easy hiking trails in Europe
Here is a tip if you face an acute what-to-do-with-the kids emergency in Barcelona. If you are visiting the Catalan capital with teenage kids in tow who have become ever so slightly rebellious after three days of art nouveau, hallucinogenic architecture and the musty smell of museum corridors take them to Girona (it’s a little…
Castellar is a vaguely picturesque medieval village just to the north of Menton on the French Riviera, and on its own (we might as well be honest about this), it is not worth the trip. Castellar’s 972 inhabitants may hate me for saying this, but such are the risks of boldly speaking truth to power….
What constitutes a “beautiful landscape”? Opinions on this may vary, but most people will agree on at least one of the five reasons why rivers make great travel companions. A a beautiful landscape must contain some …. 1. Body of water For the simple reason that we are programmed to find beautiful what is good…
Over the years, this blog has featured many different kinds of walks for different occasions: exhausting hikes as well as gentle strolls, explorations of the wild and urban walks with a cultural theme, walks for summer and walks for winter, walks that you can spread over several days and walks that you can squeeze in between…
Enough about painters and the French Riviera! Entire books have been written about the way in which the great modernists of European painting – from Monet to Picasso – fell in love with the lights and the sights and the colours of southern France. You don’t even have to go to the library to read…
Today’s post sets out to prove that, no matter how gloomy and unpromising the area (and the weather) may look, you can still have fun. Just put on your walking shoes and a raincoat – an extra layer of clothes if it’s cold – and go out for a hike or even a brief walk….
W. G. Sebald and The Rings Of Saturn, the greatest literary work about hiking The book deals – as you may suspect – not only with hiking but with a great many other things besides, but its central conceit is a long walk that the author undertakes along the coast of East Anglia, the peninsula…
Now that we have established that the local food alone is worth a trip to Barcelona (by eating a lot of it, intrepid adventurers that we are), only one question remains: how do we get all those calories off our waistlines? Well, by walking, of course. I am sure you had already figured that out…
In our last post, we talked about something that Mediterranean countries do not, on the whole, do very well – Christmas, or, to be more precise, the “universal” (but in fact Northern European-North American) version of it. Today’s post, conversely, is about something which lies very much in Southern Europe’s comfort zone: food. Which is…
Don’t we all just love the Mediterranean! And aren’t we grateful that we have its wonderful countries: for their food, their joie de vivre, the refuge they offer us at this or, indeed, any other time of the year. Having said that, we must also admit that these countries are not perfect and that there…