester United play way back in 2009 (yes THAT Ronaldo goal) – most of which was spent in a pub – so it did feel as though I was visiting a new country. We chose Portugal for the nice weather in February and interesting things to see both in Lisbon itself and a few nearby excursions.

The direct flight from Bristol took less than two hours and the airport is quite central. Our hotel “Lisbon 5” was a little smaller than expected but really well located being a 15 minute walk to the main square(s) and a few minutes from the nearest metro station. The breakfast was limited even for a continental offering but worth the minimal additional cost.

Getting around

The city centre is easily accessible from the airport as it is part of the metro line. There are loads of travel options to get around the centre of Lisbon. Trams (including the apparently famous #28), trains, metro, buses all run on a very frequent basis and Google Maps worked well to plan your journey.

The centre is surrounded by hills, which was a bit of a concern (being fat and lazy) but there is so much to see walking around it won’t feel strenuous. Some locations even have escalators, lifts and funiculars!

Our two excursions to Cascais and Sintra really added something extra to our trip, and although each around an hour train ride away, is included in a 24-hour travel pass that works on all public transport. The daily €10 fee added up but well worth it.

Things to do

I will cover a lot of the sights in the itinerary below. If you want just a city break I reckon 2-3 days will be enough – like many European capitals in my opinion. We don’t tend to stay long in restaurants or have drinks in the evening, although most days we had a few hours ‘siesta’ back in the hotel and still comfortably seen everything we wanted to in our 3 full days and-a-bit, this including two half-days seeing places outside of the City.

As usual, I tend to avoid churches and museums in favour of panoramic views and football stadiums, so please look around for the endless offerings the City has to offer. You could be a proper tourist and get a guide book, my personal preference being the Marco Polo ones, but nearly everywhere I go I plan using various websites and other blogs (the lesser known / harder to find ones tend to be more fruitful). Everywhere is so accessible I wouldn’t worry too much about not seeing everything you want to see.

Costs

It has been over a month since I’ve returned home so I’m already a bit rusty on prices. Easyjet flights from Bristol and four nights in a 3* hotel cost around £500, but I’ve noticed the cost of flights have jumped a bit going in to 2022. Spending also worked out to be around £500 for both of us. £50 each per day isn’t bad is it?

A tenner should look after your travel per day – a bargain if you use it a lot. Food was cheaper than I expected, similar to UK prices. The busy but basic centrally-located outside café bars were around £10 each for food and a drink, but there’s a big choice of dinner restaurants that were really nice and great value. I’m sure you could pay a lot more if you decide to and chuck a couple of cocktails on to the bill.

Itinerary – What we did

Day One

Our flight didn’t land until 6pm so this took up most of the day, I think we left the hotel to go out around 8:30pm.

We walked to towards the centre ending up in the biggest square/plaza in Lisbon “Praça do Comércio”. First impressions weren’t brilliant as to get here through the streets we lost count of how many times we were offered marijuana variants or stronger, although it was busy enough to feel safe.

From the plaza you get a first look at the huge Golden Gate-style bridge spanning the river Tagus, with a Rio-style Christ the Redeemer statue lit up looking over the city. Copyright laws may not exist in Portugal.

We walked along the harbour scattered with the odd beach until we found our dinner destination. Time Out food markets are popping up all over the place in major cities and this was our first experience. An old converted marked space with 50+ food stalls offering octopus to foie gras (no taa) to chicken biryani to burgers! A bit pricey but a good atmosphere and literally too much choice! Since my visit, Newport market has also opened with something similar and (looking at my socials) the feedback has been bloody fantastic.

Following food we walked to the nearest metro station (literally outside) and started to get familiar with the four lines, making our way back to the hotel. A very good use of our first two hours.

Day Two

With not having any concrete plan for the day we weighed up our options for the day and decided to visit the Castle of St George. Not only did this tick the box of panoramic views to get our bearings, we could also catch the tram uphill most of the way. You may not know about the Lisbon tram system if you haven’t been before, but you soon realise it’s a tourist magnet. I knew to avoid peak times and we thought we were early enough to avoid large queues at stop one near our hotel, but still had to wait for 2 to go by before squeezing on to the third. The trams – also a nod to San Francisco alongside the bridge – is tiny considering the demand, but with good reason as if it was any wider or longer it simply would not creep up the steep, narrow meandering streets that give access to the old town. It was comparable to a rollercoaster with the uncomfortable sudden jolts and how it defies fitting through seemingly impossible tight corners and streets.

