The Adventuring Hills

Day two in Iceland saw us rising before the sun - not difficult to do considering sunrise isn't until gone 10.30am in January! We had a quick breakfast at our hotel, with Paul enjoying the Icelandic yoghurt known as Skyr, then it was time to get layered up as much as possible ready for our Golden Circle tour that we were booked on for the day. Gray Line Tours picked us up from our hotel room to transport us to Reykjavik bus station where the coach tour departs. As we were getting ready for collection, the rain was coming down hard. It looked like it would be a soggy experience, but as we climbed onto the coach the rain quickly turned to snow. As people who were born and raised in England where snow is generally disappointing, and then the few times it is good, the country grinds to a halt; the snow we experienced in Iceland was something else entirely. Within minutes the ground was covered, but still life carried on as normal for everyone. The coach tour set off, and although ...

A little later than planned, I'm finally writing about our trip to Iceland that happened in January. For my birthday in December, the lovely Mr Hill booked for us to go to Iceland. We arranged to go away in January to get Christmas and the likes out of the way. Mid-January rolled round and saw us leaving at 3am to drive to the airport to fly to Iceland. It was pretty chilly, but nothing like what we knew to expect once we reached Iceland. A short 3 hour flight saw us landing in Reykjavik's international airport, Keflavik. After we cleared through security we went to pick up our hire car which was going to be our main mode of transport for the 4 days we had to explore the country. It was a bit of a surprise to find ourselves with a Hyundai i10 as our mode of transport, but we quickly learned that it didn't matter what make and model the car was, as long as it had snow tyres on, this was all that mattered in the icy and snowy environment! We had a short 20 minute dr...

After all the the excitement of my last post and then Christmas, New Year and just life in general getting in the way, I've not had much time to post. That's also in part because we went on another adventure in January, but you'll hear more about that next month! Today, as snow is covering much of the UK, I decided I wanted to throw it back to Summer 2016 when we went to Santorini for a friend's wedding. I've spoken in a previous post about this trip, but today I thought I would talk about one of the days in more detail; specifically the day that we did the boat trip. Now, I know, I talked about it at some length in my original post, but I wanted to share a few more pictures of this excursion and talk about it more because it was amazing! The tour we chose to go on was run by Kamari Tours - according to their website , they are the biggest travel agency in Santorini. There are lots of tours offered by various vendors as you walk the beach fronts, but Kamari ...

Last time I wrote I left it with us strolling through Zermatt and heading towards the mountains. To be exact. we had arranged to go on the Matterhorn Glacier Paradise excursion, using our half-fare rail cards. This trip involved taking 4 gondolas up the mountains and once at the top you had a panoramic view of 38 peaks of the Alps. It was set to be a beautiful day, little did I know at the time that it was going to get extra special. So we headed on up the mountain, working our way through the various gondolas. You can get off at each stage and go exploring if you wish, but we decided we wanted to go all the way up first and explore on our way down if we wanted to. Arriving at the top, it's safe to say the view was spectacular! We made our way up in the lift to the viewing platform that sets you at 3883m, and able to see the French, Italian and Swiss Alps. In the distance is Mont Blanc (the highest mountain in Europe and somewhere that we had driven through on our very first ro...

Having come back down the mountain from being at the top of Europe, we headed back to the car to hit the road for our next stop. We had booked ourselves in for a couple of days in a place called Zermatt. When we first looked at this placed, I thought that there was no way Paul was going to want to stay here - they have a complete ban on any fuel burning vehicle. They only have electric powered vehicles. Surprisingly though, we did decide to go - it's kind of a modern age dream to experience no cars allowed in this current society. What to do with the car whilst we stayed here though? And how do you then get into Zermatt? Well thankfully this was easily answered - there is a town just before Zermatt called Täsch, which has a big train station with trains going straight into Zermatt, and plenty of parking. We found the parking costs at the train station very reasonable, I think it was about 30-40CHF for what was just over 2 days. There are other options available as well - a lot of...

Having spent the night on top of the world, we had planned to go even higher up and head to the top of Europe - Jungfraujoch! It's also known as the highest train station in Europe sitting at a pretty cool 3454m above sea level. We knew we had plenty of time for this section of the adventure, as our next stop was only about a 2 hour drive away (a short distance in comparison to some of the drives we had done so far) so once we got back down from our hotel, we had a short walk across to the train station to get the train on up. We had pre-booked this trip through Swiss Travel Centre, as we had also bought a Half Fare Railcard each - at £89 each, they're not cheap, but the savings you get from these railcards quickly adds up as they do what they say on the tin and give you 50% discount on the trains, boats, buses and some cable cars. For the 2 excursions we knew we had planned, we had effectively made our money back on the ticket costs, and then there were added bonuses like ou...

The fourth stop of our Swiss road trip saw us heading towards the famous town of Grindelwald, a place famous for it's snowy views being synonmous with the perfect Christmas card image. There wasn't much snow around for us as we were there in June, but when we reached our hotel, there was still some snow lingering! Our hotel for the night was Berghaus Männlichen. The reason we had picked here? Well, it's located at the top of a mountain, 2225m above sea level to be exact, and only accessible by gondola (or a very long hike up the mountain if you're fit and into that - we didn't fancy it!). After sorting the car and grabbing what we needed for the night, we headed off to the gondola and made our way up the mountain. It took about half hour to get to the top and the views as we headed up were stunning. It was a bizarre sensation for me as I had never been in a gondola before, and did not expect to be shot out of the station at the beginning and half way up. The spe...