We had quite the utopian existence for our days in Biarritz on the Basque Coast: sleep in, breakfast, morning swim, lunch, afternoon surf, afternoon Basque nibbles, dinner, sleep, repeat. Biarritz […]
Author: Sam
Arcachon and Bordeaux
After a week in the wine country of Burgundy and the Loire the kids and I were about done with vines, so while Lisa hobnobbed with French winemakers across the […]
Tours and the Loire
It was a bit of a mission to get from Bourgogne and Chalon-sur-Saône across central France to the Loire Valley: the main high-speed train routes fan out from Paris and […]
Lyon
Lyon was a quick overnight stop for us on our way west, a way to break up the journey from Switzerland’s Valais canton to the Burgundy wine region. Often compared […]
Canton Valais and the Swiss Alps
After 34.6 kilometers/21.5 miles of darkness and ear popping through the Lötschberg Base Tunnel – which, when it was originally completed, was the longest railway tunnel in the world – […]
Gornergrat and the Matterhorn
The Gornergrat Bahn is Europe’s highest open air railway, stretching 9.3 kilometers/5.7 miles from the resort town of Zermatt at 1605 meters/5266 feet above sea level to its terminus at […]
Central Switzerland
It was a beautiful train ride from Innsbruck in Austria to the central Swiss city of Zürich: we passed through so many quaint mountain villages and some beautiful farms and […]
Innsbruck and the Austrian Alps
As we were walking out of the train station in central Innsbruck the first thing I saw was a couple a little younger than Lisa and I exiting the station […]
Munich
We weren’t expecting a lot from Munich: another city on our way west and a good way to break up our train journey into the mountains of Austria and Switzerland. […]
Prague
The words “new” and “old” have a bit of a different meaning in the centuries-old city of Prague. Our digs for our few days in Prague’s New Town – Nové […]
Moravian Wine Country
Whether we had the all clear to enter the Czech Republic was a bit of a gray area and something we scratched our heads over for a little while when […]
Vienna
A train from Ljubljana to Villach, and then Villach to Vienna was the plan. The first train – from Ljubljana to Villach – was on a daily train that ran […]