As much as I love Andalucia and spending time here, I also love to travel. Over the years I’ve travelled to five continents and over 30 countries (mostly in my pre-blogging days).
While Andalucia lends itself exceptionally well to day trips and weekends away within Spain it’s also a perfect base for European city breaks, road trips to neighbouring countries, and short ferry rides to Morocco.
On this page I’ll be sharing posts about places I go on my travels to hopefully inspire you to visit too.
2020. Definitely the strangest year I’ve ever experienced (and that’s an understatement) which means it probably seems a pointless exercise to write one of my annual travel reviews. At the start of the year I made the decision to quit my job so I could concentrate on my blog, with the plan being to spend …
Tavira in Portugal’s Algarve region is just 25 kms from the Spanish border. Tavira sits on the banks of the Rio Gilao and, thanks to its proximity to Spain, its Moorish influences are very much in evidence as you walk around the town. It didn’t take me long to realise that Tavira is insanely pretty …
Your gap year is over and you need to think about getting a job after all your travelling . Don’t panic, help is at hand! As a HR Manager in my non-travel blogging life (and author of a book about finding and keeping a job you love), I’ve seen thousands of CVs over the years …
Berlin is a city with a dark past. When you consider the part it played in the Nazi atrocities of the Third Reich and the building of a wall that divided the city during the Cold War, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s a depressing place to head for a break. You’d be …
I celebrated a big birthday last year and wanted to make it one to remember so, after much deliberation about where in the world I’d like to be when I hit a half century, decided on a safari in Kenya. To get a full safari experience (and increase our odds of spotting the ‘big five’) …
I’ll be honest. It wasn’t that long ago that I’d never even heard of Chefchaouen. However, when planning a weekend trip to Tangier and browsing Instagram I was captivated by the images of this beautiful blue city. Just over 100 kms from Tangier, Chefchaouen is a popular spot with tourists drawn to the town by …
I thought I’d finish the year with a roundup of my favourite travel moments of 2019. Whereas 2018 was filled with lots of short breaks (or microbreaks as the latest buzz word seems to be) in and around Andalucia, this year we’ve ventured further afield a few times. Unfortunately, I don’t have the most generous …
One of my favourite parts of the festive season is decorating the Christmas tree. Over the years I’ve started a collection of baubles and tree ornaments from my travels and, to be honest, no trip is complete these days without trying to track a new one down. I don’t always manage it but I give …
There are certain things I don’t leave home without. As I live in Spain and work in Gibraltar my usual front door mantra of ‘keys, phone, purse’ has now expanded to include passport. Forget that and I can’t cross the frontier to get to work – perhaps not always a bad thing! Passport aside, here …
Writing about backpacking before the internet carries the risk of making me sound like an old fogey (although I am now over 50 so I do feel slightly entitled to a certain level of grumpiness!). However, I can’t help feeling that these days we’ve all got it easy when it comes to seeing the world.
My first backpacking experience was in the summer of 1988 when a friend and I went inter-railing during the university summer break. Armed with a copy of ‘Europe by Train’ (which took up far too much room in my backpack) and the Thomas Cook European Railway timetable (which took up even more) Wendy and I were like a female version of Michael Portillo with his trusty Bradshaw’s guides.
(more…)
