Category: holidays
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All the Peoples of the World (Lisbon 3)
Views from atop the Monument to the Discoverers, or Padrão dos Descobrimentos, built in around 1960 at the height of the Salazar dictatorship. This is on the river edge overlooking the Tagus, near the Belem Tower and self evidently across the road from the Jerónimos Monastery. I loved how the people on the encompassed mappa…
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Rooftop Tiles and Tiny Alleys (Lisbon 2)
On day two we acclimatised to hot hot weather, ridiculously steep hills, narrow cobbled and graffiti’d streets and so many people! For the past two years we’d avoided people; at the start of the pandemic we stayed in the house, slowly venturing into the woods and fields around us but never ever into the cities.…
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Travelling Light (Lisbon 1)
It’s been a while. Two years of Covid-19 has caused not only lockdown but a fairly ingrained aversion to crowds. More perhaps than for most, with Janet’s kidney transplant placing her pretty much at the top of the “extremely medically vulnerable” list. So, after vaccine number four and her consultant telling her she was currently…
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Flying to Mexico
So this started out as a “let’s ride the bikes to France” between two blokes, and then became “ok, we’ll take the wives”, and then the wives calculated it was almost as expensive to ride across the Channel as it would be to fly to Mexico… The outcome was inevitable. Climate calculations were attempted, then…
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Cheap Day Return
“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” said Tolkein. We didn’t actually get as far as Mordor, but the morning’s walk did extend a little. Just short of 14km, or eight and…
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Cragside, Northumberland
Cragside is a National Trust estate, massive is size and full of wonderful stuff. The first house to be powered by hydroelectricity and we were so pushed for time we didn’t even visit the house. We did happen on this fellow though, in the extensive woodland. It pains me that we’re seriously considering, after twenty…
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Capuchin Crypt
One of the places that intrigued me in Rome, and which I made an effort to see, was the Capuchin Crypt. The pictures I offer here are not mine, but are re-worked images taken from the internet. The Catholic Order that owns the crypt under the Santa Maria della Concezione does not permit photographers, and…
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Vatican Statuary
So… the Vatican is full of statues. most of them look pretty statuesque, and some simply don’t. Please, someone tell me why this statue exists outside a nightmare! Part Addams Family, part someone-I-think-I-once-knew… 890; is that the number of her victims? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition…
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Tree’s up
So this year I had to do it all on my own, Charlie being at Manchester until next weekend. Decent tree too, I had to cut fourteen inches off the top to get it in. The ‘fairy’ on the top is traditional, and older than me. The Armagnac is less so, but just as…
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