Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
An unexpected pleasure was watching a rather entertaining documentary on BBC 4 last night – Peter York’s Hipster Handbook.
York is an astute observer and this hit the spot on several occasions during the one hour of airtime. I’d presume that the show is available to viewers in the UK via BBC iPlayer and there’s a fair chance that BBC 4 will also be repeating the programme in the next few days.
The reason for the title of this piece?
The revelation that there’s a cafe in the US serving coffee at $12 a cup…
Don’t think that I’d be partaking at that price if I was in the States, but I do wonder how much it would cost at a motorway service station here in the UK!
Let the games commence…
You don’t always need Heathrow to get to places like this…
The decision has been made to allow a third runway at Heathrow Airport and there’s already conjecture that it might never happen if last night’s TV news reports are anything to go by.
I have flown out of Heathrow on several occasions, but if memory serves me right, the last couple of times were in 1999 and 2000. I was living in the North East at the time and access to Heathrow was usually by taking an overnight coach to the airport.
Fast forward sixteen years and I’m now living in Yorkshire so it’s easy to use either Leeds Bradford or Manchester to access international destinations by either direct flights from Leeds Bradford or Manchester or by flying via Schiphol or even via Heathrow.
Travel forums are already buzzing with comments as to what might happen, Boris Johnson has stated his thoughts on the matter and we’ve already had one MP resign his seat in the House Of Commons in protest at the decision and this is leading to a by-election.
Given that the legal niceties, planning and building processes are going to take year to implement, who knows how long it will be before the runway is actually up and running and whether it is the answer to the questions that have been asked over goodness knows how many years?
In which case I’ll stick to flying from and to airports closer to home here in the Northern Powerhouse!
Luggage matters
Our faithful packs – Osprey Farpoint 40
After watching a couple of episodes of The West Wing series two last night, we switched the DVD player off and up came one of the presenters of The Travel Show on BBC News who was talking about the latest in packing technology for travelling with both hand and hold luggage.
First up was a hand luggage pack with wheels that could also be used as a scooter that came in at an unladen weight that was fast approaching what some airlines have as their fully packed weight allowance for bags being used as hand luggage.
Somewhere in the mix was also a bag that you didn’t have to hold onto whilst negotiating the airport terminal or a hotel lobby as the bag is designed to follow you around as you make your way through fellow passengers or people seeing fellow passengers off.
Yes, it was a motorised bag that homes in your movements – a handy thing to have you may think, but dare I allege that it could cause problems when used in proximity to those with visual problems, children running around or even a potential passenger using the same type of bag (especially if they look identical as they haven’t been personalised!).
We phased out big time though when the hold luggage that could store flight and destination information was talked about, largely because we don’t travel with hold luggage any more.
The last time we did this was back in 2008 when we headed off to Austria for a walking holiday based in a hotel that was offering half board as part of the last minute deal. Since then it’s been hand luggage all the way when flying or getting a ferry to Bergen in Norway.
There have been a few posts on travel forums over the last few days as to what pack to take when travelling light and even a few from one person who is designing a potential hand luggage system as part of his third year projects for a degree course.
Osprey Farpoint 40 packs have been mentioned once more on these forums and it was purely coincidence that I had some time to take a look at a 2016 version yesterday whilst wandering around shops in Leeds city centre.
Yes, it’s gone up from £80 to £90 since Caroline and I bought our examples, but I had to look long and hard to see what changes had been made to the pack. From the outside at least, all I could spot were changes to the zip pullers for the two main compartments on the pack.
You may not be able to use the Farpoint 40 as a scooter, but you should be able to pack it for a trip and fly on an airline with a 5kg hand luggage limit.
Not as much fun if you’re a scooter fan, but at least we may not be handing over cash at an airport for last minute bags in the hold charges!
As seen in…
The only surviving TSR-2 at RAF Cosford Air Museum
A reminder of a former employer, Abergavenny
Lyme Regis harbour, Dorset
The Thatcher we approve of – Thatcher’s Cider Shop, Somerset
One batch of raw materials at Perry’s Cider, Somerset
Low tech…
Looking at various travel forums, it would appear that there are a few people out there who can’t live without mobile coverage or Wi-Fi access.
We’ve just had two weeks in Herefordshire & Somerset here in the UK and guess what?
Low signal on Caroline’s smartphone and my dumbass phone at the two cottages we stayed in Herefordshire and Somerset and no signal at all in some of the places we visited in those counties or in the Brecon Beacons, North Devon or Dorset when we were exploring those areas.
And Wi-Fi? None at either of the cottages and only one place – the cafe next to Tintern Abbey – on the day we were moving between the two sets of digs.
Did my head explode because of this?
