Long before the other cruise lines had adopted the Quiet Vox system for walking tours (and some still haven’t), Viking had introduced it on their cruises. It is the best.

Instead of huddling around a tour guide who is holding up a colourful furled umbrella, and straining to hear her speak over the noise of the crowds in the town square, or worse, being in a museum or gallery and being forced to listen to a tour guide talking to his group at the top of his lungs when you’re just trying to admire the nearest Rothko or kouros, these little earphones make walking tours truly civilized.

The guide has a small microphone and transmitter, and the members of the tour group each wear a receiver on a lanyard, with an earphone attached. (Yes, I am well aware that many people reading this will already be aware of these audio aides & probably don’t need a detailed Lain-splanation, but I just think they are so fantastic – everyone needs to know.) It means the tour guide speaks in a normal tone of voice, and everyone dialled into her frequency can hear her perfectly clearly. Granted, the lanyard & receiver make you look like some kind of geeky sore-thumb of a tourist, but whatevs.

Okay, I gotta admit the convenience/courtesy isn’t the only reason I like Quiet Vox. I was impressed with the system from day one, but once LL & I discovered we could drift off up to 100 metres away from the guide and still be connected to the group, this became a game changer. Now we can join a walking tour, learn about a location, not get lost, and shop. All at the same time. How genius is that?

LL & I can tell you all about the remarkable Sea Organ in Zadar: a series of hollow concrete steps that play music as the waves crash in and out from the sea. We also know all about the Monument to the Sun Compass, and the Cathedral of St Anastasia, as we carefully listened to our tour guide lead us in, through, and past all of these magnificent sites. At the same time, we were able to drift away (slightly), pop into some boutiques, try on clothes, and purchase a blouse & some jewellery – all while being lectured to about the history of Zadar (and not getting lost – the minute the reception starts to crackle, you know the group is moving away, and you need to catch up). Philistines? Maybe. Efficient? You betcha.

9 October 2023

I don’t know what I was expecting of the Balkan countries. Well, yes, actually I do know: I was expecting poor, post-Soviet Bloc, dull little towns with beautiful mountains in the background. I was so wrong (not about the mountains, just everything else).

Ljubljana was lovely, as was Dubrovnik. We stopped in Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro and at each stop we were fascinated by the history, delighted by the scenery, and welcomed by the locals. I would love to go back to all of those countries, and spend some time in each one.

8 October, 2023

LL & I had booked a cruise for the spring of 2020. Yes, 2020 – you can imagine what happened then. After three postponements leading to a significant ship credit each, we decided on a cruise from Venice to Athens with Viking. Organizing this was entertaining (for me), demanding (for LL), and frustrating (for both), as it seems I can’t manage my Viking account using the viking.co.uk site and can’t access viking.com account from Scotland. So LL was constantly on the North American website pretending she was me, or on the phone explaining why the Viking service rep couldn’t talk to me directly. Such fun (for me).

My lovely young cousin volunteered to take Scout while I was away, and as she lives less than 10 miles from Gatwick, this was a perfect solution. Scout seemed delighted with her new home, and I headed off to a hotel (that I think was designed by the same company that makes Japanese capsule hotels) in Gatwick in order to make my 5:00 a.m. flight to Venice.

I gotta say, flying out of Gatwick with EasyJet is easy (hence the name) and cheap. My ticket was one-tenth (ONE-TENTH) the price of LL’s. Granted, she was coming from Toronto, but still – ONE-TENTH! Orkney to Gatwick is also ten times more than a Gatwick-Venice flight. No wonder Brits are holidaying in Majorca and not Orkney. And, to be fair, the average temperature in Majorca is slightly higher than in Orkney. But, wow, what a price difference.

It was great to see LL again, and after saying hello, partially unpacking, and a quick clean-up, we did the obvious – headed to the ship’s fancy tasting-menu restaurant for an elegant five course dinner. Plus wine. As the ship sailed out of the harbour, we toasted the beginning of another exciting trip.

*Normally I backdate posts like this, so they’ll align with days of the actual trip, but I’ve let it go so long that it hardly seems worth it. I’ll just add a correct date at the bottom of each post, for my own future reference.

5 October, 2023

Sorry about the lengthy absence – I know it’s been a ridiculous amount of time.  There are reasons (and excuses).  The former?  I’ve been on holiday, and my laptop has had some serious bugs over the last 8 weeks.  The latter?  Laziness and procrastination.

But, I’m back. 

(* I will say, my laptop is NOT back ☹ so the next few posts won’t have much in the way of photos.)

Exactly two years ago today I hugged my sisters good-bye, grabbed my British Passport, and boarded a plane in Toronto for my big adventure.  This morning I boarded a plane in London on my way to a Mediterranean holiday.  I rarely take selfies, but here are two, 730 days apart.  Happy Anniversary, me!

In this part of Scotland people don’t say, ‘There you go’, or, ‘All done’, or ‘Here you are.’   Instead they say, ‘That’s you.’  The mechanic replacing your tyre hands you your keys and says, ‘That’s you then.’  The clerk in John Lewis hands you your receipt with a smile and a ‘that’s you.’  My cousin, when she’s driven us home from a day out and about, puts the car in park, turns off the ignition, and says, ‘Right, that’s us.’

