As I may or may not have already mentioned, for the second half of our week in Italy we stayed in Sorrento.  It's a convenient location for visiting Pompeii, and has the added benefit of not being Naples!

On our first evening we were treated to this rather stunning sunset:

There's not a huge amount to do in the town itself.  Lots of nice places to eat and drink, even more shops selling limoncello and other lemon themed products, and travel companies selling day trips to Capri or tours of the Amalfi coast.

We went on an hour long boat tour of the... continue reading »

Last Sunday we went for a nice long walk with the dog.  Ended up being 21km, to a local pub (the Red Lion) and back.

For whatever reason, we took a slightly different route than previous walks, involving some untested footpaths.

Turns out this wasn't such a great idea.

It should have been a warning sign when our path led to this footbridge:

This led into a cornfield, supposedly with the footpath running diagonally across it but this was impossible to do because of all the corn.

Having skirted the edge of the field we just about managed to find our next stile, which led... continue reading »

After four nights in Rome we headed south for the rest of the week.

Visiting Pompeii has been on my bucket list (not that really I have such a thing) for a while.  But the more research I did, the more I kept seeing reports that Herculaneum is in many ways 'better', due to being smaller and a lot quieter than Pompeii.

We'd pencilled in two days to visit both sites and walk up to the top of Vesuvius.  Herculaneum was first up.  The excavated area is relatively small, but a lot more of the town is still buried deep under the... continue reading »

When in Rome... go and visit a different country.

The Vatican City is very small, but does have several popular tourist attractions: the Sistine Chapel/Vatican museums and St Peter's Basilica.  We only visited the latter, because I wanted to go all the way up to the top of the dome and enjoy the views.

Queuing to get into St Peter's was probably our longest queue of the week, at about 20 minutes.  This was mostly just a bottleneck at the security scanners.

Top tip: if you carry a penknife in your handbag, leave it at your hotel. I can't possibly comment about whether... continue reading »

This year marks the 80th birthday of the trig pillar.  To celebrate, Ordnance Survey have been running a Twitter/Instagram photo competition.

A few weeks ago one of my pictures (this one) was chosen as a winner.  Exciting!

So here I am, standing next to one my local trig points modelling my shiny new tshirt.  I feel I should also point out that the messy flowers are nothing to do with me or the dog.

Thanks OS   I'd definitely recommend a browse through the #trigpillar80 hashtag to see what photos everyone else has come up with.