I’ve been over to Brighton many times, often as a day out from London, and a few of those trips were to see friends who live there. It’s one of the easiest seaside days out you can have from the capital. A direct train takes about an hour, and it drops you a ten-minute walk […]
Archives for June 2026
The Best Day Trips From London: 12 Trips Worth Taking, Picked by a Local
London is one of the best bases in the world for days out, and I say that as someone who spent years using it as exactly that. I lived in London for a few years, spent five years down in Bath, and another long stretch in and around Oxford, so a lot of the trips […]
Day Trip to Bath From London: Our Perfect One-Day Itinerary
We spent five years living in Bath, which means we have done the city in a single day more times than we would like to admit. Usually it was with a friend who had taken the morning train down from London and wanted to see everything before the last train home. So we know which […]
2 Days in Manchester: A Complete Itinerary for First-Timers
I lived in Manchester for a summer back in my twenties, and a couple of years ago Jess and I came back and based ourselves in the city for two full weeks. We walked the centre end to end more times than I can count, ate our way through Ancoats and the Northern Quarter, and […]
2 Days in Bath: The Perfect Weekend Itinerary
I lived in Bath for five years, in Weston, a couple of miles out from the centre, and in all that time I never quite got over walking into the city on a clear morning and seeing the whole honey-coloured place laid out below me. Most people give Bath a day on the way to […]
Best Memory Card for Photography: A Working Photographer’s 2026 Guide
I’ve worked as a professional travel photographer since 2010, and in that time I’ve shot to almost every type of memory card going, from CompactFlash in my early DSLRs to the CFexpress card sitting in my Canon R5 today. If you’ve just bought a camera and you’re staring at a wall of cards labelled UHS-I, […]
Best Rome Pass: Roma Pass vs Omnia vs Go City (Which Is Worth It?)
We bought the Omnia Vatican & Rome Card on one of our many trips to Rome (it cost us about €130 at the time), and on another visit we bought a Roma Pass on its own. So this is not a desk-research comparison. We’ve held these cards, used them for public transport, and stood in […]
2 Days in Florence Itinerary: What to See, Pre-Book, and Skip
Florence is the city in Italy we keep going back to. We first visited in 2015, staying in a small apartment a few streets from the cathedral, and we’ve returned several times since, most recently stepping off the fast train and walking ten minutes to our hotel with the Duomo already crowding the skyline. I’m […]
Visiting the Unclaimed Baggage Store in Scottsboro, Alabama: Is It Worth It?
We have now visited Unclaimed Baggage in Scottsboro, Alabama twice, most recently this June on the long drive home from visiting Jess’s family in Ohio. We live in Alabama and regularly drive the Huntsville to Chattanooga corridor, so this odd and rather brilliant store has quickly become a favourite stop whenever we are passing through. […]
One Day in Chester: Best Things to Do
I’ve been coming to Chester since I was a child, and as a professional photographer I’ve since shot most of its landmarks on countless trips, on my own and with Jess. It started with my parents bringing me here for shopping days out: a lot of standing around while clothes were tried on in one […]