Europe holidays tips

Coming from New England, which is famous for its fall colours, I was disillusioned by the sheer multitude of brown, crumpled horse-chestnut leaves on display in Paris in autumn. So I began my quest for hints of gold, amber, russet and scarlet and have been richly rewarded.

In the glare of the morning sun, the streets of downtown Faro are a textural hot mess. A faded art deco shopfront sits cheek by crumbling jowl with its neighbour’s rusting balustrades and handmade fondant tiles. A bank swerves around the corner like an ice-cream sandwich hit by pistachio light. Everywhere there are buildings you might generously describe as less art and more nouveau. These are layers of the near past – and I’m smitten.

Madame Ziemowit the witch nods and scratches her beard as I flip a tarot card, revealing the chariot symbol. Picking the chariot seems fitting, as the turban-clad sorcerer and I are on a train, having just crossed the border from Germany into Poland. Multicoloured lightbulbs adorn carriage windows, framing a green-blue blur of fields and rivers. Next to us a toddler, sitting in a mini-library by the loo, draws squiggles on an Etch A Sketch. A jaunty brass fanfare plays through the carriage speakers.

‘Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression,” was, according to the poet WB Yeats, how he persuaded the playwright John Millington Synge to discover his muse – the desolate beauty of the Aran archipelago. Whatever was the true genesis for Synge’s Atlantic coast hiatus, his times on Inishmaan culminated in the critically acclaimed Playboy of the Western World (1907).

Swifts dart and swoop from Norrqvarn’s eaves, the morning sun filtering through the pines as I load my panniers and get set for a slow day’s cycling. A former mill turned welcoming and, crucially, affordable hotel, Norrqvarn is my starting point for a multi-day bike ride taking in Sweden’s most impressive engineering feat, the Göta canal. The canal celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2022 and the newly opened Göta kanalleden section is the main attraction along Sweden’s national cycle route 7.

Every Easter, a sleepy corner of the Cotswolds transforms into a miniature version of the Blue Ridge mountains of the eastern US. The idyllic Kingham Hill private school, near Chipping Norton, is invaded by hundreds of banjos, fiddles, mandolins, guitars, a handful of dobros, and even the occasional autoharp. The reason for this is the appropriately named Sore Fingers bluegrass and old-time music week.

“The Ducati trail?” My husband was suddenly excited. “Do we get to ride motorbikes?”

France could well be the perfect place to track the progress of the main battle over the future of travel: trains versus planes. In May 2021, France positioned itself as the frontrunner in a carbon-cutting train renaissance when its government enacted a ban on domestic flights where the journey could be done by train in less than two and a half hours. “We are the first to do it,” Emmanuel Macron said on Twitter, and it was hailed by minister Clément Beaune as a “powerful message” and a “strong symbol”. The European Commission designated 2021 as the “Year of European Rail” and billions of euros have since poured into railway infrastructure across central and eastern Europe.

The path, more of a faint depression in the field I had just crossed, disappeared into a wood: yes, I could see an opening in the vegetation. The day before, I had left the official walking route of the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrimate route from Canterbury to Rome, to stay at a B&B that was highly rated and affordable. Early next morning, after stuffing my pockets with the breakfast my hostess had set out for me, I cracked open the massive gate in the wall surrounding the little country compound and sneaked through.

Does there come a point in every marriage when you realise you don’t know your spouse very well after all? For me, that moment came not when watching yet another ill-judged birthday present shoved to the back of my husband’s wardrobe, but when I noticed a half-price sale on Interrail passes and decided to book a pair for what I felt sure would be an excellent and perhaps even romantic late-summer adventure.

It took the second thud to rouse me. Worried I’d slept through it, I slid up the blind to find our train pulling into the port city of Villa San Giovanni in Calabria, Italy. Not quite 6am, the last of the night’s sky was taking leave: navy clouds pulled apart before my eyes, a single neon-pink patch igniting the ridgeline of the Peloritani mountains in north-east Sicily.

Saint-Tropez may be known for glitz, but a few miles along the coast, the very ground beneath my feet glitters like a jet-setter hotel. I’m in the Var department in south-eastern France, where the Maures massif meets the Mediterranean and the bedrock is mica schist, a flaky stone that sparkles in the Provençal sunshine (and also makes for great wine).

Lunchtime on a warm spring Saturday on the Cours Saleya – Nice’s famous flower market, tucked away just one row of elegant fin de siècle buildings from the sea – and it’s hard to see how any business can be open in town, apart from restaurants and cafés. Everyone, it seems, is here; every table taken beneath the canopies and parasols, queues forming outside the most popular eateries, every bench taken with families tucking into paper-wrapped socca – a salty chickpea pancake – or gelati. It feels like high summer; the sky is a vivid blue, the palazzos and mansions beneath blazing butter yellow and warm, burnished terracotta.

The Basques have Juan Mari and Elena Arzak, the Catalans Ferran Adrià, and Andalucía has “el Chef del Mar” Ángel León – chefs who have put their region’s cuisine on the world food map.

Whether they are naturally formed, cast in concrete on a rock shelf or hewn from the rock itself, tidal pools solve a problem by providing safe access to the sea. Plunging into rich saltwater in a sheltered area protected from the turbulent waves, yet still refreshed by the tide twice a day, is an unfettered joy.

As befits a landscape that has been regularly repurposed and reimagined over millennia of dynamic human use and interaction, Eryri (or Snowdonia) is woven like a Welsh blanket with a multitude of tracks and paths. There are Neolithic ways leading to burial mounds, Roman roads past stone forts, snaking trails through coppiced woodland to abandoned mineral workings, drovers’ roads over bleak moorland, old narrow-gauge railway tracks and slate paths haunted by the ghosts of miners walking home from slate quarry to slate cottage. Somehow, Traws Eryri (Trans Snowdonia), a new 140-mile (225km), mainly off-road bikepacking route from Machynlleth to Conwy across the great mountain fastness of north-east Wales, manages to follow them all.

At first, there is some fussing from my 10- and 12-year-old sons. “Will the water be too cold?”, “I don’t want to wear a wetsuit”, “Are there even any decent waves?”… But once their young surf instructor, Josh Mahony, appears with two boards under his arms and the kind of shoulders that suggest he could paddle south to Spain and back in his lunch break, there is only silence as they follow him into the waves.

Ivan Vera, 24, has always loved the feeling of being naked. He says that when he was about 17, he “ decided to try it in public”, with his then girlfriend. Since then, “I have been very busy with the associations in Catalonia,” he tells me. The Catalan naturist-nudist scene is rich, decades-old and organised. Vera is a member of Joves Naturistes, which is for 18- to 35-year-olds; last week the all-ages Naturist-Nudist Federation of Catalonia made a public appeal for tourists wearing swimsuits to stay away from their beaches.

‘Slipping through my fingers all the time / I try to capture every minute …,” mourns Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia! as we drive along a dusty road lined with goats and olive trees to Kefalos beach. I glance over at my girl – rosy cheeks, sun-kissed hair, phone glued to hand – and I’m overcome with emotion and involuntarily snort tears down my face.

My mum is not a sun bunny. She likes active holidays: walking about interesting towns, gazing at historical things (churches, art, gardens), plus non-spicy food and, possibly, some water to paddle in.

When downtown rents dropped because of the pandemic, lots of ambitious shops, cafes and restaurants ended up launching as a result. There’s a real sense of revitalisation in the city.