Category Archives: Travel

Daily Gratitude Challenge Day 7: Travel Experiences

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In an effort to inject some positivity into my daily mindset and the online world I have created a Daily Gratitude Challenge and I am inviting everyone to participate. If you have missed my introductory post that explains the challenge and maps out the daily post schedule, visit here.

What travel experiences are you most grateful for

Day 7 is all about the travel experiences you are grateful for. Travel wasn’t really something that was particularly important to me until my late 20’s – I had been on some package holidays to a few places abroad but never really took the time to explore anything while I was there, preferring to focus on sunbathing during the day and partying at night. However, a trip to America on a school trip that I was supervising introduced me to all of the incredible things to see and do while visiting a new city, even more so when a natural disaster left us stranded for a while (and gained us an invitation to the White House). Since then, travel has become high in my priorities and I am incredibly grateful to have seen and experienced some amazing things. Continue reading →

A Visit to East Croydon and Crystal Palace

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After my awesome afternoon experiencing a street art tour in Shoreditch with my bloggy friend, Tiffany, I headed on over to Victoria and caught a train to East Croydon to meet another bloggy friend: Donna, the creator of Jot to Jot. We connected a few years ago online and have met several times in person since (she even came to my wedding), and since the birth of her little girl last December I had been promising to visit.

It only took nearly a year. Better late than never I suppose! Continue reading →

How to Spend 4 1/2 Days in New York City

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The Bloke and I recently visited NYC on our honeymoon and had an absolutely incredible time. It’s a fast paced, exciting and vibrant city that has interesting things to see and do on every block, but it isn’t possible to do it all in just one visit, particularly on a limited budget.

It is, however, possible to experience an enormous amount of things in a short amount of time and without spending an enormous amount of money, and we’re proof of this as we’ve just done it ourselves.

It is worth noting at this point that we were staying at a fairly centralised hotel – Hotel @ Times Square on West 46th Street, near 6th Avenue, so it was possible to easily walk to a number of the locations we visited on the first few days, but the subway is efficient enough that it is easy and inexpensive to get from one side of Manhattan to another in a short space of time. Continue reading →

Blog of the Day: A Girl and Her Passport

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I love travel blogs – they give me an insight into parts of the world that I have always wanted to visit from a first hand perspective, and if I am planning a trip I will spend lots of time reading travel posts from some of my favourite bloggers to gain ideas of things to see, do and eat that are not part of the usual tourist hotspots.

Tiffany is one of those bloggers. An American ex-pat currently living in Qatar, she is the creator of A Girl and Her Passport, a travel blog that documents her travels and experiences of countries from all over the world. What I like about Tiffany’s blog is the fact that she varies her posts to incorporate all areas of travel, from reviews of hotels that she has stayed in, individual activities in cities that she has visited (I particularly loved this one about a Thames boat trip in London), what to pack for specific activities, and, my favourite of all of them, humane and ethical encounters with wildlife in places that I would consider to be exotic – her Elephants in the Wild post in Sri Lanka made me incredibly envious. I love her photographs from her travels: Continue reading →

Terms and Conditions

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Those of you who follow the blog regularly will know that I travel via train fairly frequently. I’ve learned to be fairly savvy with it – I know that one of the biggest train and travel companies in particular will hike up their prices by as much as £100 for travel on the same day as booking, so making sure that tickets in advance are essential unless you want to take out a second mortgage just to pay for travel costs.

So, when they sent me an email informing them of their summer sale, with tickets on offer for £4.00 between Birmingham and London, I eagerly planned a day trip for The Bloke and I, feeling really pleased with myself for obtaining tickets for both of us for the grand total price of £16.00. Bargain.

That is, until I discovered that I’d gone and booked tickets for the opposite journeys that I wanted – I’d done London to Birmingham instead of the other way around. Idiot. Totally my fault, and I was irrationally super-angry with myself for not concentrating and making a rookie mistake.

Now, it’s only £16.00, but for the principle of it I set about getting a refund. After 5 phone calls during which I was waiting for a total of about 45 minutes and eventually resorting to Twitter because nobody answered the phone, I was informed that my tickets were non-refundable because they had been purchased in the sale. Not that this is made clear anywhere on the booking page in advance, but they got me with the fact that they had included this in their Terms and Conditions, at the bottom of a long list and buried in their website.

So, we have had to book another set of tickets, ultimately paying the same price that we would have done without the sale. I wouldn’t mind, as it was my mistake, but I am a bit cross at the fact they have made extra money from me and won’t give it back, which is always covered by the crappy Terms and Conditions. Hopefully, they can use my money (and I’m sure the money from other idiots like myself) into improving the service and getting the trains to actually be big enough to accommodate the amount of people that use them…

What about you guys? Have you ever made a mistake and then been screwed over by the Terms and Conditions?

