This morning we met Daniel (my nephew) at a coffee shop in his neighbourhood for brunch. It is an Australian coffee shop (underlines the multi-nationalism of Berlin) and they served a very nice breakfast (and the coffee was good to). It was raining when we left and we were waiting outside for our taxi to come when a lightning strike hit the telephone/electricity pole about 15 meters away from us. The thunder struck almost immediately afterwards...

After all the walking of the last week, we opted for a more chilled day with a little less walking. The plan was to have breakfast at a coffee shop at 9:15am and then take a Berlin city hop-on-hop-off bus tour to get a better overview of the city. The tour we chose was a 2-hour round trip and we hopped on Gendarmenmarkt (in front of the Conzerthalle). We stayed on the bus until the stop...

Given it is the 500th year of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg, we had always planned to make that a stop on our European tour. Originally we thought we would take the train from Prague to Wittenberg (as it is south of Berlin) and then on to Berlin but I discovered when I tried to book the train tickets that the train to Wittenberg from Prague actually went through Berlin...

We left Prague (photo view from our hotel room this am) today on the 10:28 train to Berlin that actually left at 10:58. Prague station seems totally disorganized. About 75% of the trains were reflected as arriving or leaving late.  Ours wasn't but left 30 minutes late anyway. At one stage the platform number of one train went up 1 minute before its due departure time and everyone had to run to get to the train....

Breakfast was included in our room rate at the hotel and it was a pretty good spread including fruit (a lot of varieties), eggs (scrambled, boiled and fried) and usual extensive selection (for Europe) of breads, rolls, meat & cheese. We headed for the Museum of Communism after breakfast. Ironically it is situated in one of the Palaces which it shares with a swish casino and downstairs is MacDonald's. It is a street with shops both...

We left at 7:30am from the flat for Heathrow to get our BA flight to Vienna. We had some breakfast in the BA lounge and by the time we were finished it was almost ready to board the plane. I used air miles for the flights and could only get 3 business class and 3 economy class seats and so O, M & S were in economy where you get no food on the flight at...

I can't believe it has been a week already in Portugal. We arrived last Saturday and the week had simply flown by. Feeling like we should have had 2 weeks instead of only 1 week. Nothing to be done about that now though. Saturday was our last full day in Portugal. Every Saturday there is a market at a nearby town called Loule. Helen had planned to run in the morning before we left for the...

You should be used to the pattern by now - every second day, a round of golf. Michael and I had booked our last round in Portugal for 7:30am. It was a bit colder than previous mornings as evidenced by the fact that all the staff at the golf course were wearing jerseys. It was a bit cool but neither Michael nor I would have even considered wearing a jersey. It was an average round of...

Spending the day doing very little is the definition of holiday. That is pretty much what we did yesterday. The whole morning was spent around the house (either inside or next to or inside the pool). Michael cooked us some burgers for lunch which was probably the most active thing done the whole morning (except that Oli and Helen went for a run in the morning). In the afternoon I needed to buy printer ink (yes...

On Monday after our shocking round of golf Michael and I immediately booked the next round at our favourite course in Vilamoura - The Millennium course (http://www.dompedrogolf.com/our-courses/millennium-golf-course.html). While it still has a reasonable number of trees it doesn't have nearly as many as Pinhal and both Michael and I really like the course. We had the first tee off time of the day at 7:30am. It was 16 degrees when we drove to the course and...