I was in Paris for a few days towards the end of November. The night before I went, as per, I waged a duel between the desire to sleep and the worry that if I did, I might not hear my alarm pinging, in the small hours, and as a result miss my flight. While I was tossing and turning I was running through a mental list of things to do and places to see when I got to Paris: wondering which museum to visit and musing over the more mundane question of where to have breakfast.
Category Archives: Travel
Breakfast in Paris: Le Café Marly
Filed under Paris, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
Austria: Mayr and More Health Centre
When I returned from my recent stay in the Mayr & More Health Centre my brain sifted through various ways to describe the place. The best I could come up with was that it’s a clinical crossroads, where they offer a cure (detox), and where evidence based medicine intersects with alternative methods with a heavy leaning, on the scale of that tower in Pisa, towards different and holistic ways of healing.
Filed under Healthy Living, Travel
Georgian Dublin: The Irish Landmark Trust
I remember when I first read about the Irish Landmark Trust, even thought I cannot recall when or in what publication I saw the article, thinking its existence a most excellent idea. The Irish Landmark Trust (from now on, for simplicity sake, referred to as the ILT) says its raison d’être is threefold: to save, share and sustain. The ILT’s website explains that it’s a: ‘ not for profit organization that saves interesting, unusual and architecturally important properties throughout the island of Ireland. To ensure these properties have a sustainable future, they are given a new lease of life as self-catering holiday homes’.
Travelling Bag
It is an immutable law of blogging that whomsoever is in possession of a blog will sooner or later publish a what-is-in-my-handbag post. I have managed to blog for just over two years without doing so, until today.
Filed under Shops/Shopping, Style, Travel
To Kilkenny City via Jerpoint Abbey
What with a soft blue sky filled with sportive fluffy white clouds which were backlit by sunshine and some real warmth in the air, last Saturday felt like the end of the current glacial age had finally arrived. The meteorological deities had, for once, come up trumps as last Saturday was also the day I planned to make a return trip to Kilkenny. It’s less than two months since I was last there so I wouldn’t normally have returned so soon except that I needed to collect a ceramic tree I bought, on my recent trip, at the Future Beauty exhibition in the National Craft Gallery.
Bennettsbridge: Nicholas Mosse Pottery
It might seem slightly bonkers, given that I had driven for nearly two hours, to pull in for a coffee break just a few miles short of my destination. But that’s exactly what I did on my recent trip to Kilkenny city when I stopped in the pretty village of Bennettsbridge which is only four miles from the city.
Filed under Craft, Ireland, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
Trip to Kilkenny
I am back. Back blogging that is. I am also back from Kilkenny a lovely and vibrant inland city in the south-east of Ireland. And no, I was not sequestered in Kilkenny for the duration of my blogging break, just for a few days last weekend.
Coffee in Milan: Peck
It is a few years since I was last in Milan and then only for a short stay so I only remembered, and just in a gossamer-fine way, some of the city’s most famous set pieces: The Duomo, La Scala and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle. As I was unsure of how to negotiate the city’s labyrinth of streets and as I was heading into Milan for just a day from my base on the shores of scenic Lake Como I thought that it was best to decide in advance exactly where I was going so I could make the optimum use of my time and to avoid ambulating around the city like an aimlessly spinning top.
Filed under Coffee, Food/Wine, Restaurants/Cafés, Travel
Postcard from Lake Como
I arrived at Milan’s Linate airport yesterday morning and at my hotel in the village of Cadenabbia on the shore of Lake Como around lunchtime. It was a painless journey; the only downside was that I had to get up at the ungodly hour of four am to get to the airport on time. It’s not the four am start per se that’s the pits but getting up to catch an early flight is always proceeded by a fitfully sundered night’s sleep as I worry that the alarm on my phone which functions perfectly well every other day of the year might fail to go off.
Filed under Travel
Back to the Past: Islington
Like a runaway horse heading in one direction only, the unstoppable temporal train gallops forward carrying us ever onwards towards our unforetold futures. There are no return trips and as we are not time travellers we cannot go back to yesteryear. Of course, our minds can wing us back to remembered and half remembered days gone by and besides if curiosity gets the better of us it is usually possible to revisit places where we have been at an earlier time in the arc of our lives.
Just Add Attitude
Just Add Attitude 