2012: A year of travel in review

I have not been posting to my travel blog much this year so seeing as it is now December, I thought I'd write a summary for 2012.

• My year started well with waking up on New Years Day in Paris. I had got there just for new years eve (with only about 2 hours to spare) after getting spending the night on a bus stuck on a closed, icy mountain road in the French Alps and having to be rescued by the rescue services (see separate blog post). I would visit Paris two more times in 2012, both in November, with a business trip and a trip to Disneyland Paris in the same week. 

• My business travel year also started well. I travelled to Pennsylvania for business meetings, and combined the trip with a weekend in Atlantic City. I managed to lose both my passports on this trip and only realised on my way to the airport to fly back to London. Luckily I managed to get them back!

• The Spring was packed full of travel! A boys' trip to Las Vegas for a mate's 30th, a long weekend in Tenerife, a business trip and weekend in Ireland, a surprisingly rainy weekend in Gibraltar, and Easter in Australia, where I went just for a week. I surprised my parents as I didn't tell them I was coming home. On my way back from Melbourne I stopped over in Doha to look around. 

• During the summer, my parents were over from Australia. With them, I travelled to Prague and Venice, and also did various sightseeing around the south of England. 

• However, my main trip this summer was to the Benicassim Festival, on the coast of Spain between Barcelona and Valencia  We stayed at a spa resort instead of roughing it camping, spending the nights at the festival and the afternoons recovering on the beach.

• Autumn was spent chasing the last of the summer sun. I saw my parents off to Dubai on their way back to Australia, and had a weekend in Ibiza with my girlfriend.

• Other business trip destinations this year included Brussels, Madrid, Munich, Oslo, Prague, Vienna and Zurich.

• My travel year will finish off with flying to Miami on Christmas Day to get some winter Florida sun!

Overall less flights this year than 2011 but about the same distance flown:

Munich. Business or Pleasure?

I have not written in a seriously long time. Sorry for neglecting you! It's not that I haven't been travelling. I have. I have so much that I've barely had time to write. Plus I think I'm one of these people who starts a lot of things but finishes nothing. Which, of course, is a terrible trait.

So, where in the world is DK? Tonight I am in Munich. I flew in last night for some meetings today. The meetings finished in the late afternoon and I enjoyed the sunshine walking around town. I had dinner in the outdoor beer garden at the Chinese Tower in the English Gardens.  Bratwurst and sauerkrout with potatoes, mustard and a big beer, to the sound of a Bavarian brass band in Lederhosen playing on the tower. I felt very Bavarian.

It has been interesting summer weather here in Bavaria this week. Quite tropical, really. Warm and humid during the day, and wet in the evenings.

I stayed at a hotel last night (thank you, Mr Employer) but decided to book a hostel for tonight. I stopped off at the Hauptnahnhoff (central station) before checking in to change from my suit to shorts and a T-shirt. This had two main purposes:

1. It was pretty bloody warm and walking around in a wool suit in the sun is never that much fun.
2. I wouldn't be caught dead walking into a hostel wearing a business suit!

To be fair, I did compromise.  I had booked a private single room in the hostel, rather than a dorm for the night. Or so I thought.

It turns out I had booked a single room, but not for tonight. Rather, I'd booked it for a night next week. When in fact I will be in Spain. And there were no more single rooms left.  So rather than getting a single room for 43 Euros I got a twin room to myself for 70 euros. I could have got a decent hotel for that. Of course, that would be a much less interesting atmosphere.

Speaking of atmosphere, I'm sitting in the hostel bar right now. I just bumped into a bunch of people who conduct tours in Munich, including one guy I went skiing with near Salzburg a few years ago. Small world!

Christmas and New Years in France with the Fanaticas

If you know me at all, you ill know that I like to use all of my days off work for travel. When I found the Fanatics Skifest and Paris Combo tour, I knew it was perfect for me because it left after work on Friday 23 December and returned on Monday night, 2 January - absolutely maximising the Christmas and New Years break: ten days away for the price of 3 days' annual leave!

It certainly made for a Christmas to remember.

