Our Travel Blog

Yet again I managed to avoid the “Full English”! Our plan today was to visit a wild life park to make a change from driving.

After breakfast we headed out to the car park to find the damaged wall from the other day being repaired. This wall has no mortar and is only held together by the placement of the stones on each other. The stone mason had been working for about 90 minutes and already had half the job complete. We spoke to him for a few minutes, his is a dying trade. The youth of today weren’t prepared to put in the work needed to learn the skills required. As he put it, all the youngsters were interest in was jobs that could be done on their mobile phones that paid a lot of money!!

We then headed out in the car and followed the main roads this time and found the park. It was crazy, even at 10:00 the car park was mobbed and there were people everywhere. We decided to abandon that plan.

Being interested in aircraft and knowing RAF Fairford was home to a number of large military aircraft including B-1’s and B-52’s we headed off there. Obviously this has been a popular destination, there are literally hundreds of no parking cones along the roads surrounding the airfield. Obviously these little cone can be moved, thereby creating a “legal” parking spot. We did NOT move the cones, but someone else had, so we parked there for a while. Even then it was difficult to see the aircraft through the miles of razor wire.

It was only after taking a few shots that I saw this sign ….. Oooooops

From there we headed into the local town to buy some essentials for home. Bars of Cadbury’s chocolate and Penguin Biscuits!!

We meandered around the area looking for lunch, we did take a couple of back lanes in the process but I survived. We found a country pub so pulled in for lunch. We grabbed an outside table and I went into order. On the way out I had to negotiate a rather heavy spring loaded door while carrying 2 pint glasses. I was so pleased to get through without spilling anything that I didn’t notice the next door was only 5ft 9 inches tall. I’m 6ft. Ouch!!!! but I didn’t spill anything.

From here we just took a lazy route back to the hotel for some down time. Vacationing is so tiring!

As we entered the car park we noticed the wall had been finished!

Once back I decided to wander into the village to look for a geocache, and to take some photos. I couldn’t find the geocache so I stopped at the village green to watch some cricket!

We’ve never stays at a 5* hotel before, but now we have stayed at a 5* inn. Look carefully, you can count the stars on the bottom of the black and yellow sign.

Last night we noticed a large BMW in the parking lot, in front of the BMW was the remains of a stone wall. Hanging around the BMW were an elderly couple (beyond my age!) and a collection of walking sticks. My first assumption ws that the said BMW had an argument with said wall. However this seemed unlikely as at the front of each parking spot was one of those long concrete beams to stop forward motion. Puzzling, until I looked closer, the concrete beam ws about 2 inches shorter than the distance between the inside of the front wheels! Amazingly there was very little obvious damage to the BMW.

This morning I avoided the temptation of the full English and went for poached eggs and toast (and maybe a sausage). I am beginning to live in fear of the scales when we get home.

Today Lyn had planned a circular tour of the local area. It may be boring for you, but we are happy driving around looking at the scenery rather than stopping off in towns and museums. Lyn was a little worried as this tour came from the AA Book od the Road, 1978 edition!

Many decades ago I was perfectly happy bombing around the countryside and country lanes at the legal speed limit (or more!). At the start of this trip even half the speed limit was enough to give me white knuckles. Slowly the confidence has returned and I’m up to about 80%. Below are a few shots of the roads, they are about one and a half times the width of car in the wide places, narrower places can have the hedges on withe side brushing the car. There are “passing places” every few hundred yards. Passing places often being defined as worn down hedgerow either side of the road where a car can squeeze into. Below may look like driveways to peoples houses, they are not, they are two way roads!

As we are in the Cotswolds, which is a range of hills, we had some amazing views across valleys, unfortunately I find these views are not well reproduced in photos (I need lessons!!)

At one place we stopped we found a flock of sheep just sleeping in the field. They were totally oblivious to us humans.

We also passed an old Abbey, built around 1248, so we stopped for a few pictures.

The oldest gravestone we could decipher was from 1762

Of course every Abbey needs a Manor House

And every Manor House needs a (green) horse and carriage.

We had lunch in a village pub and then then went off in search of the Cotswolds Falconry where there were a number of birds of prey. I won’t bore you with lots of bird pictures, mainly because it’s beer o’clock!

You’ve got to love the village names around here, we’re in Lower Slaughter, so of course there has to be…….

Collectively known as the Slaughters.

