Category: Travel

Not a good hotel experience in Edinburgh today. Place booked at the Bank hotel, sight unseen through Expedia, but they bumped me to a ‘sister’ hotel called the Three Sisters. Sister hotel as in ugly sister. Stuck down on Cowgate, in the lee of Castle Mound, the outside area is a huge courtyard with a giant screen showing (today) Channel 4 racing. No room service either (noooooo).

The room was small and heavily overlooked, with cheap accountant’s-office blinds that moved in the slightest breeze. Oh, and there was an aircon unit outside the window that sounded like the Saturn V taking off.

I am now in the bland and corporate Radisson SAS on the corner of South Bridge, a much nicer spot, and handy for this evening’s do at the Scottish Parliament.

The National Rail website has vastly improved its journey planner.

Jane and the kids are off to Jávea at the end of next month. Valencia, the nearest city, is a wonderful place, and I’m sorry not to be able to head over there with them. One of the best things on the web about Valencia is the website of its Metro, with a nifty interactive map that even gives details of station exits and their opening hours. It’s a really well-designed site as well.

Not from this trip, but from Frommer’s Budget Travel.

A wonderful evening with Jane in Paris this evening, while Liz sat the kids back at the hotel. Since 2003, every August, Paris has set up a beach environment on the right bank of the Seine, called Paris Plage. It’s a wonderful idea, particularly for this city, which half depopulates on 1 August, and Jane and I had a good beer in a beach cafe overlooking the Île de la Cité, before wandering on to the Pont des Arts. It was full of picnicking couples and families – not sure whether they’d been drawn there by Paris Plage – and we bought a couple of cold beers from a passing beer seller, and enjoyed the view down the river.

Finally, we headed for a glass of extraordinarily expensive, but wonderful, wine in the brasserie Le Pré aux Clercs at 30 Rue Bonaparte in the 6e, and the evening was rounded off with a crêpe complet at the stand outside the St. Germain des Prés metro stop.

More spots around Paris:

Eating:

Le Beaupré brasserie, av. de Suffren, near the Eiffel Tower: adequate bistro, with overfriendly staff a bit too ready to try English, German, Italian, etc. on foreign-looking visitors. Thanks, but we do speak French.
Chez Paul, Rue de Charonne, 11e.: Excellent and very traditional French bistro – with one (1) vegetarian option on a huge menu. Tom tried snails and steak tartare.

Shopping:

Galerie Kara, 24 Rue St. Louis en l’Isle: Lovely jewellers in the swish Île St. Louis, with some great necklaces. Email galeriekara at hotmail dot com.

One evening in Chambery, capital of Savoie, en route from Verona to Paris. It was quite a pleasant spot – our soulless but comfortable hotel, the Mercure, was right opposite the railway station. I got the feeling, wandering round in search of food, that there were a lot of people having fun somewhere, but just somewhere else. I found a ‘pub’ – complete with beer and signs, confusingly in English, and had a Savoyard speciality called (I think) a tartine, which was a sort of ham-cheese-potato concoction. Nice, but not very summery.

The rail journey down from Chambery to Lyon was just beautiful, through cloudy mountains and high meadows. Nearby is Evian-les-Bains, home of that water.

Venice was as wonderful as it always is, with the usual hordes of tourists around the Piazza thinning out nicely as we walked round past the Goldoni theatre and la Fenice to Campo S. Stefano. The pistachio ice-cream at Paolin’s there is a good thing. Jane slipped into a reverie at the Ponte dell’Accademia, which was great (I always think I might be a bit too Venetophile).

The Doge’s Palace is beyond words, again. Tom got a cat mask from a shop called il Ballo del Doge, near la Fenice.

Missed my usual trip to see Goldoni’s statue in C. San Bartolomeo. If they ever make a statue of me, I’d like to be smiling like Goldoni is (not self-satisfiedly, whatever the article linked might say).

I am posting this from a hotel (with wifi) apparently scientifically situated in the middle of nowhere, somewhere near Marseille. This is thanks to SNCF voyages who, while good at booking rail tickets, are apparently absolutely incapable of understanding the concept of a hotel being close to their own railway station, as opposed to a €30 taxi ride away from it.

A pleasant stay in Paris at the Hotel Patio St. Antoine, on the rue Faubourg St Antoine, metro Faidherbe-Chaligny. Also, right by the metro, a lovely friendly cafe callled Le cafe Faidherbe.