No, largely because we’d checked network coverage out before we left home and whether there was Wi-Fi at said cottages.
Did it bother us?
Not really, even on the day that both of us forgot to pick up our phones on the day we headed into North Devon and around Exmoor.
The iPad was used for note-taking and for reading using the Kindle app whilst Caroline was watching Poldark and to check my email whilst having a coffee and a bacon butty at Tintern.
And that was it…
Did we have a relaxing holiday? Yes…
Did we enjoy a low tech holiday? Yes..
Will we have more like it? Oh yes!
Back home…
Two weeks have flown over, even though we haven’t been on a plane…
One week in Herefordshire, one week in Somerset and a whole lot of cider going on!
I finally got to see a De Haviland Comet, a Vickers VC10 and the only surviving TSR2 at RAF Cosford Air Musum plus a whole lot more, even though we were only there for just over two hours.
Not much in the way of phone signals in the last two weeks and virtually no Wi-Fi either so no postings or checking emails!
Back home now though and the posting start again this week…
TV or not TV, that is the question…
Just coast to show…
Now that most of the wall to wall sports coverage is out of the way, television in the UK is getting back to what passes for normal over here.
There’s no chance of me watching either Strictly or Bake Off, but a few old favourites have materialised on BBC2 and the Travel Channel recently.
The Travel Channel has been showing a selection of classic Palin travels and I’ve ended up re-watching episodes of Himalaya and Around The World In Eighty Days, even though I’ve seen them before and have both the books and the DVDs of each series too.
Both were rather watchable, as was the first episode of the Michael Portillo vehicle Great Continental Railway Journeys that was on BBC2 last night.
Whilst Portillo is still a political commentator, to my mind he’s made his mark as the presenter of his programmes on the joys of travelling by train in various parts of the world.
Yes, his choice of jackets can be rather flamboyant, but his love of rail travel shines through. Last night’s show involved travelling around Switzerland, something that I did back in the 1980’s.
After a night or two in Geneva, the rail passes were pressed into action to get us to Interlaken where a tent was pitched to use as or Swiss base.
When the sun was out, it was time to head into the mountains. When it wasn’t, it was time to hit the cities.
Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Zermatt and the Jungfrau were stops on sunny days, whilst Zurich, Basel and Berne were stops on our city days.
Portillo also visited Montreux, one stop that we didn’t make on that 80’s trip, but I did stop off on the Lake Geneva shoreline a few years later although there was no smoke on the water during that visit…
Portillo’s next stop? Morocco, but whether he calls in at Rick’s Cafe American is yet to be revealed!
And finally we have Coast.
There are a few boxed sets of this on the shelves downstairs, but I must admit to being a little disappointed when the new series started last week.
The reason? The mix of new footage was good, but there were too many clips from previous series for my liking. I will take a look at tonight’s instalment to see whether things improve, but I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for a new segment to appear and to appeal to regular viewers…
Mind you, I gather that Neil Oliver has also made Coast New Zealand, so hopefully that will be coming our way soon.
On a different note, watching the footage of Geneva on Great Continental Railway Journeys brought back memories of wandering around that city.
Most of it was written up for a travel piece in The Northern Echo newspaper back in the day.
What did surprise me was that one line stayed in the article and was published in all its glory.
It referred to an observation made whilst walking from our digs to the railway station for the train to Geneva Airport…
“The ladies of the night working the day shift.“
London calling…
Kings Cross Station, London
Just spotted what’s being shown as part of the Keith Richards’ Lost Weekend thread on BBC 4 here in the UK tomorrow night (Saturday 24th September) at 9.15pm.
It’s Julien Temple’s ‘London – The Modern Babylon’, a fascinating documentary about London since the beginning of the 20th Century. It’s a mix of archive material from the BFI (British Film Institute)library, interview footage and clips from various films too. And it has a cracking soundtrack too… starting with The Clash and London Calling.
Will be watching it as it goes out, even though there’s a DVD copy on the shelf in the lounge.
No brainers…
Sometimes you just have to roll the dice to see this…
Or this…
One of the ‘joys’ of looking at travel forums on a regular basis is spotting the number of posters who have done their research using guidebooks, Google, Yahoo, Bing or even travelogues to plan, loosely plan or even not plan their break, holiday or journey.
There are some who want fellow forum users to suggest where they should go or even plan out their trip for them.
Others want so much validation for their plans that by the time they’ve made multiple posts on a similar theme that forum members either ignore them or become sarcastic after offering the same advice again and again and again.
Those who haven’t done their research are easy to spot because they’re so vague in their requests for places to go or for someone to do their planning for them that they can’t even be bothered to include basic information such as their budget, their time frame, their interests or passions or whether they have specific dietary needs or accommodation preferences.
