Voyagers

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang Amadeus

I wish I'd had more time in Salzburg, and I will certainly return for a week sometime and really explore its musical heritage. (As opposed to its musicals heritage, which is entirely different. The hills, as they say, are indeed alive.) I'd particularly love to visit it at Festival time, although I'm usually singing at a different festival that time of year.

Mozart would be 253 today. That's only slightly older than Cher.

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Land's End at sunset

That's Land's End, there, with the Longships Lighthouse in the distance. If you were to swing round to the right you'd probably be able to see the outlines of the Isles of Scilly against the horizon.

The sound of the waves, and the scent of the bracken, wet in the evening air, make Land's End a glorious place to live.

Tourists under Untersberg, Salzburg

One of the odd things about Salzburg is that Austrians don't really do The Sound of Music. Clearly, Salzburgers do, because there is a fair deal of money in it, but the film itself is fairly unknown in Germany and Austria, certainly compared with its ubiquity in the English-speaking world. It's quite useful, really, because it means that Salzburg has a purpose other than the hills being alive with, et cetera, and that one can dork out with other lonely goatherds (yodel-eh-ee, and so on) in the morning and do some serious Mozart-geeking in the afternoon.

This is Salzburg's iconic peak, the Untersberg, with Salzburg's iconic tourist swarm below.

Helsinki Harbour

When I got back to Helsinki from Kuopio and Rovaniemi on Easter morning, I splurged on a room at the Scandic Grand Marina. It's a fantastic place in a beautiful old brick customs building right on the harbour, which was more than a little icy in April -- in the same way that a Coke in the American South in summer is served with more than a little ice in it. Helsinki still has frequent ferries to Tallinn, Stockholm and points west across the Baltic, and it was cool to watch the enormous ships loom out of the fog and the darkness before nipping downstairs to the hotel's sauna.

Machynlleth, Wales

Machynlleth is in the middle of nowhere, to the south of Snowdonia National Park, amid mountains and mist and sheep in north Wales. It's an incredibly beautiful area, and Machynlleth -- pronounced not machine-leth but mukh-un-tleth -- is pretty too. There's a fab deli, too for the makings of a picnic, perfect for mid-May.

Norwegian fjord, sans fjord

At some point, I imagine, there was water here. There was certainly a glacier at some point -- my GCSE Geography A grade and my geographer father helped me figure that out. But now, it's grass, northeast of Bergen, and it's beautiful.

Infinite tube, London

Ah, the sight of much of my life in London: the Central Line. Normally deep, crowded, and late, I'm surprised that I ever got a picture of it this deserted, even out west where I used to live.

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Église catholique de S. Pierre-le-jeune, Strasbourg

For those of you who don't parle français, that's the Catholic church of St Peter the younger -- and, interestingly, the "younger" part refers not to a younger St Peter, of whom there were many, but to the fact that it is the younger of the two Sts Peter in Strasbourg. Or at least so Judith, my Strasbourgeois friend, tells me, and she's French, so she should know.

The church was beautiful in the spring light, with its pale stone and the flowers and the bright green new growth of the tree nearby, just beautiful.

Airbus sunset

On my way back from an Easter long weekend in Finland, the sunset over northern Europe was incredibly beautiful -- a fitting end to what was a very beautiful (if chilly) holiday. I do love the enormous skies that you get looking out of a plane, and the way that a sunset will stretch out for hours if you travel westwards.

Blue Ridge

Like so many of the pictures from my Blue Ridge Parkway trip with Kristen, I can't place exactly where this photo was taken. From the date stamp, I'm going to guess it was east of Roanoke on the Blue Ridge, but I could well be mistaken. It was certainly a beautiful spring afternoon.