On the final morning of this year’s Friends of Scouting in Europe Tour, Mark and I went to prison. The former Stasi prison in Andreasstraße in Erfurt, to be precise. After our visit to Buchenwald on Friday, this was another encounter with a history which is uncomfortable partly because it really isn’t very long ago….
There are days when the places you visit seem to speak to one another, and today was certainly one of them. Mark and I are in Germany with Friends of Scouting in Europe, visiting projects supported by the European Scout Foundation. This morning took us to Weimar; this afternoon, just a few miles up the…
Mark and I are back on our travels, this time in Erfurt in Germany for the annual gathering of the Friends of Scouting in Europe. These visits have become a part of the year that I particularly enjoy: a chance to catch up with old friends, make new ones and, more importantly, see something of…
. . The final morning of a holiday is mostly about luggage. We packed, repacked, checked the weight of the bags, moved things from one case to another and eventually established that we could get ourselves and everything we had accumulated over the past ten days back to Britain without having to wear six layers…
Copenhagen feels noticeably busier than Stockholm. The streets seem fuller, the pavements more crowded and the soundtrack considerably more international. We set off this morning to explore properly on foot. The city is compact enough that walking seems the best way to understand it, although by the end of the day our feet may have…
Our last morning in Sweden began with another excellent breakfast at Bomans in Trosa. Mark discovered pancakes with lingonberry jam, which seemed an appropriately Swedish way to start the day, before we packed the car for the final time and set off south. We had a fair distance to cover, but by now we have…
We have done quite a lot of walking on this holiday, but today managed to combine a gentle morning stroll to the End of the World with an afternoon involving a palace, fika, some impromptu foraging, rocky forest paths, an observation tower and several extremely wobbly suspension bridges. Sweden continues to deliver. We began in…
After three very full days in Stockholm, today was about saying goodbye to the city and beginning the journey south. We weren’t in any particular hurry, with Trosa only about an hour away, so there was time for one final Stockholm experience as we headed the car out of the city. Our choice was Skogskyrkogården,…
Mark’s birthday could hardly have begun better. We were enormously fortunate to spend the day exploring Stockholm with Migo Goldberg, a qualified official guide but, much more importantly for us, an old Scouting friend.We first met Migo at the World Scout Jamboree in 2007, when he was leading the Swedish team doing its reconnaissance for…
Today we left the car firmly where it was and set out to explore Stockholm properly, taking the Tunnelbana from Gärdet to Östermalm and beginning at Östermalms Saluhall, the magnificent food hall which has been feeding Stockholm since the 1880s. It is exactly the sort of place in which we can happily spend far too…
