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Looking north from the Fern Pass, Austria Well, we are on day six of our grand tour to Leros and I’m in bed in the guesthouse looking out at the Alps. It’s a crispy morning with a light frost and the early morning sun is illuminating the snowy caps in a “ tantalising ” way. Of course, to the modern traveller, one can use romantic prose to describe such obstacles, but for the medieval traveller, “ menacing ” might have been a better word. Fear of extreme discomfort or even de

We were still in Greece in Autumn 2024, when Richard started to talk about driving down to Leros next season. There are always a few foreign-registered cars at the marina – British and German in the main, plus the odd Italian job, and I think Richard had wondered before about a Road Trip. He wanted to make a proper Grand Tour out of it, rather than just zapping down a bunch of motorways for eight hours a day. To do that we really needed to monitor our Schengen days in Greece,

S5 in Dinkelsbühl After leaving Würzburg, we found the ‘ Romantischen Strasse’, and wended and meandered southwards towards the Alps.   'Romantic' is a word to me that conjured up chocolate-box landscapes, dotted with Lego-perfect towns, and with villages full of medieval charm. And, indeed, that’s what we discovered to our delight. However, we soon discovered a possible darker interpretation of the word. This is related to the sentimental meanings of this Bavarian idyll. Aft

Aachen cathedral survived the aerial bombings and urban battles of WWII The ‘Low Countries’ are well-named; the landscape, as we travelled eastwards across Belgium, is pretty flat and geologically featureless. As we passed into a small southern finger of the Netherlands, we crossed the Meuse north of Maastricht (meaning “ crossing of the Meuse ”). Here the landscape gradually changed to become more undulating and wooded. We passed into Germany almost at once, and into the his

The Two Venices The First of Two Venices Rather than jetting back to Missy Bear for her fifth season, I had the mad idea to drive there instead: a top-down, grand tour to Leros in the red S5. She had just had her paintwork touched-up, finished with a ceramic coat and she was gleaming like new. It still surprises me how many complete strangers continue to take the trouble to hail me saying, “ Beautiful car! ” But which route to take? There are innumerable permutations. There a