Whilst the majority of the continent’s land mass is the nation of Australia, Oceania is actually made up of 14 different countries and 10,000 islands. Having previously travelled to Sydney and Melbourne, I’ve kept them off this list, and in fact only one Australian city features in my 5 Places to Visit in Australasia.
With services from Bedford, Cambridge and Peterborough in the north, through Central London, to Kent, East & West Sussex and some of the south London suburbs, Thameslink connects London’s northern and southern commuter belts and was the controversial winner of the 2020 ‘World Cup of Tube Lines’.
Crossing the Atlantic Ocean from South America, you land on the stunning continent of Africa, the next location for my ‘5 places’ series. From the plains of the Serengeti to the heights of Kilimanjaro, Africa is a beautiful and varying continent, and below are the five places that I really want to visit.
Affectionately known as ‘Happy Trains’ due to the positioning of their light clusters, the Class 365 Networker Express have been a mainstay of the longer-distance former Network SouthEast (NSE) routes for the past 25 years, operating services from King’s Cross to Cambridge, King’s Lynn and Peterborough. With forty-one units initially built, their use has been ramped down and now just two services are required to operate the daily service diagrammed to the Happy Trains.
From Central London there are three ways of getting to Heathrow Airport by train: London Underground’s Piccadilly line, which is the slowest but cheapest; TfL Rail, which will eventually become the Elizabeth Line; and Heathrow Express, which runs non-stop from Paddington Station to the Heathrow terminals.
Bristol is a wonderful and historic city that I’ve been fortunate enough to visit a few times over the years. My most recent trip was back in September 2019 when I spent a couple of days visiting friends and taking the opportunity to explore the city and surrounding area. This post is going to explore a few free things to do in Bristol and the surrounding area, as well as a couple of things that aren’t.
Flights & Times 