Take a break from the rigours of the road when you are enjoying your Great British Road Trip.

Catch a canal boat.

Having nearly fallen into irrecoverable decay, the canals of Britain are enjoying a renaissance, thanks mostly to the indomitable efforts of volunteers who repair, rebuild and resurrect these great industrial and commercial highways.

So now you, dear traveller, can enjoy one of life’s quieter pleasures.

Sorry Britain – there’s no such thing as spaghetti bolognese . . . not in Italy, as I discovered on a recent visit to Bologna.

It is, like chicken tikka masala, entirely an English invention and, according to any Italian cook, not one of the better ones.

Nonetheless it is a compulsory item on the menu in any one of Britain’s 4700+ Italian restaurants.

The Lady Driver and I specifically stopped off in Bologna to have spag bog in what we assumed was its native habitat.

On the dinner-time taxi ride into the old city, our driver realigned our gastronomical thinking.

How would you like to watch the sun rise at Stonehenge on the day of the summer solstice? No problem. We can do this.

Usually that would involve being there with over 20,000 of your closest pagan friends. Not this strange year. The event will be eerily quiet yet millions of people will be watching it.

For the first time ever, English Heritage, the organisation that manages the site, will livestream the rising of the sun on the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day but there will be no-one, other than production crew, at the site itself.

There’s an awful lot of bullswool talked about finding cheap airfares. All manner of self-styled “experts” will tell you how to find that absolutely amazingly cheap air fare.

Sorry to give you a large slosh of cold water but here are some questions with answers you mightn’t like:

• Is there a “best” day to buy air fares? No.
• Is there a “best” site on which to find the cheapest air fare? No.
• Do airlines track your browsing habits and up the fares accordingly? No.
• Can some websites predict price movements? No.
• Is there a “best” time to book? Maybe.
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What is it about train travel that is so alluring? Is it just a harking back to simpler days? Is it just another manifestation of the retro thing?

Whatever.

I hadn’t been on a train in donkey’s years, but having done the Ghan last year I now found myself sitting in one of the 1^st class cabins on the Bangkok-Chiang Mai overnight train.

Ok, it sounds a bit poncey to be in 1^st class. I sure as hell can’t afford it on an aeroplane, but at my great age I really can’t see me doing the all-in-together-in-one-big-happy-party of a second class carriage.

Besides, the trip cost me 2430 Thai baht to have a compartment all to myself. That’s about $US75. Why would you not, especially given that it avoids a night‘s accommodation?

Imagine being in a helicopter that just flew over the runways of Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, one of the busiest in the world. Instead of having an air traffic controller going bonkers, screaming something to the effect of “what the hell are you doing here. Vacate immediately” they were just excited to have a real aircraft to work with.

Travel photographer Andy Luten had just that experience as he cruised over various US airports taking pictures of parked aircraft.

He published them in his travel blog. Headed “They Will Fly Again: an Aerial Look at Grounded Jets across the USA” , it’s a grim pictorial essay on the parlous state of the international airline industry.

Even as life begins to acquire a patina of normality, as we are let loose from the limitations of lock-down, it will be a long time yet before we can start travelling as freely as we once did, but we can still dream about it and more importantly prepare for it.

One of the items higher up on my bucket list is to visit the great art museums of the world. In Amsterdam The Van Gogh Museum and The Rijksmuseum (The Milkmaid, pictured, is one of the many great works there), the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Been there once but could easily spend at least a whole day there again. Same with the National Gallery in London. Been there, done that . . . would do it again anytime. And at least a dozen more spread across America and Europe.

The Lake District is one of the most popular regions for visitors . . . and no wonder. It is just so blindingly beautiful.

It has inspired poets and writers for centuries. In fact it gave its name to a group of 19th century writers, the Lake Poets, most prominently William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. But others such as Beatrix Potter and John Ruskin have drawn inspiration from this wonderful visual cocktail of lakes, woodlands and fells.

I remember as a kid at school I had a box of “Lakeland” coloured pencils, made in Keswick, and the photograph on the box fascinated me: The blues, browns and purples of the towering glacier-gouged mountains cradling gentle lake-studded valleys instilled a desire to see it for myself. It took a while – 35 years – but eventually I got there and it was even more majestic, more inspiring, more beautiful than I expected.