Laurence Andrews

A while back I moved all my photos from Google Photos to Apple Photos. It was a massive pain, because Google Takeout doesn’t give you your photos in a very sensible way. If you have custom albums, photos are exported in the ‘date’ directories and then also exported in the ‘custom’ album directories - so you either need to ignore the custom albums or check for duplicates. Also, some files will retain their exif data (date/time, GPS, etc) but not all, those that don’t google will have moved it to a .json file of the same name - which Apple doesn’t read. I also found a bunch of files that where the exif data was just broken but could be repaired.

Here’s a very simple overview of the steps that I took, to get my pictures into Apple. I’ve omitted some of the obvious steps, so engage brain before following this. All commands were run on my mac, locally - If you’re using Apple photos and you’re not on a Mac, you’re going to have a bad time.

The first step is of course to actually get your data out of Google, you can ask for it in whatever size files you want. I picked 10Gb and so over a period of time downloaded each one. If you have a lot of photos/videos in Google then you’re going to need to manage your storage on your mac carefully. Ideally, you want to run these commands and manage the import of files while they are located on the on-board SSD storage (unless you have a fast SSD external drive), running these commands while the files are on a slow disk drive will take a long-ass-time, but is certainly possible.

Once you’ve got your files downloaded and stored, extract everything. I found storing in folders by year worked best so I could manage the import in batches. Go ahead and do some folder house keeping to get that ready. If you see there are folders with friendly album names my experience shows that the files in here will also be in the dated folders too, so worry about the dated folders for the time being. You can always check back later and make sure you’ve got everything.

When you’re ready to tackle your first batch, you can optionally choose to get rid of any edited images and duplicates. I had very few edited images, and those that I did have, weren’t edited very well or were an artefact of Google’s self-editing processes.

Delete all edited images to reduce duplicates.

The below command is quite aggressive, it’ll delete anything with ‘edited’ in the name. Once that’s complete I use a software package called Gemini2 to check for duplicated files in the directory, this is a fantastic tool and not only does it check for exact duplicates it also checks for similar pictures. You can review these or delete them, I was aggressive and just deleted anything that was similar. It’s best to run Gemini2 now, as you can run it against a specific directory, once you’ve imported to Apple Photos you can only run it against your whole library. If you run it now, you’re also going to avoid Apple uploading potential duplicates to iCloud.

find ./ -name “*edited*” -type f -delete

You can then run the Gemini2 app against your directory.

List number of file types per extension

This command will simply list the number of files and file types in each directory. If you have a lot of movie files, you can optionally move these elsewhere to speed up processing and help manage disk space - I did this, because I had tons of crappy videos. Take a note of the this output for later, it’s helpful to just keep tabs on how many files you’re processing.

find . -type f | perl -ne 'print $1 if m/\.([^.\/]+)$/' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

Check which files are missing data or are damaged

This command which you should run in the directory of your files will recursively check through the directory and add a line in a CSV with the date/time fields from the exif data of the image (not from the json) and the filename. It’s set to ignore the DS_Store and json files so that they don’t show up in the CSV. You could instead specify the image file types, although I found I had a bunch of random file types which were all images.

exiftool -DateTimeOriginal --ext json --ext DS_Store -r -csv ./ > out.csv

Once you’ve done that you can read the CSV and see how many files are broken and how many have got the right information. I found that about 10% of my images were broken.

Filter Broken Images

I used the sort functions in Excel to list only those files which didn’t have date/time populated. I then copied the list of course files and stored in a text file called missing. You can create the file using Vi or Nano (as below) and then simply paste from Excel and save. I stored this file in the root of the batch’s director alongside the CSV file (which you don’t need to save).

vi missing.txt

Prepare for Json shenanigans

The objective here is to repopulate the missing data for the broken files by extracting it from the file’s json file. Not every file will have a json file, but most should. First we need to get a list of the json files. The below command duplicates the file we just created.

cp missing.txt missingjson.txt

Once that’s done you can open the new file in Vi and using a snazzy command you can append .json to each line in the file.

vi missingjson.txt

Run this once you’re in Vi:

%s/$/.json/

Separate broken and non-broken files.

We’ll create a new directory called broken and move all of the files which we’ve identified as broken to it. Once done, we’ll also move all of the json files too. You’re going to see some errors here because not all of the files will have an associated json file. You can make a note if you want. Some files may have trailing spaces and they won’t move, so you can move these manually.

mkdir broken/
cat missing.txt | xargs -I % mv % broken/
cat missingjson.txt | xargs -I % mv % broken/

Now that we’ve done that we have a folder full of files that look like they’re missing data. We can then begin to repair the data or fix it using the below commands.

