Given the impracticality of overseas travel right now, and therefore the enjoyment of some of the bucket-list road trips – Blue Ridge Parkway or Alaska Highway for instance – I decided to explore one of the backroads at my own backdoor. State Highway 22 in New Zealand runs from just south of Auckland through classic […] Read More

With international travel severely restricted it may seem the wrong time to launch a book on road trips in Britain.

That hasn’t stopped travel writer David Morris releasing his eBook, “Great British Road Trips”.

“I figure that the desire to travel is still strong,” he says, “and though they can’t set sail right now, people are planning their next adventure for when the world returns to normal, whenever and whatever that may be”.

What is the best passport in the world?  And the worst?

A comparison of the passport “value” of various countries makes interesting reading.

It’s easy to assume that a British or American passport would open more immigration doors than any other.

Not so, by quite a margin.

Just finished a road trip around North Canterbury in the South Island of New Zealand, starting in Christchurch, taking in Hanmer Springs and Kaikoura and finishing back in Christchurch. It’s a popular circuit called the Alpine Triangle.

We made it a three-day long weekend jaunt, but I would suggest you make it at least four days, even better five.

The eagle has landed. Snapped this shot of a Haast Eagle sculpture on the road from Queenstown to Glenorchy at the head of NZ’s Lake Wakatipu.

Glenorchy-based sculptor Dan Kelly used century-old steel fence standards from a high country station to create this 1.2m high sculpture of the now extinct bird, in its time the top predator in the New Zealand.

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.