A Travel Blog
On our day tour of the Western Highlands we stopped at numerous lochs and castles.
Doune Castle was a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune. It was constructed in the 1300’s by Robert Stewart, the Duke of Albany. Various movies and TV shows have filmed here including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Game of Thrones and Outlander.
Sprinkled across the Andalusian countryside around Seville are a series of small towns known as the Pueblos Blancos, or White Towns.
Since the towns aren’t very accessible without a car, we booked a day tour with Naturanda that took us with a small group through two of the smaller towns and on to the larger city of Ronda (which we posted about here).
Seville has no shortage of beautiful and photogenic sites. The Palacio de las Dueñas, tucked away in a residential neighbourhood not far from our apartment, is one of those.
This complex is much smaller in scale than the vast Alcázar we explored on the weekend, but it shares a similar aesthetic with intricate Mudéjar architecture, arched patios, and lush gardens of fountains and citrus trees.
The Real Alcázar (Royal Alcazar) in Seville is a Royal Palace constructed by a succession of Moorish Kings beginning around the year 913.
It is now a sprawling complex of beautiful buildings, gardens, fountains, and baths, and is one of the most visited sites in Seville. The royal family still uses some of the upper levels as an official residence.
We visited Dublin’s Natural History Museum on Merrion Square. It contains exhibits of stuffed animals and insects that remain more or less unchanged since it opened in 1857.
After an overnight flight on Aer Lingus (good experience, would fly again) we arrived very early in the pre-dawn drizzle of Dublin. Since we’re just on a short layover, for minimum hassle we stayed at the shiny new Holiday Inn Express on O’Connell Street, located on the north side of the River Liffey. Free breakfasts and Wi-Fi are nice touches, and we can walk everywhere.
Roughly 40 minutes west of Lisbon is Cabo da Roca, a rocky outcrop that forms the westernmost part of mainland Europe. (Ireland is conveniently not counted in this context, being considered an island.)
Somewhat reminiscent of Peggy’s Cove in Canada, the only signs of humans at Cabo da Roca are a lighthouse, a gift shop café, some stone monuments and a hundred or so fellow visitors.
After Sunday’s visit to the more famous landmarks in the Belém area of Lisbon, we found lunch and then wandered through the nearby Jardim Botânico Tropical.
Much of these tropical gardens were originally installed for an exhibition in 1940, and the original intent was to showcase plants native to some of Portugal’s more tropical colonies, including Brazil, Goa and Macau.
Our visit to NYC coincided with the blooming of this rare Corpse Flower at the NY Botanical Garden. These flowers bloom only every 7 to 10 years, and the bloom period only lasts about 48 hours.
This particular plant had been in their conservatory since 2007 without blooming, and it was the first Corpse Flower to bloom in New York since 1939. We adjusted our plans to make a visit to see the flower on Saturday, July 30, the only full day during which the bloom was visible.
Our time in London was suddenly running short, but conveniently many of the remaining essential London sites we wanted to see were quite close together.
Our first stop on the Westminster side of the river was Downing Street. Due to understandable security concerns, the street is gated from Whitehall and heavily guarded. The Prime Minister’s residence at 10 Downing is barely visible through the bars.
Nearby, we saw some democracy in action, in the form of a loud protest on Whitehall.
Since we only had two full days in Iceland on our layover, we made the most of it by booking a six-hour bus tour of the Golden Circle with Reykjavik Excursions. A bus driver and friendly guide took us efficiently around the loop to see the most popular natural sites within a few hours of Reykjavik.
The first stop on the tour was Gullfoss. It’s hard to express the vast scale of these falls in photos, but the size of the tiny people walking on the path on the left helps.
We started with high, distant vantages and then walked all the way around until we were being soaked by the spray. Gullfoss is the “golden waterfall” and it lived up to that name and made good on our guidebook’s promise of frequent rainbows.
This archival post was migrated from an old Facebook album, so please excuse the choppy writing and odd formatting.
The view up Elizabeth Street from our hotel room. We stayed at the Nolitan Hotel for the second trip in a row. It’s in Nolita (aka “North of Little Italy) and is pretty much on the boundary between SoHo, Chinatown, Little Italy and the Lower East Side. It’s a great central point with good access to multiple subway lines.