Settled into the hotel OK last night. We’re now just getting our head around the price of things over here, they are HIGH! At breakfast (price included with the room) the first item on the menu was a “Full English”, eggs, bacon, sausage potatoes, mushrooms, tomato and black pudding. I forwent the black pudding, you can google it if you want, it’s too gross to describe here!! After the cruise, I was determined to cut down on size of breakfast, but………

After breakfast Lyn did a bit of route planning and off we went. The goal today was to meet a school friend of mine who I have known on and off for about 67 years! Again we toured the back roads to get there and back. We met up in a town called Witney. The Cotswolds towns are a mega tourist attraction evidently, however we survived and met up with Barbara.

As usual I will be lazy and dump a whole load of pictures, may be more interesting to those across the pond. Our first stop was Bourton-on-the-Water

From there we drove onto Whitney, which was a bit of a zoo. They were digging up the high street and there seemed to be a market in progress as well. There were cars and tourists everywhere. The only thing lacking were parking spaces. Many years ago when we lived in the UK it was no problem parking the car in a space only a few feet longer than the car, now I need about 3 car lengths of space to park!! Below are some shots of Whitney.

As you can see in the last picture, they have a strange habit of decorating mail boxes!

After a very pleasant lunch with Barbara we headed back to the car, which had exceeded its allotted parking time by 30 minutes (without penalty), and went wandering along some more back roads until we passed through the village of Churchill where we stopped for a wander. Churchill was typical of many of the villages in the area. Again more photos.

Above is the style of wall found around the area, it is used to delineate boundaries, both private properties and large fields.

Tomorrow will be more touring.

After docking at Southampton we took an Uber to the train station. then by train to Gatwick airport to pick up the car. When I first looked at cars it was around $1200 for 9 nights, sort of what I was expecting to pay. I then checked Expedia thane price dropped to $459 with free cancellation.Much better. I realised the day before picking up the car that I had booked it too early and that they may not hang on to it. Tried changing with the hire company, but the only way to do that was to cancel and rebook, with the chance of no cars being available. I checked again on Expedia and the price was now $350 with cancellation, but wait a minute, we’re here, we don’t need cancellation protection. The new price $243. I booked it then canceled the old one! When we picked up the car it was a hybrid, to book the hybrid would have cost twice as much. I was very happy with $25 (Canadian) per day!!

We spent a couple of nights with friends, then headed down to Christchurch, on the coast for the reunion. We had great time catching up with people we hadn’t seen for 50 years, it was a huge success! We headed out this morning (Wednesday) to make our way up to Little Slaughter, in the Cotswolds (Jim and Ruth this is the home of Midsommer Murders!!) We took the back roads, the traffic was fine and the scenery was great.

We arrived at the hotel, an old Manor house type building with what appeared to be a number of cottages associated. It turns out our room was one of these cottages with living area downstairs and bedroom up. Quite luxurious, and reflected in the price of meals in the dining room. We’ll try some of the local restaurants while we’re here I think.

Tomorrow we’ll do some more touring, and we’re meeting up with an old school friend of mine for lunch.

Ok, trying to get back on track. Yesterday we arrived in another new country, Norway. It was a fairly short stop as we arrived at 0800 and departed (in theory) at 1530. We may have been a little late!

As you should know by now we are attending the 50th anniversary of my graduation from ATC college next week. One of the course members got married to a Norwegian girl while on the course. He emigrated to Norway 40 years ago. Unfortunately his wife is have problems walking so they had to cancel, fortunately they live in Kristiansand, so we spent the morning with them. They have a beautiful apartment about 10 minutes from the terminal overlooking the water. We had a good time reminiscing!

We had a quick trip back to the ship for lunch, then off on our final excursion. Again, a simple sight seeing tour round the local area, then off to a vintage steam railway for a short ride through the country side.

Leaving Kristiansand there were still areas that had the old wooden houses, other areas were brick after fire consumed many of the wooden structures.

Below is a church on the outskirts

We followed a river for many miles, the scenery here was very similar to the Scottish Highlands

Of course as we approached the railway station the rain started! The railway is about 120 years old, it used to connect the valley area with the town, a distance of around 48 miles. Since it closed in the ’60’s about 8miles of the track have been saved to allow the train to run.

Today’s useless trivia, for the 8 mile journey the train consumed 1000 liters of water and 250kg of coal.

All carriages were 3rd class!

