The MBH, MBH’s mom, Adair,and I made a short excursion out to Leeds Castle last weekend. It was a fairly easy 75-80 minute drive east of London, and only about 30 minutes west of Canterbury. Leeds Castle was built in the 1200s, and spent generations being owned by various queens of England. Most famously, King [...]
Category Archive for 'Travel'
The weather hasn’t been that great the last few days. We had made plans to visit Leeds Castle and Canterbury over the Easter break, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. So instead we made a shorter trip to St. Albans, about 30 minutes or so north of where we live in London: we all piled into [...]
Capri! Day Four
Posted in Travel on Oct 1st, 2009
Sunday turned out to be a pretty hard day! I had been looking forward to going to one of the big historical sites on the island: Villa Jovis. In the last post I noted we visited Villa San Michele, built on the site of an ancient Roman Villa. Well, Emperor Tiberius built 12 such villas on [...]
Capri! Day Three
Posted in Travel on Sep 30th, 2009
We woke up on Saturday, and a quick walk around Anacapri made it clear that a small festival was underway that weekend. These rows and rows of color candies were being sold at three or four places around the village: We headed up to the highest point on Capri – Mount Solaro - via rope way. [...]
We woke up early and decided that for our first full day in Capri we’d hit what is said to be the highlight of the island: The Blue Grotto, or the Blue Cave. We had heard that depending on the wind and waves the Blue Grotto was sometimes closed, so we figured we’d give ourselves [...]
For our first-year wedding anniversary we went to Capri. Capri is just off the coast of Italy – about 45 minutes or so from Naples by ferry. Naples is a 3-hour plane ride from London. I accidentally booked our trip from Gatwick airport, which is considerably farther from our house compared to Luton or Heathrow. [...]
Istanbul, Day Two (continued)
Posted in Travel on Apr 16th, 2009
We actually ended up buying quite a few things during our afternoon at the Grand Bazaar – but you’ll have to wait for a couple more posts before we put up pictures of our collection <g>. Overall, we did pretty well with our haggling, basically aiming for 3/5ths or so of any initial quote. With [...]
Istanbul, Day Two
Posted in Travel, Uncategorized on Apr 12th, 2009
We learned one new fact about life in Istanbul very very early on our second day here. Very early, as in 6:30am early – muslims need to pray five times a day: dawn, mid-day, mid-afternoon, sun-set, and evening. And it turns out the sunrise and sunset times are recognized by the prayers being broadcast throughout [...]
Istanbul, day one
Posted in Travel on Apr 11th, 2009
We have arrived safely in Istanbul this afternoon; we’re spending our Easter holiday here. We took easyJet – the MBH wasn’t so sure about this; her view was that no airline should have ‘easy’ in its name, but the flight was uneventful. Couple of interesting points: first, easyJet is very clearly copying the Southwest [...]