On the way there our bus driver got lost, and although we were driving from London to France, we somehow made it into Italy.  Thanks the extra few hours that added on, it made the bus ride there a whopping 23 hours.

We got there late on Christmas eve, too late for the French Christmas Eve festivities, but not too late to party. When you are in the snow with a group of 150 Aussies and Kiwis in their 20's and early 30's, you know it's going to be wild. Christmas Eve was spent in a rather drunken haze, and for the rest of the week the apres-ski didn't disappoint, as all of the nights seemed to me equally big.

The skiing was good too. There was a big dump of snow before we arrived, and for the rest of the week (bar the final day when it snowed again) we were skiing in glorious sunshine under bright blue skies.

Risoul, photo courtesy of Lucy

The snow did get a bit patchy and icy towards the end but it was manageable. Risoul is a small resort in the south of the French Alps, and our accommodation was true ski-in-ski-out.

I shared a room with an English friend of mine and a brother and sister from Townsville. The Queenslanders helped me get back some of my Aussie accent that had faded in London over the last few years.

Snowing on the last day

After six nights of carnage and one more day of skiing on some finally fresh snow, it was time to head on to Paris. The bus ride from Risoul to Paris was to be eleven hours. Our tour leader joked it might be more like 17. It turned out she had underestimated it.

A few hours into the drive the drivers decided to take the snow chains off the bus. They had some sort of problem with a piece of one of the chains getting lodged in the wheel, so it took them an hour or two, while we waited patiently watching DVDs' on the bus.

Then came the second hiccup. We came to an intersection where a rear-wheel-drive car without chains was stuck on the ice. No problem, a whole bunch of us got off the bus and pushed the car out of the way. By this time it was past midnight and I was getting ready to settle into the bus seat for the overnight bus ride.

But then came the biggest problem of all. In order to get us to Paris quicker, the bus driver decided to take a small detour. A short cut, if you will. It was windy B-road through the mountains, which I think would be treacherous at the best of times, but on this occasion, given the snowfall on our last day of skiing, was covered in ice.

GPS screen capture of where we were, courtesy of Eleanor

We got stuck on one turn, and as the driver tried to get us out of it, we started sliding down the road. The girls on the left side of the bus started screaming in a panic, as they looked out of their window and saw a sheer drop down the cliff next to them.

Most of us decided to get off the bus at that point, and wait for the drivers to get the bus around the turn. As we waited out in the dark, freezing, cold, they put some grit down and managed to get the bus moving again, with us once again on board.   But before you knew it the bus was sliding around on the ice, culminating with the back wheel in a ditch and the front wheels lifted firmly off the road surface.

The bus drivers called for their road-side assistance but a few hours later we were still waiting on the bus and assistance was nowhere to be found.

Eventually we were rescued by the French National Gendarmerie, who shuttled us down the mountain a few people at a time in their cars, and put us up for a few hours until morning in a hall of a local village. The next morning, once they managed to get the bus off the mountain and the bus driver had paid his fine for taking us down a closed road, we continued on to Paris.

Our 11 hours drive to Paris turned into a 24 hour drive and we made it at 10pm on New Years Eve. A quick shower in the hotel and we headed out to the Eiffel Tower, armed with imitation Champagne bought from (probably) illegal street vendors.  Made it for the midnight celebrations - just!

One more night of partying on the evening of new years day, and we headed back to London.

Reflecting on 2011

Happy new year!

2011 has been a good year of travel. Some long haul destinations included Brazil, Argentina, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and of course Australia.

More locally, I visited Estonia, Wales and the Balearic Islands (Ibiza and Majorca on separate trips), Slovakia and Norway for the first time.

I also made return trips to France, Germany, Italy, Northern Ireland and Hungary.

Some of my trips were by train (for example all the way from London to Monaco) and some were by bus (for example the 23 hour journey from London to Risoul in France).  But many of my trips have been flying.

I have been keeping track of how many flights I have flown and the result shocked me this year. 47 flights, covering almost 70,000 miles (112,000 km).  That's more than enough to circumnavigate the world 2 and a half times.  If only I had collected frequent flyer points for all of these!

I wonder what 2012 will bring.