You can also find me on Twitter and Tumblr @suzie81blog, and don’t forget to check out my Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/suzie81speaks, my Pinterest page http://www.pinterest.com/suzie81speaks and my Instagram page http://www.instagram.com/suzie81speaks.

Blog of the Day: A Girl and Her Passport

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I’m always envious of travel bloggers, in particular when I see their beautiful posts of all the places they have visited and the experiences they have had.

Tiffany is one such blogger. The creator of ‘A Girl and Her Passport,‘ she is an American ex-pat living in Qatar, and she describes what she does in her About page:

Hi, I’m Tiffany… From here, I travel the world exploring countries’ culture, art, history, and food and to share it with my readers through stories and photography. My focus is on independent travel with an eye for finding the uniqueness of each place I visit.

I absolutely love her images:

Bangkok
Florence
Gubbio
Kynthos
Salalah, Oman
Santorini

Continue reading →

Suzie in the City

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After a truly brilliant weekend with a lovely bunch of bloggy friends, I prepared myself for the trip back to Birmingham. As Sacha lives quite a distance from me (three trains and a tube connection), I thought that I had everything organised, and as I had made it relatively unscathed (despite the unexpected detour) I was at the station with what I thought a spare twenty minutes until the first train of my journey was ready to leave. The main part of it was from London Euston, and I thought my train left at 1.00pm, only to discover that it was actually at 3.40pm – the train the day before had been that that time instead.

That meant that, by the time I arrived at Euston, I had about three hours to kill before my train left. So, as it was a glorious day, and I’m never one to miss an opportunity to be a tourist, I purchased an all-day tube travel pass and went off on a little jolly around London, setting myself a challenge to see as much as I possibly could in the time limit. Continue reading →

What a Carry On!

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I predicted that I would be shattered, but nothing prepared me for just how much my feet would hurt on the train heading back home.

Those of you who regularly follow the blog will know that I’ve spent the past three days in London, touring all the Carry On sites of interest outside Pinewood Studios. As an early birthday present for my mum, who is quite possibly the world’s biggest Carry On fan, I mapped out loads of the blue plaques, grave sites and filming locations in and around the London area.

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As an extra gift, I had managed to purchase a print from the extremely talented British Comedy and portrait artist Steve Lilly (@Stevelilart), who just happened to live about ten minutes away from me, which I gave Mum when we arrived in London. She loved it!

It was exhausting, but we pretty much managed to cover everything I had planned.

On the first day we visited Maidenhead Town Hall, which was used in several of the films, and walked just around the corner to the high street, where a few of the scenes from Carry On Camping was filmed. Continue reading →

An Amazing Few Days in Scotland

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Wow.

It only seems like five minutes ago since I published my engagement post, but since then The Bloke and I have been busy exploring the incredible sights that this area of Scotland has to offer. We’re staying at Creel Cottage in the coastal village of Johnshaven, and as well as relaxing and enjoying the views and calm atmosphere here, we’ve been able to go and see some things that have been on my Bucket List for a long time. It’s like something from a film set – everything is just beautiful – and the people are open, warm and friendly.

Dunnottar Castle
The view from Dunnottar Castle
The view from Dunnottar Castle
Driftwood huts on St Cyrus beach
The Bloke’s footprints
The waterfall at St Cyrus

Here are just some of the highlights: Continue reading →

On a Train… Again

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imageI’m on a train up north to spend a few days with the family as its my sister’s birthday. I’m not a fan of travelling this way during the week – my normal routine is to get one around 6.00am at the weekends, as nobody else has got out of bed at that time and it means that I can sit where I like and not be disturbed by screaming kids or poncy businessmen talking in buzzwords on their phones. As you can see from the image, it’s a cold and miserable day, but this is nothing new – it always seems to rain whenever I go up to Manchester.

As predicted, the train is rammed, but I shoved my way to the front, got on first and bagged a seat that doesn’t have a reservation. I have learned over the years that it doesn’t pay to be polite, unless you wish to stand for the entirety of the journey (how sad, but unfortunately a fact of dealing with the British general public), and I’m currently sitting by myself, listening to Bon Jovi (I had to put my headphones in to drown out the noise of the person opposite playing an online gambling game really loudly on his phone), eating my breakfast and watching a whole bunch of people squabble about who is sitting in each other’s seats. It’s quite amusing – I must look intimidating for some reason because a family have just had an argument about sitting next to me – apparently none of the them want to, one of them remarking that they would rather stand up. Fine by me! Hopefully, I’ll be left in peace to put my make-up on, and get on the blog, when the internet signal permits. Continue reading →