We left the tram about half way up the hill leading to the castle and hoped to find the smoothest route possible uphill to reach our destination. This ultimately involved a lot of steps but with the scenery and culture evident the walk was enjoyable. The castle entry cost around €10 and you are immediately treated to what I consider to be the best view of the city – as it’s likely to be the highest and most open.

Taking in the scenery, and 100 photo’s later we walked through the castle grounds, delightfully perambulated by peacocks! The birds were free to roam wherever and continuously opened their feathers to show off to their fans snapping pictures (apart from the time I tried to take one obviously…). The castle ruins were cool to have a wander and climb around and there is an exhibition you can enter.

Moving on from the castle, we caught the bus down in to the flat central area (how the bus got down there I’m not sure). It was a bit early for lunch so we visited the Santa Justa lift. The purpose of the lift, located near the posh-but-not-poshest shopping arears is to transport people up some 45 meters instead of having to walk up one of the steeper hills. Perhaps overkill compared to an escalator, but the 19th century industrial age piece is rather unique.

The queue was short but it did take an age to get up to the top and the €5 fee was a bit “steep”. All in all I thought it was underwhelming as a tourist attraction, but something that one should tick off during a trip, not forgetting the fact that I didn’t have to walk up a bloody hill! Once disembarking at the top over the raised walkway we passed the ‘Carmo Convent’ housing medieval ruins and archaeology museum, but chose to walk through the quieter area winding down to the increasingly busy shopping streets back to the lift base. Time for lunch.

I can’t quite get my head around the fact we did so much during this day, but after a quick rest stop in the hotel and to ‘borrow’ a towel, we headed back out to visit Cascais, a seaside resort an hour to the east of Lisbon. A swim in the sea mid February? Yes please.

We weren’t the only ones with that idea and the populated train took us to a bustling village area that led to a handful of beachy areas. Not wanting to miss out, I stripped off and spent 30 minutes having a float. Maybe I like the sea/swimming as it’s a place of tranquility away from your mobile phone and (even better) people.

Another little ramble around the village took us to a bus stop where we were able to visit Boca do Inferno “Hell’s mouth”. Not really as terrifying as the name suggests… it was a wonderful cliff top view overlooking the coast, but the crashing waves against the rocks raising 20+ meters in the air was a sight to behold.

We grabbed the public bus back to the station, choosing to have food in the nearby shopping mall during sunset before making our way back to Lisbon. That was enough for one day? Not quite.

I checked the Benfica website numerous times before our visit in the hope of getting tickets to Benfica v Ajax in the Champions League on day three, but website purchases were only available if you had Portuguese ID. Any excuse to visit the stadium.

The stadium looks really easy to access but both metro stations nearby involve a ridiculous amount of guessing how and where to cross the fenced highway. We managed to find a subway through a closed but unlocked gate and finally accessed the perimeter of the stadium. No shock to find the ticket office was completely the other side of the 65,000 seater arena.

We didn’t hold much hope being able to buy tickets once we finally asked, but surprisingly the chap had a look at his computer and stated there were only TWO tickets left in the whole bloody stadium, €75 each and although in the same section, not next to each other, which was unfortunately the deal breaker. It would have been a great experience (it ended 2-2) but I was over it quickly.

Finally, our next destination was back to the hotel.

Day Three

Mikayla tells me I was rather difficult to wake up this morning, not surprising after yesterdays adventures. We were pleased to stay more local today, firstly visiting the aforementioned Golden Gate style “25th April” bridge connecting Lisbon to…. um… the place south of Lisbon over the river. Why the name you ask? It was named after the Carnation Revolution that took place on the 25 April 1974 and dictator Salazar’s regime was overturned. There ya go.

