I've been on to the Tourist Bureau with the possibility of a new slogan… Ljubljana - When you have to be somewhere. Which just about covers our situation. We finished up in Dublin on 4 March… wanted to celebrate a massive anniversary, figured out where our various stashes of airline points and miles could take us and where we could use our IHG hotel points to most effect. And the answer to a question that could stump AI ended up being Ljubljana - w...

Well, well, well - our original six week sit in Dublin turned into a eight week sit after the Porto debacle, then we tacked another two or three weeks onto the end due to our fabulous hosts being held up in the USA due to a medical emergency. Serious. Life threatening - not once but twice. So that was indeed a stressful time for them and we were worried to death on their behalf. We ended up in Dublin for over 10 weeks. Yowser. After we enjoyed our wintry Chris...

Black and white, night and day, dark and light. That would be the difference between Porto and Dublin. We were up bright and early in Porto and rip-snorting ready to go. We were scheduled on the 10 am flight but had only booked that so we wouldn't have to rush. As it turns out we were deathly keen to rush and move on to our fabulous stay in Dublin. Even with loads of traffic getting into the airport departures drop off area we were at the counter and checking...

How does it go? Man plans, God laughs. Well indeedy, that just about sums up our experience of Porto. We had a pretty good stay planned, nice kitty, nice enough apartment, seemingly 'on-the-bus host' and a good amount of time here in order to save some dosh on accommodation (paying for accommodation through Vietnam was positively painful since it was consistently 'hit and miss'.) So we met the kitty (check - yep, nice kitty) and had a walk through the apartment ...

In the usual course of affairs I wouldn't bother writing about 2 days. Seriously, how much could happen in two days? However, by virtue of being in five countries in said two days (Vietnam, Qatar, Italy, Spain and Portugal), it probably merits a mention, if only to say 4 flights, 3 stops, 3 bags and 'Yay! We're here!' and to mention the weird feeling you get when you're jetlagged and wake up in a dark room only to have literally no idea of where 'here' is. We wa...