Florence

Back from a 3 day city trip to Florence, Italy. Click on the image to enter the Florence gallery.

Dali, Gaudi & anchovy

Hola!
We're back (again); this time from a trip to Spain. We went the North-East of Catalonia: l'Escala & surroundings and Barcelona.

Too bad that the wind was having a couple of off-days: so no windsurfing for me at the Club Mistral station at the Bay of Roses. We decided to take it easy & relax and drive around a bit instead to visit some surrounding places: Girona, Llafranc, Cap de Creus, Empuries, Figueres etc. Dali was omnipresent ;-)

After 10 relaxing days, we entered Barcelona by car, which is always a big adventure for non-Barcelonians. But we managed it without a scratch! Here is a short list of things to see and do in Barcelona: Gaudi, Montjuic, Gaudi, tapas, Gaudi and once more tapas. And of course many other things :-) Barcelona was super!

After 4 days in what I call the tapas-town of the world we headed for the Codorniu winery for a guided tour and Cava taste session. Unfortunately we still had to drive 1300km that day, so the bubbles had to be limited :-(


To enter the images library, just click on one of these photos. To see some people-saying-cheese pictures, just let me know and I'll send you an authenticated url.

Adios!

Ps. I updated my Lighthouse portfolio once more...

Jungfrau, cycling and cheese fondue

Here they are: some impressions of our last trip to Switzerland. We're lucky that we have cool friends living there, so we got quite some nice tips of places to visit. Click on the images to go to the album. For more holiday pics, just contact me to get the holiday-url.

What did we do:

• From Grindelwald (1034m) going up with the longest gondelbahn of Europe to Manlichen at 2225m from where we could see the Eiger, Monich and Jungfrau summits. Then following the Romantic route downwards to the mountain restaurant at Alpiglen for a Rosti with Bratwurst. Via Brandegg we continued the downhill track back to Grindelwald.
• The hotel offered us some great BMC MTBs to use; so we planned a trip to the lake at Biel via on and off road tracks.
• A visit to Aareschlucht where we could walk along the paths in the narrow gorge. For the ones who are interested: click here for some extra Wikipedia info :-)
  
• A quick drivethrough Lauterbrunnen and the valley of the 72 waterfalls.
• Relaxing at the lake of Biel.
• After having a stop in Interlaken, a nice small town with lots of shops (especially Victorinox), places to have a drink, etc. (quite touristic though), we went to Etang de la Gruere. A calm lake in the Jura, with a nice and quite easy walking path. The setting reminded me of the movie Lake Placid :-D I was waiting for the croc to show up...

What we did not do and is on the list for a next visit:

• lunch at resto Piz Gloria at Shilthorn, where scenes from James Bond were taken for On Her Majesty's Secret Service.
• hiking trip to Eigenergletscher
• Zurich
• ...

Cool Swiss food stuff that we experienced: rosti with bratwurst, cheese fondue, open air portable bbq with sausages on a large wooden skewer, apfelschorle, meringue (didn't know it had Swiss roots: click here) and of course toblerone.

Windsurf @ Fuerteventura

Aloha! We just came back from a one week island discovery and windsurf trip at Fuerteventura. Here's a quick summary of the experience. As it was end of March, beginning of April, the weather was OK: few clouds, blue sky, sun and wind. As the pictures show: Fuerte is quite rough and you cannot find much green out there, besides the few palm trees in the small villages and at the hotels. If you love rocks, dust, sand and windmills Fuerte's the place to be :-)
For the windsurf geeks amongst you readers, I can recommend the Rene Egli Pro Center in Sotavento as a very good windsurf rental station. I have already some experience with similar surf trips and the friendliness and relaxed atmosphere is definitely a plus here.
Cya

Johannesburg, South-Africa

Something I had to complete was the photo gallery of the last trip I made. The trip went to Johannesburg, South-Africa in between Christmas and New Year last year. This gallery is just a quick selection of the bigger set of pictures I took to give an impression of the shacks of Soweto, what a game drive has to offer and how a smile of an Ostrich looks like :-)