SATURDAY 08/10/22 The day started off so well! It is an easy ride from Concord to Oakland International Airport, via the BART then changing to the new 3.2-mile long, elevated, driverless AirTrain link to the airport terminal. We arrived at the airport the obligatory two hours early and were through security and sat in the departure lounge in good time …
A venue that every craft beer geek should visit. A great afternoon spent in the Elbow Room @elbowroomalehouse in Hinckley yesterday, attending their ‘Renewal Fest’. Friendly owner, knowledgable barkeeps, awesome homemade scotch eggs and free jelly beans. Oh, and the beers weren’t half bad either! A mega beer list from some stunning US breweries, including Beer Tree, Branch & Blade …
TUESDAY 04/10/22 Hooking up with Mark and Suzanne again, they picked us up at stupid dark o’clock outside the Pangaea on the corner of our street, en route from Concord, to start our three-day road trip. After a couple of hiccups finding the highway, we were finally on our way and 100 miles and two and a half hours later …
FRIDAY 30/09/22 Today was primarily spent travelling. Unlike the last flight, everything went smoothly and we were back at Oakland International by mid-afternoon. An hour or so later we were back with our friends Mark and Suzanne in Concord. Of course, this had to be celebrated with a beer and within half an hour we were all on our way …
TUESDAY 27/09/22 The Portland-Seattle Amtrak train we had booked a couple of months previously was unceremoniously cancelled with just one week’s notice, with no alternative routes or transport offered. Nice. We rebooked the 175 mile, three-and-a-half-hour journey on Flixbus which, ironically, departed from opposite the Portland railway station. Whilst checking the line of passengers on board we thought the driver …
SATURDAY 24/09/22 The day started off so well. Beautiful sunrise, warm morning sun, and a luxury ride to Oakland Airport, thanks to Mark taking us door to door in his Jaguar XJ. We were straight through security and into the departure lounge within 15 minutes and everything was on schedule. Unfortunately, it started going downhill from there… As we boarded …
Mrs. Belvoir and I have wanted to return to the States ever since we returned from our epic East-Coast tour, four years ago. This West-Coast jaunt was originally pencilled in for last year, but a spiky little bastard named Covid put a stop to that, and so we re-scheduled for 2022. The original plan was to fly into San Francisco …
SATURDAY 25/6/22 We made the 186-mile journey from Lisbon to Porto by coach for an insanely cheap price of 11 Euros each. The journey was comfy enough and took in some lovely scenery along the route, although the large, loud woman in front was taking constant calls on speaker phone and the girl across the aisle was jabbing her mobile …
This visit was actually a rearranged trip, the original having been cancelled two years previously because of the Covid-19 malarky. Then, the plan was to fly into Porto, then bus to Lisbon and fly home from there. As it happens, because flight routes have changed since lockdown, we were doing it the opposite way and on June 21st 2022 we …
Watching the troubling, distressing and very worrying news from the Ukraine on TV in the last couple of days, I can’t help wondering ‘When will we learn?’ Invasions of entire Nations, certainly in modern history, don’t work. Just look at Germany & Japan in WWII, Iraq in Kuwait, and more recently the US/UK in Afghanistan. All failures. I won’t drone …
