Where to Go in Germany This is a postscript to the Wewelsburg walk from earlier in the year. Remember this walk we did through the charming landscape of the Alme valley near the west German city of Paderborn, where we discovered one of the Holy Shrines of the pagan death cult otherwise known as National Socialism?…
Day Trip from Paris Today, we will finish our walk around Mont Valerien outside Paris with the best of the tour’s three highlights. A Visit to an American War Cemetery Just before you return to the street that will lead you back down on your way to the RER station of Mont Valerien-Suresnes, you will…
Walks near Paris We Went Climbing Mont Valerien All right, Mont Valerien may not be much of a mountain, but one cannot dispute that, semantically, it belongs to the same family as Mont Blanc (whereas the Butte Montmartre and the Butte de Belleville in Paris are mere “hills”). And it is, with an altitude of 162 metres…
The Right Hiking Waterproof Outdoor Jacket For years, I had been priding myself on owning the cheapest of what I believed was a waterproof outdoor jacket in town. It had cost me 10 bucks and came from a supermarket chain that normally sells discount groceries and only extends its range of products temporarily when it…
Hiking Holidays in France Neglected but Pretty French Provincial Backwater France is one of the most visited countries in the world, but there are many French regions that certainly do not feel that way. The truth is that the flow of visitors to France is very unevenly distributed – like the rain in Spain, say,…
Easy Hiking in France Marais de Bourges The Marais de Bourges is a unique landscape: 135 hectares of marshland, criss-crossed by a dense network of footpaths, and all that in spitting distance to the centre of one of France’s oldest cities. We had been eager to explore this area for quite some time and were…
Walking London Exploring London on Foot If you want to go exploring London on foot, you must – as a general rule – be selective and concentrate on no more than one area per day. The distances from one part of town to the other are simply too long for even the most determined urban…
Being Hemingway This is a postscript to last week’s Hemingway walk in Paris. It also doubles up, incidentally, as our St Valentine’s Day post. After all, it does involve a story of two people who disappeared in the toilet for some private business. Even though they were both men. And even though only one of them…
Guest Post: By Thomas Dowson Two Hours in Berlin in Winter Berlin, it seems, has more than its fair share of monuments and memorials. Whether this is true or not I do not know. Someone once told me Washington DC could rival the German capital for the number of memorials. Given Berlin’s history, it would not…
Paris Urban Walk III The first two episodes in this short series of Paris walks took their cues from paintings and historic photos. This Paris urban walk shall be guided by words. A Paris Urban Walk with Hemingway’s Moveable Feast I would like to invite you to follow me on a literary walk through the…