Airline points have become the crack cocaine of the travel world. Fly, buy dinner, fill up with gas and you get rewarded with scrip called rather optimistically “Frequent Flyer Miles”. They come in a variety of guises, and like every other currency have extremely variable exchange rates. Oddly, it seems that the most valuable part […]
Last evening a colleague and I had an absolutely marvellous meal at a restaurant called Bumbles, close to Victoria station. It is a restaurant with which I have had a glancing aquaintance for some thirty years, and although it has undergone several incarnations, has always been a reliable and innovative place to eat. The menus […]
Judging from the newspaper headlines this morning, the UK is blanketed in both literal and metaphoric snow. There is a lot of the white stuff; the western county of Devon is apparently stuggling under many centimetres of the stuff, a lot even for a seasoned Canadian, but more interesting is the snow job that is […]
I like Reykjavík, even in January when it doesn’t get light until 10.00, and is dark by 4.30. I have to say, that wandering around the streets, and driving around town, there is no obvious sign of economic doom; that, is all hidden, reflected in the massive number of crushing loans that so many Icelanders […]
Chicago has to be one of the world’s best sightseeing cities, and yesterday we saw it all. Well, we didn’t see it all, of course, and in fact only scratched the surface, but probably did as much as one could possibly do in a single day. It was chilly; even for those of us who […]
I don’t really consider myself to be an unlucky traveller, but sometimes fate intervenes. After a week in Winnipeg, it is time to hit the road again, and this time the plan was to spend a weekend in Chicago, listening to the blues, with my mucisian-daughter Katherine; her twenty-first birthday present. So after a couple […]
Christmas Day’s curious security incident has had some major and important ramifications; security organisations worldwide have introduced some puerile and bizarrely reactive restrictions; (no blankets over one’s knees for the last hour of a flight?), and once again a fragile world is tossed into chaos and distrust. Today it is airline terrorism, but it could […]
This year I am in England for some difficult family reasons, but it is nonetheless delightful to be here over Christmas. Other than the wild snow and ice of a couple of days ago, the weather has been superb, and the countryside is gorgeous. Staying with friends in their Victorian cottage in Manston, a small […]
I have always liked duty-free shops; one of the minor deceptions of travelling internationally is the idea that you can save $5 or $6 on a bottle of vodka and somehow stick-it to one tax collecting authority or another. It is, like so many other rather petty transactions a touch deceptive; alcohol pricing is such […]