The week started in Tallinn and ended in Viljandi at an Estonian folk festival. (We flew back to England for the second time- the first time was to vote in the elections and this second time was for a dear friend’s funeral). Estonia is a small country with only 1.5 million people but it has…

It was my birthday on 16 July (68) and we celebrated in style in Finland at a 1970s modernist hotel on Hanaholmen. It’s only 10 minutes drive from the centre of Helsinki but in true Finnish style it’s surrounded by pine trees and the sea. And it has a cool swimming pool, sauna and a…

Hello! Well, we skipped the blog last week because we made a mad dash back to the UK from Poland to vote in the election and see family. So this covers two weeks of travel (trains and boats and planes) and tells of leaving Poland and going North to Sweden and Norway. We’ve decided against…

The plan was first to search out my grandmother’s Jewish origins in Hungary and then to head across Hungary and Slovakia to the Carpathian mountains in Poland. We had to change plans on arrival in Poland because the van started to make very odd noises but this took us to Krakow and Zakopane in the…

The week started with music in Udine in Italy and ended with music in the Esterhazy Schloss in Austria. The rest of the week has been by a series of lakes. In Udine there was communal tango dancing in the Loggia with a lot of local participants who knew what they were doing. The next…

We had planned to head off through Albania, Macedonia, and Bulgaria to Romania but the more we looked at the weather the more the temperatures went up to the 36/37 and when you’re touring and trying to visit and walk that’s no good. So, it’s all change and we decided to head North where it’s…