Reflections on 2020

December 31, 2020 by Brad

Groundhog Day. That is how we began to describe each day of 2020 on video calls with work. Every day the same, you get out of bed, have breakfast, login to the work laptop, sit in the same spot all day, log off, eat dinner, watch tv, sleep and repeat.

On one hand one could wonder why it is even worthwhile writing a review of a year in which almost nothing happened because everyone was at home all year. On the other, plenty of unusual things and changes to usual ways of living and working did happen, and it is good to document just what a utterly crazy year it has been.

A Fresh Start

December 27, 2020 by Brad

Welcome,

After more than 15 years of content on this site, I’ve cleared everything to start again.

I’ve now completed bringing over around 250 travel related posts from the old blog.

From now I plan to focus this site on travel blogging with some ocassional commentary on life, technology and politics.

Brad

Western Europe 2018 Trip – Part Six: Side Trips to Lübeck and Osnabrück

December 26, 2020 by Brad

After failing to make it to Lübeck on our first day in Hamburg, we did a quick trip on our last day.

It rained the entire time we were in Lubeck, despite this we still walked around the city and even stumbled on a church (St. Petri Kirche) which is now a community centre after the Soviet government refused to allow churches to be restored after the second world war.

Western Europe 2018 Trip – Part Five: Hamburg

December 26, 2020 by Brad

We allocated three days to explore Hamburg and it’s surrounds.

On the train ride from Berlin, we had decided to take an immediate side trip to the nearby town of Lübeck. However, when we arrived at Hamburg’s Main Station all the departure boards for connecting trains were showing the words “Tiere Im Gleis”.

With the little bit of German I know I was left trying to figure out what “Animals on the Platform” meant, and both in a rush and not seeing any animals, we went to the nearest platform for a delayed train to Lübeck.

After sitting on this train, going nowhere, for 20 minutes, we managed to speak to someone in English and realised that the word “Gleis” isn’t just “Platform” but also “Track”, that is, there are animals on the track and the trains are not running, which also explained why our delayed train was not going anywhere either.

Western Europe 2018 Trip – Part Four: Berlin

August 3, 2020 by Brad

Following almost a week in the UK it was time to move onto Continental Europe, with the first stop being Berlin.

Western Europe 2018 Trip – Part Three: Edinburgh

May 24, 2020 by Brad

The next leg of my journey was to catch the Flying Scotsman train from London’s King Cross station to Edinburgh’s Waverley station. The modern day version of the Flying Scotsman is very comfortable and had onboard WIFI the entire way – useless for anyone who gets bored looking out the window (I’m not one to get bored looking out windows).