I like it. It feels cosy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my not-so-keen-on-Dublin feeling. I don’t feel bad about it; it’s just an opinion, and after all, a city’s feelings can’t be hurt. But so many people rave about going to Dublin and I keep wondering why I don’t feel the same way. I really think it’s (a) about the size of a city and (b) how touristy a city is.

Dublin felt very much that it was geared to tourism – which is great, tourism is a huge and growing industry, and cities should take advantage of that. But then I got thinking about other cities I don’t really enjoy visiting, and they seemed to follow the same thread – Paris, London, Madrid, New York – all too big, all too touristy. I much prefer Bordeaux, York, Valencia, Chicago – smaller, more concentrated, fewer tourists.

There are exceptions to these rules: I’m not crazy about Edinburgh, a relatively small city, but, very touristy. I loved Berlin, a huge city, but fewer tourists, and very much a two-cities-combined vibe.

Anyhoo, this is just to say Dublin was perfectly fine, but to anyone looking to travel around Ireland, I would strongly suggest Cork and Belfast as absolutely great places to visit instead.

This. This is the reason we have screens on windows back home, and why I feel all of the British Isles need to get behind them too. Scout seemed agitated about something in my bedroom, so I opened the door to find this little fellow, a great tit, inside the house, slamming himself against the window in a desperate effort to get out. After pausing to capture photographic evidence, I slowly advanced to the window, sending him into an absolute frenzy, opened it wider, and made encouraging noises in hopes he would find his own way out. Which he did. I was lucky; when this happened to my neighbour, the bird at her house committed a series of panic poops, all over everything.

Screens, people. Screens.

When one of our English friends mentioned at work that she was off to Cork, a co-worker told her that she absolutely had to see The Butter Museum. Okaay . . . . Then, when we were at the Cork Tourist Bureau, the extremely voluble gentleman behind the desk said the same thing. Well, okay then. Off we went.

The Butter Museum of Cork (entry fee €5) is, as the name would suggest, about all things butter. The history, production, distribution, and consumption of butter. Irish butter in particular. It seems that Cork was the world biggest butter market at one point. The peedie museum had churns, and paddles, and posters, and documentaries, and packaging, and maps, and well, you name it. It was small, and quaint, and a tad intense, and on the whole, I found it interesting. It won’t replace The Louvre or the V&A on anyone’s bucket list anytime soon, but I’m glad we went.

Turns out, I was the only one of my group enjoying the museum – everyone else spent the visit to The Butter Museum trying to figure out why Lindsay’s co-worker disliked her enough to send her there.

In 2000, two friends and I went on a much-anticipated, well-planned trip to London, Paris, and Champagne. The night before we left one friend presented each of us with a diary, so we could keep track of our trip. My first thought was, “Crap. Now I will have to do work.” But of course what I said was, “Thank you! What a great idea.” Had I been on my own, after two days I would have abandoned the diary to the bottom of the suitcase, but I couldn’t very well do that, with PS saying each evening, “I’m going to write in my diary now.” So I had no choice but to do the same each time she said that.

Well, that was probably the best travel gift I’ve ever received. Not just that specific diary, which I have re-visited many many times when looking back on that fabulous trip, but the whole discipline of recording my trips. For the next twenty years I have kept a travel diary of each cruise, tour, and road trip I have taken. They are all sitting in a box, back in Milton, waiting to be unearthed and re-read, once I get home.

I started this blog for two reasons: (1) as a record for myself to look back on, reminding me of details I might have forgotten, bringing back memories of a big adventure in my life; and (2) to keep friends and family back home apprised of my life, so I didn’t have to write the same letter to a dozen different people, recounting the same story again and again. I would say the former is the more important of the two goals.

Because of this blog, I haven’t been keeping a more specific travel diary for each of my trips over the last couple of years, letting this blog be the record. But it’s not quite the same thing. Nobody but me is going to read my little journals, so I can say what I want in them — like describing the absolutely dreadful little man on our first cruise up the Elbe (seriously, I can’t repeat in public some of the things he said or did – horrid little man) — but this blog is public, so I feel I have to rein in some of my opinions and obervations. I miss those more detailed accounts. So, starting with my cruise next week, I’m going back to the paper-based book for the trip, plus a few blog highlights here on my website.

But, one of the other benefits of those journals is keeping track of where and what I eat. A couple of years after that first trip to France one of the other ladies on the trip called me one evening to say she was at a dinner party and someone wanted to know the name of a restaurant we had dined at in Reims. I was able to look it up then and there, and she went back to the table sounding very knowledgable. Truly, I think about meals, and food, and dining out so much that during lockdown I actually kept a photographic record of all my meals, with a daily count and descriptors of each (before anyone gets too judgy, remember, it was COVID, we all did nutty things).

To summarise: I like travel journalling but haven’t done it recently; this blog is to help me remember things from 2021/22/23; and I like tracking food and restaurants. So, below is (primarily for my future reference and likely of interest to no one but me) all my meals from the Ireland trip.

PS. Thank you, PS, for starting me on my travel journals journey over 20 years ago!