Last Saturday, Ellie & I did a two-hour e-scooter tour with ScooTours London in Cambridge. From next month you will be able to legally hire and ride an e-scooter in London, so we thought we’d check it out. In case you were wondering: until then it is illegal to ride an e-scooter on public roads here. It’s easier for cyclists Let’s start this blog post with a quick flashback to a bicycle tour Ellie and I had ventured on several years ago. It was the first and last time we’d been riding bikes together. While I had grown up in bicycle-obsessed Germany, Ellie had not ridden a bike in over a decade, so kudos to her for trying. The short of it: out of the 35km distance we walked roughly 35km. Ellie was a tad scared of falling off the bike. To this day it is one of the longest […]
Off-Roading Training Lesson with True Grip in Kent – Wahoooooooo..!!!!!
I had been a passenger on four-wheel drive off-road trips on a number of occasions, lastly near Porto (post here), and I had known for a long time that I wanted to learn how to actually drive off-road myself. Last week I used a Buyagift.com voucher for £98 (I topped up for an extra hour at additional cost) to do a driving course at True Grip Off Road’s Eastwell Park site. They hold a Tripadvisor Certificate of Excellence and out of 1,244 reviews, 1,184 are ‘excellent’, 90% of the rest ‘very good’. From St Pancras, London, a high-speed train takes you to Ashford International in just 40 minutes. From the train station, a cab will set you back another £12 or so for the ten-minute ride (best to pre-order). Guy, the friendly owner and chief instructor, greeted me upon arrival. After a quick five minutes of paperwork and […]
Lisbon Sailing Tour
While in Lisbon for a day last week, Pedro from Pypas Cruises invited BSqB on a 1.5h sailing boat trip. My wife only joined me in Porto a few days later, so I went on the trip on my own together with a young Portuguese couple. Pedro was joined by one of his experienced skippers, Antonio, so it was five of us overall (the maximum is 12 persons/10 guests). If you should do the tour in the morning, too, like I did, then I would highly recommend having breakfast at the world-famous Pastéis de Belém. From there you can cross the Jardim de Belém to the starting point just 15 minutes’ walk away. The UNESCO World Heritage listed, gothic Jerónimos Monastery and the (equally listed) Torre de Belém (Belem Tower) are also next-door. When it was built in the early-16th Century, the tower was towards the middle of the Tagus […]