While I was at Costa Navarino I went along to a traditional Messinian cooking class in a local village house. A group of us learnt how to make various Greek dishes, and then had lunch together at a long wooden table which was weighed down with homemade bread, dishes of olives, Greek salad and other […]
Review: The Malvern Spa Hotel
As I drive up to The Malvern Spa I assume that my SatNav has brought me to the wrong place. I’ve been to a fair few spas in my time, and all of them have been either in country house hotels, or on the coast or in swish city centre locations – apart from the […]
Top things to do near La Manga Club Spain
If you’re staying at Spain’s luxury La Manga Club, as I did with my family this summer, you could spend all of your time at the resort and never venture beyond its 1,400 acres. The resort has its own beach, pools, spa, restaurants, shops and sports facilities and there’s even a free bus service to […]
How to visit Penshurst Place & Gardens, Kent
Penshurst Place & Gardens is a beautiful historic estate in England’s Weald of Kent, near Tunbridge Wells, and it’s a wonderful place for a day out, with or without children. Penshurst Place feels like a National Trust property, but it’s actually the current and ancestral home of the Sidney family. King Edward VI granted the […]
What’s it like to drive a Volvo V90 estate? Family car review
We bought our first Volvo for one reason only – safety. I’d not bothered about cars much, as long as they worked, until I had a horrible car crash on the school run. My car rolled onto its side and was written off. I remember it happening as if in slow motion, and I remember […]
What’s it like to stay at La Manga Club?
Usually we travel around rather than staying in one place during our family summer holiday, so that we can explore as much as possible. But when we were planning this summer’s trip the kids (18 and 14) said that they just wanted to stay in one place and relax. So we needed to find somewhere […]
Trying on new summer holiday clothes
I arrive back from our relaxing family holiday in sunny Spain to a marvellous surprise – a parcel of new summer clothes. The parcel is from SimplyBe, a women’s fashion website, and is a welcome distraction from the unseasonably chilly English weather. My calendar tells me that it’s definitely August, yet it’s so cold that […]
How to explore Cinque Terre, Italy
For my birthday last year two of my best friends gave me a fantastic present – they said that they were taking me on an adventure. I didn’t know where we were going or what we were doing, but I knew that I’d love whatever they arranged – we know each other inside out, and […]
Ægir Brewpub review: Viking food in the Norwegian fjords
This is a guest post by Nell Heshram, a travel writer and blogger who lives in London with her partner and two young children. She gets away whenever life, and school holidays, allow. The family also enjoy exploring territory closer to home, in London. You can read more about their adventures on Nell’s blog the […]
How to use Santander hire bikes to explore London
If you’ve visited London over the last few years, you may have noticed clutches of chunky hire bikes sitting at docking stations and being ridden around the city. These public bikes (annoyingly known as ‘Boris bikes’, after the mayor who was in post at the time that they were launched) are currently sponsored by Santander, […]