Zeppelin Museum - Friedrichshafen, Germany
All aboard the brontosaurus! (28.09.2007 17:04)
Airships are surely the dinosaurs of the transport world. Huge, lumbering bodies carrying a very small payload and difficult to manoeuvre. They both had their day in the sun before being extinguished by a fireball and survive only as a barely recognisable relic of their former selves. Like dinosaurs too, airships exercise a fascination over us, representing as they do a world long gone. It [more...]

Dolce Chantilly - Chantilly, France - April, 2007
Mostly sweet (27.09.2007 17:56)
Using a phrase like "mostly sweet" to describe our stay at the Dolce Chantilly is a graphic reminder of the danger of averages. While 500 is the average of 499 and 501, it is also the average of 0 and 1000: the extremes are masked. To put it another way, this hotel, like football, is an entity of two halves. But let me begin at the beginning, as Lewis Carroll said. He would have liked this [more...]

The Heights Isle of Portland - Weymouth, United Kingdom - May, 2007
The highs and the lows of The Heights (04.07.2007 23:11)
The Heights - you couldn't really call this hotel anything else. Well maybe "Belle Vue" if it hadn't already been taken by every seaside guest-house from Margate to Blackpool. We had never been in this corner of England before, so had armed ourselves with a map of how to find the hotel. Out of Weymouth, across the causeway beside the magnificent Chesil Beach on to the Isle of Portland, then up [more...]