The picture above was typical of the many rapids we passed. At the bottom of the picture running right to left is a “flume”. It is a wooden channel constructed to hold flowing water down which trees are sent to the lumber yards. Today all the trees are transported by road, and the flume has been converted to a walking path.

For some reason at the end of the journey they gave us 45 minutes free time. We were in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to do!! As it turned out this didn’t leave us enough time to get back to the boat before the “all aboard” time. We were about 20 minutes late. As this was a tour organized by the boat company we knew we were not going to be left behind!!

This pretty much brings the cruise part of the trip to an end. We’ve enjoyed the trip, a smaller ship would have been preferable, but we survived! Visiting the Nordic countries had been on our bucket list, and we weren’t disappointed. Overall the weather behaved, let’s hope that continues. A serious diet has to start soon!

Tomorrow morning we dock in Southampton, and then take a train to Gatwick Airport where we pick up a rental car. We then spend a couple of nights with friends, a couple of nights at the reunion then it’s off to the Cotswolds next Wednesday. I’ll start the blog again in the Cotswolds.

Yesterday was a sea day so I took break! Today we were fairly busy so just a couple of photos and I’ll do todays blog tomorrow as it is another sea day!

We passed under the Øresund bridge, this is an impressive structure connecting Sweden and Denmark. There is a 4.8 mile bridge, then an artificial island then a 2.5 mile tunnel. The island is composed of the excavations from the tunnel.

I really must take lessons on using the camera instead of relying on the auto settings! Below are a couple of experiments with the sunset, taken around 10PM. Further north the sun set just before 11pm and rose around 0330 AM

One thing I’ve found on this cruse is that google watches, phones and Microsoft can never agree on the right time! This resulted in an unplanned lie in this morning!

We arrived in Visby around 0800 this morning, we had originally planned a hop-on hop-off bus tour, but this ws canceled for “operational reasons”. After a little googling it appears hop-on hop-off have vacated Visby! By now it was too late to book another tour so we decided to walk into the old city.

After a late breakfast we headed out for the walk. Visby is the main town on the island of Gotland, about 200kms south of Stockholm in the Baltic.

Our walk took us over a metal bridge crossing the highway, then a long a gravel path into town. This time of year there were plenty of flowers in bloom.

On past a small waterfall

Then into the edge of the town about 2km later.

Once in town we had no specific plans, but as we turned the corner we say one of those touristy “railway trains” that run on the road. It would give us a 30 minute tour around the the town.

At the time we didn’t take the phrase “around the town” too literally, but that is what it did, it took us around the outside of the walled city. Below are a series of pictures, mostly of the city walls and various gates. The walls were built back in the 1200’s not to keep foreign attackers out, but to keep farmers from outside the town out! seems Visby wanted all foreign trade in foodstuffs to themselves.

Once off the “train” it was time to get some sustenance to prepare us for more exercise, an after eight gelato fitted the bill nicely.

We decided to go and visit 2 churches in the city, one in use and one not so.

The first was the ruins of St. Karin, built around the middle of the 11th century.

The other church was the Cathedral of Ste. Maria

From here we started our walk back to the boat, some general views below.

Five miles walking and we finished up back at the ship. Tomorrow is a sea day as we make our way to our last port of call, Kristiansand in Norway. There probably won’t be a blog.

Another new country, Sweden! After a very foggy night with the visibility down to around 50 meters and the foghorn blaring every minute we docked around 8AM in the morning to a beautiful summers day with a view of trees as opposed to the usual dockyard scenes.

In the photo below I zoomed in on what appeared to be an Alien Spacecraft. More on that later.

After breakfast we killed a little time until it was time to go to our tour bus. The tour was just a generic sight seeing of the city. I won’t bother with too much commentary, just some photos.

Above are the “tilting” buildings. Stockholm is rising about 50cm every 100 years. These buildings were built on wooden pilings reaching down to the bedrock, but due the rise in the land the wood is becoming exposed to the air and decaying, causing the buildings to tilt.

The ship above has a steel hull, but sail powered. It was built in the UK in 1888. It is now a sail training vessel in the Swedish Navy. Like the UK the ships names are prefixed with HMS.

Back to the Alien Spacecraft, it is actually the Sky View dome. I had to borrow the photo below from the internet, hence the watermark. The two tracks on the outside allow for a glass gondola to climb to the roof. The sphere was the largest in the world at 320ft, but recently got beaten out of 1st place by Las Vegas

Some (not too good) shots from inside the gondola, including reflections!