Repair the exif data in the files

This command is designed to fix corruption in exif data. You can read about it here, point 20b. We’re going to run this against all the files in the ‘broken’ directory. You’re going to see some errors here but I saw good success in it fixing exif for a number of files.

exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -unsafe -icc_profile ./broken/

Fix GPS and Date

If that didn’t work, hopefully we can restore from the json file. This command will read the file’s json file and then restore to the files exif. It will overwrite the files when it does this. There are lots of fields in the json, I was only interested in data/time and GPS coordinates.

exiftool -r -d %s -tagsfromfile '%d/%F.json' '-GPSAltitude<GeoDataAltitude' '-GPSLatitude<GeoDataLatitude' '-GPSLatitudeRef<GeoDataLatitude' '-GPSLongitude<GeoDataLongitude' '-GPSLongitudeRef<GeoDataLongitude' '-DateTimeOriginal<PhotoTakenTimeTimestamp' -overwrite_original broken/

This won’t work for all files. But we’ve done our best at this point.

Check back over if you need.

You can use the earlier command to see how many files you’ve fixed the date for if you want, although you may be able to gauge from the CLI.

Import to Apple Photos

When I importing into Photos import all pictures directly into an album (e.g. year_imported), this allow you to create a separate smart album filter against your specific import batch. Once you’ve imported you can use a smart album to see any photos which have a captured date before or after my selected year. If you don’t import to an album, it’s not possible to filter on ‘recently imported’ in the same way (date added variable is limited to the last 1 day, so you can’t differentiate multiple imports on the same day)

Once done, you can select all images/videos with incorrect date and manually set the date to something within that year (e.g. 1/1/year) to avoid photos showing up in completely the wrong place. You can do this in apple by selecting all photos.

Repeat for each batch

This is a long winded process and is almost certainly not the most efficient way of doing this, but it seemed to work for me. Apologies if I haven’t attributed anyone for the commands, I did this about 9 months ago and wrote this based on the notes I took at the time. I do however remember trying to piece things together and certainly didn’t find a comprehensive guide on this.

If this helped, send me a tweet ✌️

There’s no doubt that we’re living in a time where history is being written. Since the results of the 2020 US Presidential election were announced Trump has insisted that he is the rightful winner, despite, err… Democracy.

After days of victory claiming and tweeting nonsense he slipped up with this gem:

He won because the Election was Rigged. NO VOTE WATCHERS OR OBSERVERS allowed, vote tabulated by a Radical Left privately owned company, Dominion, with a bad reputation & bum equipment that couldn’t even qualify for Texas (which I won by a lot!), the Fake & Silent Media, & more! https://t.co/Exb3C1mAPg

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

Before later reassuring his following that didn’t concede:

He only won in the eyes of the FAKE NEWS MEDIA. I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go. This was a RIGGED ELECTION!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2020

This saga is as entertaining and frightening as I hoped it would be. I absolutely love that Twitter have added the dispute tags to his tweets. Can’t wait to see what happens next, I hope they make a Netflix documentary out of it.

The best Formula 1 season in history? It’s certainly up there and there’s no doubt in my mind that it has been the most memorable. It doesn’t feel like very long ago that the sport was thrown into turmoil when the opening race in Melbourne was dramatically cancelled just before it was due to start. Somehow, F1 organisers managed to pull together a 17-race season that while lacked the ‘flyaway’ circuits instead featured classic tracks such as Imola, Portimão and the Nürburgring.

Lewis has been dominant this season, winning ten of the fourteen races so far and matching and then exceeding the most wins in history. His win here at Turkey was earned, he started sixth after a disruptive, wet Saturday session but knuckled down on a wet and slippery Sunday to take 1st place and with it, his 7th world title - a record many believed unattainable.

There’s no question now that Hamilton is the greatest of all time and he’s far from done yet. Which begs the question, why has he not yet been knighted?

Potatoes 🥔

Well, this is happening #BigSur

So far, so good. 😊 The Music app in #BigSur certainly seems much better, I can’t quite explain what was wrong with it in Catalina but it seems better to me. Oh and everything else is working too (which I have of course just cursed….)

Well, this is explains why Dom Cum scarpered so briskly

Boris Johnson told to self-isolate again after contact with Covid MP Lee Anderson

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b…

Well, so much for hoping that this would all be over by August…! Welcome to instalment three in the Coronavirus blog series. Since the last blog things were slowly beginning to open up following the original spring lockdown and while life certainly hasn’t been normal, it has become the ‘new normal’ to use one of my most disliked phrases. The rough timeline since my last post is that on the 10th of May gyms and shops were permitted to open back up and a few months later in July, pubs too reopened along with the welcome news that families can once again visit and stay. Like many others, we were a little hesitant to stick our heads out above the fox hole, but after a long few months of what had essentially been isolation from the outside world we certainly weren’t complaining.

