I was looking round the unofficial Bob Marley museum in Trenchtown. I’d been taken there by Turnip, driver of a decrepit taxi, who had befriended us the day before. There was some debate among the slightly unfriendly guys running the place as to how much to charge me for admission, but they settled on ten [...]

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The Swiss Family Robinson … My father wanted me to read it, so I pretended I had. Swallows and Amazons … I tried to make my children read it but they didn’t even pretend to. Robinson Crusoe … scary. Lord of the Flies … even more so. And Oliver Reed with … ooh, what was [...]

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It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. Some friends who live in Grenada wanted to visit their children in the UK for Christmas and offered us a house swap. Well, would you have turned it down? Fast forward a moment. We’d been in Grenada for a week. Our daughter and her friend were meant to [...]

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Busman’s Holiday Three things softened the blow of turning sixty: the winter fuel payment, the bus pass and the free swimming. The free swimming has already gone and surely the bus pass is next. This added urgency to my plan to hit the road with the bus pass and see how far I could get. [...]

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Sometimes on holiday, things just work out well. For a start, our boat trip over to Little Tobago turned out to be an individual tour, as there was no one else on board except the guide. We had an hour on this desert island bird sanctuary, making contact with Blue-Crowned Motmots, Frigate Birds and Boobies. [...]

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Tulsa is uniquely associated with one song. The only trouble is that the entire point of “24 Hours From Tulsa” is that dear old Gene Pitney is still a day and a night away from Tulsa as he sings of his indiscretion in a hotel room which means that he can “never, never, never go [...]

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The opening up of Eastern Europe presents an opportunity for some great value weekend breaks in some fabulous and previously inaccessible places. Prague, Krakow and Budapest are all so attractive that already, you’re almost more likely to hear English voices than indigenous ones. On our recent trip to the Baltic state of Estonia, the rumours [...]

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Ronda, the most famous of the Andalucian “White Towns”, is a perfect destination for a short break. Although it can be swamped with tourists at the height of the season, at any other time it is a quiet and amiable place. I visited in June and it was almost deserted. Now that there are flights [...]

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Although I am just about vegetarian, I don’t have the discipline to be successful at the vegan lifestyle. My wife is a Wurst-eating German but was happy to try out the “Bergidylle” (mountain idyll), which I had found on the internet. It advertised macrobiotic breaks in the beautiful Fribourg region of Switzerland. With the stunning [...]

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Dominoes can be a frustrating game. Just are things are going along smoothly, you unexpectedly experience a setback. Just like the Euro-Domino, in fact. What is the Euro-Domino? It’s a train ticket which allows you to travel anywhere within a certain European country during a particular period of time. You can buy them for three, [...]

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