THURSDAY 27 OCTOBER Our long weekend began with a East Midlands Trains journey from Derby to London St Pancras. We had enough time for a drink at the St Pancras Grand Hotel before we hot footed it to the Eurostar terminal for the final departure of the day to Brussels Midi at 1934. This train was operated by a 'classic' Eurostar and if honest we prefer them to the new Siemens e320 trains that are now coming into service. The on board crew were pretty swift and...

It is just a one hour flight from East Midlands Airport to Dinard. With Ryanair only operating this service from April to October, and three days a week, it is fairly rare that we can take advantage of the flights as the times need us to use some of our valuable annual leave allowance. Our friends Simon and Linda accompanied us on this trip to Brittany, their second visit of the year to our little bit of France! By the time we had collected the hire car and drive...

It is a very long way to get to, but it was well worth the all travelling to enjoy a cheeky weekend break in Cornwall. The trip was really all about ticking off another item of Heather's 'to do' list as she had never visited Lands End but as ever we managed to pack a few extra things into a couple of days. Leaving Derby at around 1630 on the Friday it was a five and a quarter hour trip to St Austell with the through CrossCountry service travelling via Bristol, Ex...

I cannot remember when I last visited Hastings, but it was certainly a long time ago. Our Friday evening journey from Derby to Hastings took about three and a half hours on three different trains. Our Guest House accommodation, The Senlac, was actually quite good - albeit the street did seem a little bit rough on first impressions - the room was fairly large, very clean and looked freshly refurbished. Our friends, Tim and Georgie, had arrived before us and source...

After arriving into Biarritz on the train from Arcachon it was then time then to catch a bus into the city centre. The station is a long way out of the centre and even then we still had a ten minute walk to our hotel from the nearest bus stop. First impressions of Biarritz were probably tarnished by the weather - which was overcast - and our hotel which, if honest, was a little rough around the edges, had no air-conditioning and had a slightly musty smell about i...