Once back on the boat and suitably fed and watered wined, beered and cocktailed we headed to the theater to see a display of the local folk dancing.

At dinner last night we were talking to a couple who suggested we try the hop-on hop-off boat, they had just done it and said it was a good way to get a different view of the city. We decided to give it a shot, we had to be on board by 10:00 to make sure we got back to the ship for the 1330 departure. As we departed for the boat we learned that the first departure 1030.

This put a dent in our plans as we were planing to get off at the Navy museum to see the recovered wreck of the Vasa. The Vasa ws a wooden sailing ship that went on her maiden voyage (can you believe the programme just told me I should use a non-inclusive gender neutral phrase instead of maiden voyage!!!) on August 10th 1628. The Vasa sank on August 10th 1628 just 15 minutes into that maiden voyage. It ws finally recovered a few years ago and is now in the museum, evidentially one of the best preserved wrecks of that era. With the time constraint we now had we abandoned the museum visit but decided to do the boat tour.

The next dent in the trip wasn’t discovered until we got back on board, the camera had a problem, so no pictures. Most of them were repeats of yesterdays, just from a different angle.

The final nail in the coffin came as we approached the museum, there was a very ornate rowing barge moored up at the steps. The guide explained that the King had decided to take his rowing boat out, so the dock was closed. We continued on the boat and enjoyed the rest of the trip.

We left Stockholm shortly after lunch. It was a great city, plenty of old well preserved buildings, more than most European countries. This was due largely to Sweden’s neutrality during the two world wars, and consequent lack of bombing.

Like most Nordic countries, Sweden has a very good welfare system, that comes with the price of high taxes. Income Tax can be as high as 60% and their VAT is capped at 25%. In return each child is given from birth to 18 years US $132 monthly. This increases at 18 to help fund them through University, tuition is free but accommodation, food and books have to be paid for. Parents get 480 days maternity leave, split between them paid at 80% wages except for the last 100 days which are paid at 100%. Minimum vacations are 5 weeks a year fully paid.

Religion does not play a big part in the lifestyle with only 8% regularly attending church.

Again, like the other Nordic countries, the people are happy and content with their way of life.

A couple of final pictures as we make our way out through the Stockholm archipeligo.

We’re now on our way to the island of Visby.

We have a day and a half in Stockholm, so I’ll combine the two days tomorrow as the rest of today is spoken for!

The last of the “early” starts for us. We’re in Helsinki, Finland that may give you a clue for the title! After another room service breakfast we headed out to our bus. It was overcast, drizzly and around 16C. Today was the day of the Helsinki Marathon, so our driver had to make a few detours.

As we started our drive around Helsinki the rain decided to welcome us. By the time we got to the first stop iy was pouring down. The first stop was the “Rock Church”, or to give it its correct name the Temppeliaukio Church. The main religion in Finland is Lutheran, and this is a Lutheran church built in 1969. Fairly modern, but unusual in design in that it was blasted out of bedrock. A few pictures below.

Today’s useless information, the organ has 3,001 pipes!

Below is the Church from the outside, not quite so inspiring.

The rain had backed right off by the time we left, but the damage had been done, my top half was warm and dry thanks to a waterproof jacket. Unfortunately the jacket diverted all the water onto my jeans!

It was back to the coach, it was not possible to get photos through the windows as they were wet with water droplets. We continued around various parts of the city until we reached Sibeliuksen­puisto or Sibelius park The park was named after Finland’s greatest composer Jean Sibelius on his 80th birthday in 1945. Within the park is the Sibelius Monument designed by Eila Hiltunen. The park also contained the first geocache of our trip!!

The next stop was senate square, unfortunately most of the square was given over to celebrate the 150th birthday of Paulig coffee. Coffee is a big thing in Finland, they drink more per capita than anywhere else in the world. The square is named for the old Senate building which is now Government offices.

Also close to the square is the Finnish Lutheran Cathedral, completed in 1852.

Traveling back towards the ship, the rain pretty much stopped! I managed a couple of pictures out of the window

Upsenski Cathedral started life in 1868 as a Russian Orthodox church, in 1919 when Finland won independence from Russia it became the main Orthodox Cathedral of Finland.

Like most Nordic countries, Finland has a relatively high taxation rate, but in return Tuition is free right through University, free health care, pensions etc. It was recently voted the happiest country in the world. If only they could control the weather!!