Devall Travels

The scenic railway is called the "Train des Merveilles" and it runs from Nice Ville to Tende. Train of Marvels So how do we get there? My plan is to leave early on Sunday and head south on the motorways as far as Nuits-St-Georges. This will be the longest day to kill off miles in Northern France. Next stop Annecy. It's not a long day and I have set the routes from here to be "no tolls". I don't see the point in spending all day on the road and arriving with no time to see anything. The no tolls route takes us along Lac Annecy and then down to Albertville, then alongside the A43 to Modane.  From there you can take the  Fréjus Tunnel  or take the D1006 over the first pass of the trip over the  Col du Mont Cenis  at 2083m. This route joins the same route at Susa that would have come through the Fréjus Tunnel. From there it is into Italy. The route loops down and around Turin ending in Cuneo. I have booked an overnight here. This is the f...

The ideas are still bubbling away.  With an Old SOCs weekend planned in the English Lake District for the middle of August this trip needs to be done from late July. I had the idea of fulfilling one of my bucket list points and heading for Poland.  Auschwitz has been a pilgrimage for me for many years and I have never made it. Once in the 90's when I worked in Zastávka u Brna I did get as far as the Czech/Polish border at  Český Těšín  and got no further. The bridge over the river was closed to traffic although I did walk across to the halfway point to say I had stepped foot in Poland. I have no idea whether this was just that day or (semi) permanent. I watched Richard Ayoade's " Travel Man - 48 hours in Krakow " recently and the lure of a salt mine was almost too great.  But the lure of a scenic railway tops that! The railway in question is Train des Merveilles and runs between Nice and Tende.  It w...

I had hoped that Claire would have felt able to go on the bike.   I looked in October at the long ferry to Spain when Brittany Ferries released the prices and the booking system opened for the summer.  In the end that didn't go any further. We toyed with a cruise but none met with where we wanted to go or the dates didn't quite fit when I can go. So. No cruise. No bike trip.  Some while back when I was hoping for a bike trip I had a look at visiting the eastern part of France - the Vercors. I scrapped that and deleted all the routes I had worked out.  Until I started going on trips with my brother where he plans to the Nth degree, including prospective fuel stops.   I haven't been that exact.  My level of planning was to choose a place, what to do/see and where to stay to achieve that. A chance email from Claire and a French contact from work about Evian les Bains has given me food f...

After reading some very low opinion reviews of Drivefly Gatwick on Google Reviews I decided that maybe I was lucky in early 2019. The car came back undamaged and clean. Or at least as clean as it was when I dropped it off! Instead I have booked with the airport's own long term parking solution. We have used this many times before. Except this time, I have signed up for their meet and greet.... So that's another thing checked off the list.  We've only flown into Alicante once before although I had a few times in the 90's when I went quite often to visit ex partner in Murcia. Then I used the bus to Murcia and didn't hire a car.

With all the scare stories surrounding where to park at the airports, especially Gatwick, I might revert back to the long term parking on the airport where I park the car on concrete and take the key with me. The bus from there to the departures takes only a few minutes.  The problems surrounding "meet and greet" seems to stem from unscrupulous people with a website and a field taking people's cars and leaving them in an unattended and unguarded field. This is one of the cases that was brought to national attention -  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2nY7zwtVKkhl134HBvWhcPy/park-direct-gatwick-ltd When we went to Florida earlier in the year we booked a "meet and greet" service at Gatwick with DriveFly . The car came back to us as it was when we left it and wasn't damaged any more than it already is.  No mud. So we will possibly go with them again in the future. Reviews on Google not good though. They score 2.8 out of...

That is the question.   After a wander around the new Saga cruise ship "Spirit of Discovery" all other summer vacation options are pretty much nullified. The "Cruising!" blog is linked on the right -----> I had hoped to have a bike holiday but we'll have to see.  Maybe I'll have to look at a short break somewhere. I had looked at Czech for the MotoGP and France for maybe a tour.

Firstly. Let's get this out of the way.  The lunch was absolutely bloody marvellous.  From appetiser to the cheese and then a light sorbet for dessert.  The Angus steak perfectly cooked for me.  Cut like velvet.....  There were veggie options too. The service from the crew was as expected top class.  It sounds snobbish (for a working class bloke!) to say that although I enjoyed last year's Norway cruise with P&O, Saga tops them for service and that idea that cruising is still a rich person's holiday. It's not of course. Before that we had a coffee in the cruise terminal.  We went with friends, Ulli and John, but didn't get on the tour with them. The ship is really nice and we had a trip around all the decks and a view of the cabins. This will be an all-inclusive ship and for us oldies, it's free of children!   As it is almost new the show cabins were actually just cleaned as the ship was just back from a cruise, in fact there were many ge...