The latest news that prompts this post is that following a sharp increase in cases, dubbed ‘The Second Wave’, we are once again being plunged into another full-scale nationwide lockdown, set to begin on Thursday 5th November. This is not a great surprise, many had predicted from the start that while things may subside in the summer, it’ll all be back in the autumn and winter, as people being to spend more time indoors and flout distancing rules. I was beginning to hope that the threat of a nationwide lockdown had gone, replaced with the very-recently-announced regional three-tier system. It seems that despite the government having months to come up with that concept it was all just a bit too late. Things are set to be a little different this time around, most significantly because schools are to remain open - most likely because of the exam result fiasco that Owen was impacted by. How keeping schools open will change the duration of this, only time will tell, but since it’s now evident that this isn’t going away quickly it seems to be the only sensible course of action.

In terms of statistics, things are all a little different from the first post, in the UK there have now been 46,717 deaths and while that number isn’t climbing rapidly, it is expected to very soon. The death rate naturally tags behind the case rate and that is currently off the chart high, somewhat attributed to improved testing. There has been noticeable improvements to testing over the past months, it now exists and does so on scale, it doesn’t seem to be perfect, but it’s there. Victoria and I have both had tests done, I had an antibody test privately though work (which was negative) and had a got-it-or-not before I went into hospital for my ear (more on that later). The antibody was a blood test and the got-it-or-not was a cotton bud to the brain - which was incredibly unpleasant. To our knowledge, neither of us have contracted the virus and we haven’t shown any symptoms either. We have however noticed that as a result of wearing a mask, sanitising our hands and reducing use of public transport we have basically not been sick at all, no colds, coughs or stomach bugs in this house!

So yes, lockdown 2.0, frustrating news, but we are ready again to do our part. We’re stocked up with food, have all the creature comforts we could ask for and a 4K UHD subscription to Netflix. It’s not like I’ve got to pack up off to Belgium to fight on the front line, we’re sitting at home binge-watching box sets and smiling on Zoom calls, not exactly a massive hardship. But we’re very lucky, we both have our jobs and are able to take some punches, there are people out there that are suffering following the loss of their job or similar and I certainly feel for them. This time round the lockdown is going to be a bit more difficult, I remember remarking in March that “It could be worse, we could be in lockdown over winter” - a dog walk in the morning March sunshine was something to look forward to, the same in November’s wind and rain will be a whole lot less novel. Small things like that make a difference and without them it’s going to be a struggle, we’ll very much be on submarine HMS Galleon Way, with no immediate plans to resurface. We do however have Christmas to look forward to, in whatever form that may take, it’ll be one to remember, that’s for sure. Oh and the US Election is this week too and that is certain to result in some entertainment.

Godspeed.

The dents are gone! I don’t know why I didn’t do this sooner… There have been two dents on the car that have been driving (hah!) me crazy for months now, one was on the rear quarter which has obviously been caused by somebody opening their door, not very big but it stood out when I was washing the car or whatever. The other was much more severe and was caused when I reversed into a metal pole in a car park, it was overhanging the wall and so the parking sensors didn’t pick it up. Luckily the paint and everything was intact or it would have looked much worse.

I took the car to a scratch and dent place on the city estate and they said that everything would need to be resprayed. That seemed a bit nuts so I just left things for another day. With not much to do with the ‘Rona going round I messaged Kent Dent Repair who fix dents without needing to do any respraying. They turned up a few days later and after two or so hours of banging away everything was back as it should be! I don’t know how the bloke did it, but I handed him my credit card and that was that. The price was pretty reasonable, £180 for both and I didn’t even need to leave the house. Very pleased, glad to have my car back the way it should be. Just need to deal with some of the tiny hairline scratches now!

There’s a new trend going around where people record themselves doing a short activity after being thrown a toilet roll. Those videos are stitched together into one bigger video and the idea is that people throw the loo roll from one person to another. Some of them are pretty funny, and it’s all in aid of mental heath awareness week. This was the perfect opportunity to get my scuba gear on, seeing as it’s almost six months since I last used it. It was HOT. I don’t recommend wearing a dry suit in the summer sun, my clothers under my dry suit were drenched. You can see the full video here.

