Chappies Tour of UK Aug-Sep2022

  Tuscan hills and history The last blog was posted the night before we were due to take a balloon ride with Tuscany Ballooning, run by Pascale and Kirsty and their business partners, plus a small army of highly professional ground and support staff including Pascale and Kirsty’s son Oliver (piloting one of 4 balloons that went up that morning) and daughter Anna running the office back on terra firma. They are super-busy, so we were indeed very privileged to snare two slots on a glorious still and sunny morning. We flew for well over an hour, from near where Kirsty and Pascale live, close to San Casciano, as the sun started to touch upon the amazing landscape of small villages/towns, vineyards interspersed with olive groves, valleys and ridges of the Tuscan Hills, and the occasional open field for landing on! It was spectacular! So quiet, with perfectly clear sky and excellent visibility. Pilot Pascale At one stage we saw see the distinctive dome of the Duomo (Cathedral) ...

  So now we have crossed to the Continent, using our Eurail Pass. I am writing this at the home of Kirsty and Pascale (Abraham family friends), which sits on a hill-top near the town of San Casciano in Val di Pesa, about 30 km south of Florence, at the northern end of the Chianti wine region. In the beautiful hills of Tuscany. More of that in the next blog. In the meantime, there is stuff to catch up on from the last 6 or so days, which have gone by in a bit of a blur. Every day has been so full, it has been a case of: find hotel-get something to eat and drink-crash. No time to write a blog! First, the Eurail Pass . The one we bought is valid for 22 days, on most train services in 33 countries. We plan to travel in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as the UK – all being Eurail member countries. As many people have experienced, the rail systems in Europe are awesome: you can get to most major regions and towns/cities by rail, quickly and efficien...

  What we enjoy doing most in the UK is being in the more-rural and remote areas, stopping off in the smaller villages and towns, visiting gardens, exploring the coast, and walking. Cornwall ticks all our boxes, with a constant background of stunning scenery and picturesque sights. Rural and remote? Although a very popular region for holidaying and tourism, it’s not as busy as ‘heartland’ England, so does feel more like being in the country and away from the heavy traffic etc. that gets really tiring. The roads are, commensurately, small and remote: we drove many miles on ones like in the photo below, heart-in-mouth and hoping like heck not to meet anything coming the other way especially tractors or trucks! Amazingly, they do work pretty well, people who drive them regularly are very skilful and we didn’t have any real problems, other than its slow-going, like 15-20 mph average for any journey. So, just allow extra time. A Cornish road. To be fair, these are just connections...

  Backing-up: Chester, York and north Yorkshire plus a dabble in Essex and Kent Chester is a historic Roman town, built originally around the classical north-south and east-west street layout. There’s a thought that the Romans built here with a view to Deva Victrix being their ‘capital’ of what is now Britain and Ireland: if you look at a map of both countries, Chester is about dead centre. In the 1600s/1700s it was one of the most important cities in Britain. In those times it was on the coast and therefore an important port, but the river Mersey changed course which left Chester stranded and the city declined until the Victorian era when tourism became a major money-earner. By then the town was pretty shabby, so the Victorians tarted the buildings up in the classic black and white half-timbered style that was common centuries earlier and for which Chester is renowned today. So, all those lovely frontages e.g. in the photo below are actually about 120 years old, not 400 or 500...