Back in March Beth and I were fortunate enough to both have a Wednesday off work together and rather than wasting the day just pottering about at home, we decided to go on an adventure! As such we left the house at some ridiculously early hour and, at just before half past six, we were pulling into one of the car parks at Birmingham Airport ready to fly to Dublin.
Back at the start of March, I took a trip to Bristol for the weekend to stay with some friends and explore some of the railways in the southwest of England. Travelling with GWR from London Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads and return, I decided to use this opportunity to try out the journey in both 1st and Standard class, upgrading my outbound trip via Seatfrog and seeing whether it was worth upgrading to 1st at a weekend.
When people talk about mainline railways that cross a UK city, probably the first that spring to mind are either Thameslink or the Elizabeth line in London. After that, Glasgow’s Argyle and North Clyde lines might come to mind, or the mess of railways that ‘kind of’ cross Manchester. However, the UK’s second city, Birmingham is also home to a cross city railway, simply named the ’Cross-City Line’.
After three days in exploring the Portuguese capital it was time to head home onboard a TAP Air Portugal flight from Lisbon to London Heathrow. Unfortunately I was still feeling the after effects of my spate of food poisoning and so wasn’t really ‘with it’ for the flight and as such this will be a relatively short post.
During our trip to Lisbon, there was plenty we were able to visit and explore, but there were also a number of places that we’d have liked to visit but just didn’t have the time to. I thought that I’d try out this style of blog as something a bit different, to share both the highlights of the trip, some things to avoid and some of the places we want to return to visit.
This post covers the second part of our visit to Lisbon back in February, so if you haven’t read part 1 you can check that out here. Part 1 ended with us heading for lunch with some people we had met on a walking tour, and we were hoping to try somewhere recommended by our tour guide João. Unfortunately, when we found the restaurant, it was closed, with a notice on the shutter advising the owners were on holiday.
Flights & Times 