A recent little hobby of mine around the streets of European cities has been to hire the odd eScooter (not always sober) but until today never convinced Mikayla to have a go. There was no better time than when we departed the nearest train station to the bridge, as there was a flat, quiet promenade all the way to the bridge, perfect scooting atmosphere bar the cobbled terrain. Saving about 19 hours instead of walking to the bridge we both sailed along the shore and only approaching the bridge do you realise its stature, it’s f***ing massive!

Bizarrely, you couldn’t tell from the photos it’s painted bright red!

Back past the way we came there is also a monument dedicated to Portuguese explorers “Padrão dos Descobrimentos”, and there’s quite a few of them. Located along the river where ships departed to explore and trade with the wider world, the monument celebrates the Portuguese Age of Discovery.

We could have visited the Belem tower at this point, which we should have, but luckily squeezed it in the next night.

That was pretty much it for the morning. I recall my feet struggling so we probably had a few hours in the hotel, whilst trying to find out what else to do. That choice was to visit the 25th April monument this time, with its not quite park, not quite field, not quite garden area leading down to the Avenue de Liberdade, a leafy boulevard including the who’s who’s of fashion. Gucci, Prada, Versace, and lots of others I have never heard of . How the other half live eh?

Back to central civilization (i.e. a McDonalds in view) and thinking about tea, we had somewhat of a lightbulb movement and chose to ride the #28 tram to pass half and hour (which turned out to be 90 minutes).

This was a great time filler for the evening. The route started uphill visiting the steep east side of the City central area before going out a few miles west, and back. I should really provide more information on the places we saw on the route but I’ve only got to writing this section in May 2023, 15 months later! One sight I can recall was the Estrela Basilica, the first church in the world dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Lovely.

Once back in the centre I recall having a quite extravagant Indian/kebab platter of food that was really good value based on location and with the footy on the tele. Thinking back to it now, it’s actually bloody worth a mention… a quick Google confirms it was the Aagan restaurant on the western side of Martim Moniz square, just over the road from the Tram 28 start point. Very full, we bounced the short distance back to the hotel to plan our final day.

Day four

A day trip away from the main destination can be a bit risky sometimes on a last day, especially if you come across something smack bang in the middle of Lisbon you didn’t already do, but I must say our decision to visit the village of Sintra, specifically the Park and National Palace of Pena was a bit of a master stroke.

Sintra is about an hour away on the train and still included in the Lisbon area travel pass. It is a very remote village, quickly swelling with tourists to see a colourful castle that wouldn’t look out of place in a Disney Movie. Add to this, it sits on top of a cliff so the views from the castle are outstanding.

Various independent tour guides and buses are impossible to miss when leaving the train station. I recall them not exactly being cheap, but your options to explore the various buildings and ruins are limited, along the narrow, hilly roads. We chose to get off at the stop before Pena castle and have a forestry walk from there. This sounded nice, but we didn’t take in to account that once we were at the castle entrance, there is a significant bloody hill to climb before seeing the good stuff.

It was worth it. Again I’ll remind you I’m writing this 15 months after our visit, so the internal aspects of the building have since been nearly forgotten, but the views and narrow walk along the outside of the towers were cool, albeit a bit discomforting for the larger gentleman.

Returning back to the village, there wasn’t a lot here apart from the odd cafe so we headed back to Lisbon for food and a banging ice cream, planning on one last thing to do before our early flight home the next morning.

It was an easy decision to visit the Belem Tower (Torre de Belem) in the evening. We caught a bus here simply to have a more relaxed journey.

The tower is a Portuguese national monument and a UNESCO World Heritage sight. Although a ‘fortified’ structure, of little use given the location and the vast shore of the river, it was better used as a ceremonial gateway to Lisbon, a spot to see off or welcome back explorers of past times.

The building itself was closed for exploration, being the evening, but it was an impressive structure and worth a visit even though it’s a little out from the centre.

We really should have squeezed in a trip to the Sporting Lisbon stadium this evening too, but hopefully I’ll have an opportunity to visit again – would be a great Wales football away trip.

A final note of an unfortunate memory from our journey back from the tower was that it coincided with Russia’s first attacks and intended invasion on Ukraine. Recalling happy memories from this trip has been difficult given the time that has since passed, but it is impossible to imagine what these 15 months has been like for anyone affected by the conflict.