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Foreign travel is very important to us, since this is about seeing new places, meeting new people, trying different food and ideally also getting to taste the wines of the region in which we find ourselves. Like everything else, our holidays have evolved: from touring holidays by car, first around Scotland then around France, Italy, Spain, Florida or California; to simply lying on a Caribbean beach with a pile of paperbacks when we were at our busiest work-wise; to wanting to strike out and tick a few more boxes before it’s too late, ie. before we seize up and decide that long-distance travel is too much hassle and simply not worth the effort.
For the past 19 years we have therefore spent a fair number of our holidays cruising, latterly with a road or rail trip included. Our cruises have been both on sailing ships (eg. the
Royal Clipper and
Star Flyer) and on more conventional vessels — but still not large ships (with no more than 1,250 passengers). We reckon this is a great way to see the world, without having to get on and off aeroplanes, or keep packing and unpacking. Choosing a cruise is easy: you just need to choose the right
cruise line, the right
ship, the right
itinerary, on the right
date, at the right
price. The choice of cruise line is crucial: it should ideally have the right formula — great itineraries (ideally with some days at sea); spacious but not large ships with as high a Berlitz [Cruise Guide] rating as you can afford; meals with open seating
and open dining (eat when you like, with new people every night) and great food; and finally a relaxed smart-casual ambience among a gregarious and well-travelled target audience.
Along the way we have interspersed these destination-intensive holidays with city breaks to tick yet more boxes. Then, in 2015, having acquired a Tesla all-electric car we rediscovered the European road trip; something we did regularly in the 1980s and early 1990s. So while our long-haul holidays have been a fabulous experience, we think it is also important to investigate countries nearer to home. Touring by car enables us to see our European neighbours in more depth than a cruise allows, since you are quite literally ‘on the ground’.
We are very fortunate to have set foot on every continent (apart from Antarctica), and to have travelled to the outermost fringes of our planet: Alaska/the Yukon, Greenland/Iceland, North Cape, Khabarovsk/Japan, Milford Sound [NZ], Cape Agulhas [SA] and Ushuaia [Tierra del Fuego], and a great many places in between. We have visited a total of 104 countries or territories
‡ apart from our own; their flags are shown above (hover over them to see which is which). To see our travel photographs requires you to log in, but once you are logged in you can either click on a flag above to see holidays to that territory (if there are no photos yet uploaded it will say), or you can click the globe at right for the list of all holidays.
‡ obviously this depends on how you define territories: we have included the constituent parts of countries that don’t exist any more (such as USSR, Yugoslavia)
, which are now countries in their own right (Georgia, Estonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia etc
); overseas or dependent territories (such as Puerto Rico, Sint Maarten/Saint Martin, British Virgin Islands
); autonomous§/self-governing territories (such as Faroe Islands, Greenland
); and territories that are no longer autonomous (Hong Kong, Macau).
§so the Azores and Madeira are included in our tally, whereas the Canary Islands are not.
