Trip Blog Posts

Blast From The Past: Last Day In London

Trip Blog Posts

Today was our last day “on the job” as tourists in Europe (if you don’t think being a tourist abroad is “work”, just give it a go sometime), our last day in London, our last day of adventures on the “Tube” (1-2 Sardine start and end, with about 8 Sardines for a while this afternoon), [...]

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Blast From The Past: A Long Walk Through History

Trip Blog Posts

Today we had the opportunity to do something that few tourists get to do — tour the British Parliament Buildings. During the August and September recess, the public (including we Yankee visitors) can pay a modest fee for an hour-plus guided tour of the Westminster legislative halls. We entered the complex through the Victoria Tower [...]

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Blast From The Past: Wren’s Masterpiece; London Blitz

Trip Blog Posts

Old St. Paul’s Church, a huge Gothic structure, burned down (along with most of the other buildings in the one square mile that is “The City of London”) in The Great Fire of 1666. Sir Christopher Wren, architect to the King, was commissioned to design and supervise the construction of a new, Baroque style church [...]

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Blast From The Past: Visiting “Mad” King George

Trip Blog Posts

George III of England, king during the American Revolution, had a small palace (just a nice, modestly large, three story home by comparison to most royal palaces we’ve seen) southwest of the City of London and City of Westminster. He and his queen and children spent many summers at that home. The palace lies within [...]

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Blast From The Past: London On Foot, In The Tube

Trip Blog Posts

London is a great city for those who want to see the city on foot and has a highly organized group of walking tour guides. Today we did two, two-hour walking tours, one in the morning and another in the afternoon, with a quick lunch in a historic pub in between. We first went on [...]

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Blast From The Past: Speaking In Tongues, Driving The Wrong Way

Trip Blog Posts

For three and a half weeks, we used our garbled German and fractured French on the Continent. Lucky for us, most of the people who have to put up with tourists speak fairly fluent English, or could figure out what we we’re trying to say in their native language. Now that we are back in [...]

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Blast From The Past: Typing Underwater at 100 MPH

Trip Blog Posts

As I write this post, we are traveling at 100 miles per hour under the English Channel aboard the Eurostar train on its 2 hour and 49 minute run between Paris and London. We just finished our three-course lunch of jambon and melon, veau (pour Madame) and saumon (pour moi), followed by a chocolate caramel [...]

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Blast From The Past: That’s Some Church, Dude!

Trip Blog Posts

Chartres Cathedral is one of the more famous of Europe’s large churches. It boasts 176 stained class windows (some dating from the 13th century) and an intricately carved screen that runs in a semicircular path surrounding the choir area of the church. We arrived in Chartres from Normandy in early afternoon on Sunday, September 24th. [...]

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Blast From The Past: Norman Comfort Food

Trip Blog Posts

(One of the pleasures our our stay in Normandy was the ability to lunch out at great little restaurants, and dine-in at the 400-year old stone farmhouse we’d rented in Bayeux.  Here’s a recap of some of the meals we enjoyed “in and out”). Cops & Robbers For the second night in a row, we’ve [...]

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Blast From The Past: Ancient History

Trip Blog Posts

A storm blowing up the English Channel from Portugal in the South brought us some wind and rain late on Thursday night and into Friday morning. Hunched under our umbrellas, we walked a few blocks through the drizzle from our parking spot in Bayeux to the building housing its famous Tapestry.

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Blast From The Past: Remembering WWII In Normandy

Trip Blog Posts

On June 5, 1944, the Allies hit the beaches of Normandy in the D-Day assault against the Germans. This area has many museums, cemeteries, and other historic landmarks of that invasion. Monday, we went to Arromanches where the British built an incredible faux harbor right after the invasion to allow supplies to be brought into [...]

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Blast From The Past: Cool Island Monastery

Trip Blog Posts

On Sunday afternoon, fine fall weather broke the gloomy skies we had encountered at the end of the last week and continued with even sunnier skies and warmer temperatures on Tuesday as we drove south of Bayeux about an hour and a half to the storied island abbey of Mont. St. Michel. This monastery fortress [...]

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Blast From The Past: French “Lean Cuisine”

Trip Blog Posts

We’ve been complaining (but scarfing up) the heavy-on-meat-and-cheese German-style cuisine of Austria and Switzerland, so we were hoping that dining out in France would give us a “leaner and meaner” look.  No such luck. Finding a table in Beaune is tough this time of year with all of the tourists in town. Our hotel recommended [...]

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Blast From The Past: We’re Not In Gimmelwald Anymore, Toto

Trip Blog Posts

After riding on a gondola, a bus, and four trains, we crossed the border into France and picked up a “Similar” car.  (Hertz rented us a Renault Laguna or “Similar” car, but since we haven’t as yet been able to figure out the make of the vehicle, we assume it is a “Similar” and not [...]

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Blast From The Past: Hiking with Heidi and Pinocchio

Trip Blog Posts

We were joined at dinner last night by a woman from San Diego who said that she came to Gimmelwald because the movie “Heidi” could have been filmed in an area just like this. Maybe Pinocchio grew up around these parts, too. At the urging of our host, Olle, who lent us a couple sets [...]

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Blast From The Past: Up In The Air In the Swiss Alps

Trip Blog Posts

How does a civilized traveler in Europe get to the top of a 10,000 foot mountain? While hiking is an option, taking a thirty minute cable car ride that whisks you to the summit (where you can dine in a revolving restaurant, buy souvenirs in the gift shop, or simply slowly freeze to death out [...]

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Blast From The Past: Beautiful “Downtown” Gimmelwald

Trip Blog Posts

Gimmelwald is a quintessential Swiss mountain community. Chalet-style homes dot steep grassy slopes where goats and cows chomp away at the greenery. Glaciated, horn-shaped peaks loom above us sending their melt waters in bridal veil rivulets down into the deep valleys below. There is only foot traffic here; the few vehicles that you see always [...]

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