Category: Sabbatical

  • Toot Toot I’m On A Boat – Aylesbury to the Netherlands

    Ferry to the Netherlands again; This time I’m spending a smidge over a week in Amsterdam. I could have come up with an itinerary to do more than one city, but … I didn’t want to? Moving between locations is kind of a pain in the arse, and I figure I can do some day…

  • Middlesex v Glamorgan at Lord’s

    It was Good Friday, and the weather was nice, so some friends who care about cricket went to Lord’s to watch a match. Or maybe the first day of a longer match; I’m not sure, the ticket is unspecific, and I don’t really care enough to ask. Turns out it’s the first day of a…

  • 42 Hours In Manchester

    Years ago, in a hostel in Edinburgh, an astonishingly annoying guy¹ stated that he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to travel, or go anywhere else, because you could find anything in the world in Manchester. At the time, I thought he was an idiot. Having visited Manchester, and found it to be an interesting…

  • Riding A Little Train

    Last full day in Aberystwyth, so I decided to ride the Vale of Rheidol railway. I’d originally intended to go on the 10:00 trip, but at some point I’d turned my alarm off, and by the time I woke up it was clear that the morning trip wasn’t going to be happening, so I had…

  • Cliff. Cliff Railway.

    Buying a ticket for the cliff railway took a while, not because their systems are slow, but because a group of indeterminate size took forever to buy tickets. They were clearly from somewhere in Europe, but their English skills were good enough to engage in commerce from what I could tell; What took the time…

  • The Village / Portmerion

    Look, I’m going to be making a lot of references to the TV show The Prisoner in this post, because this is where the outside scenes were shot. So if there’s something that makes even less sense than usual, that’s why. Getting to Portmerion is kind of a pain in the arse it you don’t…

  • Shrewsbury

    I have many reasons for visiting Shrewsbury, but they’re not wildly sensible? I’ve read & re-read a bunch of novels set in & around the town, and there’s a NZ biscuit named after it. If you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, you should know better than to think I’m going to…

  • Black Watch Museum & Perth Museum

    This one is sort of a roundup of visiting Perth. The museums are just the bits I mentioned in the title. I came here for no particular reason, other than it being on the same train line as Stirling, finding a cheap hotel, and having been to the other, more Australian, Perth, so wanting to…

  • Wallace Monument

    Unlike yesterday, it was not a beautiful day with clear bloo skies, but I went anyway. There’s a route which leads a bit more cross-country than the way I went, but I wanted to cross over the bridge even if it isn’t the actual historical Stirling Bridge, so I went that way. Plus I didn’t…

  • Stirling Castle

    It was a beautiful day, and the chap at the breakfast cafe I went to recommended it as being a good day to visit the Wallace Monument. That didn’t happen, because the Castle ate up most of the day. A bit of a trudge up the hill to get to the castle, which isn’t unexpected;…