And the usual answer to this lot?
Suggestions to buy at least one guidebook for where they’re going – my response is normally to get hold of both a Lonely Planet guidebook AND a Rough Guide book to whatever country or area they’re visiting or to point them in the direction of either the forum’s own search function or the search engines mentioned above.
There isn’t any excuse for such laziness when you’re heading off somewhere. It’s your trip and I take the view that it’s up to you to do due diligence and do your own research into where you’re going.
Do the research and you have a good idea about what to expect.
Don’t do the research or let others point you towards sights, places, areas or countries and there’s a fairly good probability that the brown stuff could hit the fan, leaving you to scream and scream and scream when in fact there’s only one person to blame…
You!
At the other end of the scale are those who plan everything to the nth degree and want so much validation that they become a pain in the butt…
Even when they’ve been told by several posters that the weather may not be in their favour, that their choice of clothing for walking is about as much use as a chocolate fireguard, or that they should loosen up, relax and go with the flow rather than ticking off every box on their long list of things to see and do.
Then there’s the lot who want to see as much of an area, country or even Europe in a few days rather than taking time to immerse oneself in one area or just one country as a means of exploring what’s on offer.
To those posters, I’ll invoke memories of a popular 1980’s t-shirt slogan:
“Frankie says RELAX!”
Don’t do it…
No fog on the Tyne…
And none of these grey clouds either!
“What time is it?”
“About six…”
“Sugar…”
As Sunday mornings go, this was an early start.
Two cups of coffee and a shower later, it was 6.50am and we were in the car and heading up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to see Caroline’s daughter take part in The Great North Run.
The Mission were on the car’s CD player – ideal driving music as we headed up the road for two hours and took the quiet roads into Newcastle, found a car park and went for second breakfasts.
Greggs bacon butty and coffee deal for me plus a doughnut & coffee combo for Caroline and then we hit the Tyne Bridge for a longish wait.
Some guy called Mo Farah came along on a warm-up session, then the wheelchair racers, visually impaired runners, the women’s elite and then the men’s elites – including that man (and now three times winner) Mo…
And then came the pack – around 57,000 runners, all heading for South Shields. I spotted The Red Arrows before the red, white and blue smoke was activated for their flypast as the masses ran past with at least one Paddington Bear as part of the proceedings!
Caroline’s daughter found us, took the suncream and headed off. We stayed on the bridge until the last runners came along and then tried to get the Metro to the finish line.
The emphasis here was on the word tried. The first train was full and whilst we did get on the train, it was packed and standing room only so not even Jeremy could have sat on the floor to read Private Eye! Allegedly…
Whilst we boarded this train after a few stops it was packed and I’d had enough of playing sardines. So we got off the train at Pelaw and headed back into Newcastle in search of lunch at a pub I hadn’t been into for over thirty years – The Northumberland Arms, just off Northumberland Street.
With two Sunday roasts, a pint of bitter shandy and a half of cider coming to just over £13, this was a result, especially as the beef was cooked properly, unlike some pubs we could mention where it’s served pink and bloody.
Pink and bloody awful is my view on that!
Now that we were fed and watered, the going got tough as the tough went – shopping! I’ve had a £5 John Lewis gift card in my wallet for six months and this came in useful for a couple of small purchases that came to £5.20…
We didn’t find anything we needed in Lush this time around, but I did get some useful info in the Apple Store as to what was happening about imminent operating system upgrades on my iPad Mini 2 – wait for a few days or a week, see what’s being said on the forums and then make the decision to upgrade, because once it’s done, you can’t restore the old one!
After rattling around the M&S Food Hall for a while, we settled on the stuff for our Sunday night evening meal.
This wasn’t any old reduced price food, this was Marks & Spencer’s reduced price food as we’d hit the time of day when the price changes were done on food coming up to its due date. Two packs of bakes and a two for £2.50 deal on packs of cheese scones and we were sorted…
Our coffee in the upstairs restaurant was also cost effective as my customer loyalty card had a freebie loaded onto it for a free cup of coffee after 2.30pm. Two medium Americanos for £2.30? That’ll do nicely!
Once we’d retrieved the car and negotiated our way back onto the A1M for the journey back to Yorkshire, we reflected on the cost of this grand day out.
Petrol used came to around £20, car parking was £3 for the full day, first breakfast for me was £2.25 at a motorway service area, second breakfasts for two was a total of £4, Sunday lunch was a total of £13.50, a pen and pair of scissors cost me 20p once the gift card was used, our M&S food hall bill was £5.65 and that last round of coffees was £2.30.
With the total bill for the day out coming in @ £50, we reckon that that was a result, so much so that we may do the same thing again shortly!
wisepacking 
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