Tag: Random

This is a heat map of where I’ve been from the photos that I’ve taken. There are some gaps here as I used a camera for some trips rather than a phone and my trips to Russia seem to have entirely disappeared. Anyway, it means that the only European countries (I’m going to include the Vatican City and similar here, regardless of what they actually are) that I have left to visit are:

Vatican City

Belarus

Moldova

Iceland

Kosovo

Monaco

Andorra

San Marino

North Macedonia

Bosnia & Herzegovina

I mention this as I’ve persuaded Jonathan, who I went travelling to Turkey/Georgia and Armenia with in January and February, to take me to Montenegro and Bosnia & Herzegovina in September. He can deal with rural public transport and I’ll deal with food options, it’s a fair allocation of resources. Some people divide travel responsibilities by navigation, accommodation and logistics. We are operating at a more advanced level, namely buses for him and lunch for me to worry about.

Belarus I can’t really go to at the moment and it’ll be a faff to tick off the micro-states/countries of Vatican City, Andorra, Monaco and San Marino but I’ll work it out. There are some Wizz Air possibilities to Iceland, Moldova and North Macedonia hopefully not far away, perhaps I can even visit those this year.

And then maybe I might start going outside Europe, but at least I have an exciting rail trip around Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia to look forward to in September. What could possibly go wrong?

With my last flight of the year completed a couple of weeks ago, that concludes my international travel for 2025.

I visited a fair number of countries again, including Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Switzerland.

New countries for me included Albania, Austria, Cyprus, Liechtenstein, Slovakia and Slovenia. That leaves me just with Sweden to visit so that I’ve completed every EU country, and just Nicosia (Cyprus) and Stockholm (Sweden) to visit so that I’ve been to every EU capital.

As for my favourite city of 2025, it was without doubt Warsaw, but that is unlikely to surprise many people.

I didn’t go further than Europe, not least as my Wizz Air pass gave me plenty of options to explore European countries a little more. I’m looking forward to seeing what surprises and delights I’ll find in 2026……

Every day…..

It was me that was trying to log-in, so thanks as ever to Facebook for being so helpful….

My laptop has failed which is highly sub-optimal, so my two loyal blog readers might face a delay in reading my riveting posts until the matter is resolved….

NB, the image is AI generated, not my actual laptop….

Credit for this one to Family Tree Magazine, but they noted that on this 1911 census form that the occupation of the housewife has been listed as “spends my money”. George Henry Mousell, a transport clerk, lived at 17 Clifford Gardens in Kensal Rise, London, and goodness knows if his wife, Lucy Mousell, ever saw this. [I originally posted this in November 2020, but have reposted it to fix the broken image link].

I really like this story, which is that the oldest person in the world is a lady from Surrey who is 115 years old and 253 days. The element that intrigues me the most is:

“Ms Caterham was born on 21 August 1909 and is the last surviving subject of Edward VII.”

There is just one person in the world who was alive when King Edward VII (1841-1910) was Monarch, I think that’s really quite something. Mind you, given my healthy diet and how I treat my body as a temple, I wouldn’t be surprised if I live just as long.

I will confess that even I’m getting annoyed at the adverts on my blog, which is just because I let Google choose the best placement. Anyway, there are evidently too many and I’ve worked out the settings that stop the ads from interrupting the flow of my beautiful text. I think I might have a celebratory beer later to mark this event and here’s a photo of the cat I liked in Athens that Richard wouldn’t put in his suitcase to bring back. Also, no-one else commented on the interrupting ads, so many thanks to everyone for their patience.