Tag Archives: Sicily

As time passes by our interest change – activities and hobbies I’ve outgrown or lost interest in

Leave a reply

Are there any activities or hobbies you’ve outgrown or lost interest in over time?

– Jetpack prompt

As I reinvigorate my blog I’m experimenting with different approaches to posts. In my early stages I used regular prompts as an approach, so here I go.

Riding in Sicily

There are many activities and hobbies I’ve grown out of. No surprise there, I’m on the wrong side of 65.

The one that quickly came to mind was stamp collecting. As a primary school child and early teenager, I was an avid collector. I wasn’t the beneficiary of a parent or grand parent’s collection, so I started from scratch. I say that because I used to look on at envy at those who had old albums full of interesting stamps. Mine however was just ‘bog standard’. Aussie stamps collected from envelopes, swapped and bought over time. For a while my sister and I went to a local stamp club where we’d buy a few stamps, as my own swaps weren’t of much interest. I also built up a collection of First Day Covers. However, as I grew older I simply lost interest, and today I’m not sure I even know where my stamp collection is.

Continue reading →

The Diary of a Slow Traveler – Amateur Traveler and other blogs

6 Replies

As we start to plan our next trip I found myself immersed in travel books and searching the web for inspiration.

I love travel books, travel programs and just surfing the web about travel. I am watching Michael Portello’s train journeys at the moment. Even Escape to The Country and Escape to the Continent have provided useful travel trips. Travel books are fun, but more recently I have found that they are more useful to people planning their trips than to us!

So I thought I’d mention how we have used blogs and forums and some of the sources we have relied upon for inspiration and valuable information in our travel.

I found out about rail travel from the man in seat 61. Relying on Mark Smith’s advice I have graduated from having the travel agent book my train travel to being completely comfortable travelling through Europe, reading timetables and making my own bookings. Sure I have missed trains and misread timetables but that has led to some pretty amazing experiences like an unforgettable Bastille weekend in Paris when we should have been on the train to the Amalfi Coast!

As we plan our trips I type a country or place into the search engine and see what I can find.  Continue reading →

Diary of a Slow Traveller – You miss one train…

7 Replies

 

St Emilion

I was reading one of my favourite travel blogs, Picnic at The Cathedral and WOB’s hilarious reflections on missing a bus in Poland  and was immediately reminded of missing a train in Bordeaux on Bastille weekend and the repercussions of missing that one train!

Some years age my favourite person and I were traveling through Europe with our youngest daughter, who was about fifteen at the time.

We had arranged a train trip from Bordeaux to Taormina. Yes I  know, this involves going across the water and trains don’t normally travel over water, but in Italy they sort of do! They barge the carriages from the mainland across to Messina and then you continue your journey. We thought it sounded like fun.

St Emilion

Back to the story. We were staying in St Emilion and needed to drive back to Bordeaux railway station to drop the car off and then board the train to Paris, travel across Paris to catch another train to Amalfi where we’d planned a couple of days sightseeing before re-boarding the train to travel onto Taormina. As I write this it now seems so obvious it wasn’t going to be straight forward but I didn’t expect it to turn sour even before we boarded our train in Bordeaux.

After a delightful Saturday morning in St Emilion, we allowed ourselves what we considered to be a more than ample time (two and half hours) to get to the Bordeaux train station. I allowed this time because the previous year I’d been in Bordeaux for work and seen how busy the traffic was.

So all packed and seemingly with plenty of time, we loaded the address into the GPS and set off for the station. Continue reading →

Diary of a Slow Traveller – Catania, Palermo, Naples – three cities that you must visit

6 Replies

Palermo Cathederal entrance

Palermo Cathedral entrance

 

It would be fair to say that when you think of three cities that you must visit, it’s doubtful that Catania, Palermo and Naples immediately come to mind? However they are each cities with enormous character and personality. Each enjoys a reputation of being dark, dirty, unruly and not safe.

The words of warning are appropriate but so are the reasons to visit!

We took the opportunity to visit all three on our last trip to Italy.

While we had visited Palermo twice before, we had steered clear of Catania and Naples previously, due to the general commentary around safety. So  as I said, on our last visit to Italy we decided to visit both Catania and Naples as well as revisiting Palermo. Infact, we enjoyed each of them so much that we made a return trip to Catania while we were in Sicily and extended our stay in Naples. We also wished we’d allowed a little more time for Palermo.

Each of these cities have their own personalities. Continue reading →

The Diary of a Slow Traveller – Do I need a car?

4 Replies

Does Slow Travel require a car? The notion of Slow Travel by its very nature suggests not being in a hurry and being in control. A car gives you flexibility and allows control as to where you’ll go so it would seem a car goes hand-in-hand with Slow Travel.

So why wouldn’t you drive?

For some of us the challenge is that we drive on the left hand side of the road meaning that to drive in Europe, USA and many other destinations you need to unlearn everything you have been taught.

For all of us there is the challenge of reading signs in a foreign language and learning new road rules, or quickly becoming aware that road rules make little difference to the way the locals drive.

My driving exploits in foreign locations have been the source of many laughs. My four attempts to see the sign to the airport as I zipped around the roundabout on the outskirts of Palermo are regularly brought out by favourite person and daughter when we discuss driving in Europe.

Continue reading →