Category: Site seeing

Bruce wanted to stay in a hilltop village, which we couldn’t do in Italy, since we didn’t have a car. Dimitsana is a beautiful town stuck on the side of a mountain and is perfect. The drive up here was a bit tricky, but Bruce enjoyed it. It took us a while to find the […]

We picked up our hire car and left Athens, to drive to the Peloponnese. The initial part of the trip was a bit tricky getting used to the traffic and driving on the wrong side of the road, but Bruce coped reasonably well. Making to our first stop, the Corinth Canal. This was constructed in […]

We arrived in Athens and everything went well at the airport, Bruce organised a taxi pickup which is always very pleasant and stress free and we had a nice drive into the centre of Athens. We were dropped off right next to a huge restaurant area with beautiful trees and lots of people. Our hotel […]

To get to Greece, the best option I could find was to go Etihad via Abu Dhabi. Unfortunately there was a 20 hour transit so I looked into their free stopover offers and we chose to stay for 2 nights at the Traders Hotel (actually only 30 hours) but much better than sitting in the […]

After a long overnight flight (midnight is not Rosie’s best time), we arrived in Phuket at 9am only to find ourselves at the back of a huge queue at immigration. It took an hour to get through this, despite our best efforts we were the very last people through. Taxi was waiting and we arrived […]

We have shifted from Hiroshima to Osaka on the bullet train and most of us are feeling a bit tired so the plan in Osaka is to take things at a more leisurely pace, get up late, long breakfast, one attraction then rest for afternoon. The first day, we visited Osaka Castle, which was quite […]

Bruce wanted to visit Hiroshima since he likes to see how people react to major events in our history. He watched “Oppenheimer” in the plane on the way to Japan and by coincidence happened to be reading a book based on the events of the Manhattan Project in the week leading up to us getting […]

It rained all day on Sunday so we didn’t do much. Went for a walk to Nishiki Market, which was really the same as every other market in Asia. Lots of fish products and knick-knack shops. On Monday, we went our separate ways with most of the group going to the Starbucks set up in […]

We left Hakuba on Friday, catching a taxi back to Nagano and then a train to Kyoto. The first part of the train trip was very scenic since it was on a slower train that travelled down the western side of Japan going through farmland and beautiful scenery. At Nagoya we transferred to the Shinkansen […]

The non-skiers in our group went on a tour to see the Snow Monkeys, we were supposed to see them when Merv and Bruce took Liam’s year group skiing in Japan, but there was too much snow to get into them. Merv and Bruce went skiing for the day and had a great time, we […]