Fun and games aside it was also a Sailing School night. This was the hardest lesson yet, I really struggled. The theory of each step makes perfect sense but to calculate each thing is quite challenging especially when trying to do it quickly. Wednesday’s lesson of converting compass headings from true to magnetic and vice versa (TVMDC) was complicated enough on it’s own but is then just a part of the process used when working out estimated positioning. Here’s my brain dump on the process used to calculate an estimated position, there are three key steps:

1. Water track. For this we need to convert the vessel’s magnetic heading (given by the skipper) to true using the TVMDC process. Once we know the course we can note this on the chart with a long line with an arrow indicating direction. We can then calculate the vessels dead reckoning position by using the speed (knots to understand the distance that will be covered. Since 1 knot is equal to 1 nautical mile per hour this is relatively easy to establish. This position is then noted with a small perpendicular line along with ‘DR’ and time it was noted.

2. Tidal Vector. This is the impact of the tide on the vessel’s direction. For example, if a vessel is travelling from north to south and the tide is running from east to west the vessel will be moved off course to the west despite it maintaining the same heading south. We can calculate how much the vessel is moved off course by understanding the rate and direction of the tide. To calculate the tidal rate we need to understand the date and time of our passage, we can then look up the tides in the closest port’s tide table. Once we’ve found that information we can calculate the tidal range (by subtracting low water from high water) and using this to check if it’s closest to a spring or neap tide. We will also note how many hours before or after our passage is from high water. With that information we can look up the speed and time of the tide. We can check this information in one of two places, either using the tidal diamonds and associated table on the chart or by using a tidal atlas in an almanac. In either case it’s necessary to look at the speed/direction based on the time before or after high water. Once established another line can be drawn from the dead reckoning position based on the direction of the tide and the distance can be calculated using the speed of the tide (which is shown in knots) and noted with a dot and a surrounding triangle along with ‘EP’ and time it was noted. The line should be noted with three arrows.

3. Ground Track. This is a line which is drawn on the chart from the vessel’s position to the estimated position. The line should be noted with two arrows. Once drawn it’s possible to reverse calculate the course over ground (COG) and speed over ground (SOG). Using this line we can check that the vessel isn’t going to pass any obstructions in reaching it’s estimated position.

It’s worth noting that these calculations assume that the sailing vessel is either running or reaching, if the vessel is heading to windward (beating) then it’s necessary to tack which will also need to be noted on the chart accordingly. A similar process is followed to complete this but it hasn’t yet been covered in the course. Tonight I’m going to run through some more exercises to make sure that I know what on earth I’m talking about. but it seems to be making sense in my head…

Sailing aside, today I went to London. Projects at work are all largely continuing despite the current situation and one of the projects we kicked off this year is to replace all of the internet for UK branch offices. As the lockdown has slowly been relaxed it’s allowed for an opportunity to go and connect up the new lines and get them tested. Being a good citizen and following government guidelines I decided to drive in, something I’ve only ever done to this office once before. There was very little traffic at all and it took just over an hour (faster than the train!), I drove through the city and passed Picadilly Circus which is now all up and running. At work we got what we needed to get done, had a little time for some lunch and enjoyed the peace and quiet, there were a fair amount of people walking around but a lot less then you’d normally expect to see on a Saturday. All a little strange.

Anyway, I should probably get back to work and drive home rather than typing up a blog post. Verdant beer awaits at home!!

Wednesday’s Day Skipper lesson was great. The Zoom format continues to work very well and I’m enjoying being able to be in my own space and not have to worry about other people. We covered some interesting topics, how to calculate bearing, position fixing, and compass variation and deviation, which was a new concept to me. We also covered tides and depth theory, the concept of tides is something i’ve sort of understood but it’s nice to learn about it properly. Homework from lesson 2 wasn’t too difficult, perhaps two hours in total and most of that I wrapped up straight after the lesson like the good student I am. A cocked hat by the way is a positing term, for when three position lines are taken but don’t perfectly intersect, creating a triangle.

In ‘Strong Holm’ I posted about how people were abusing the ‘take away’ for the pub. Well, turns out somebody must have said something because there are now warning notices duck-taped to each of the pub benches. For those wondering, it wasn’t me, I’m far too lazy to bother complaining about something like that, I’d rather just moan about it here. I suppose it could be that my blog is now so popular that it’s having an impact in the real world, but I highly doubt that since the post has only been read six times.

In booze-news, I ordered the new Verdant beer releases on Wednesday, little late off the mark my order didn’t complete until 10:42 which meant they didn’t ship that same day. They look pretty good, one of the beers, All together IPA is a charity beer and Verdant split a portion of the profits with Hospitality Action South West. The other beer, Where does time go is an 8% DIPA, not sure it’s going to be quite up my street but we’ll see. The more exciting booze-news is that Tarquin’s released Hell Bay Seaweed Gin on their Thirsty Thursday. It’s the first time that i’ve ever seen it sold online and it’s usually only available from behind the bar of the Hell Bay Hotel on the Scilly Isles. I’ve checked this morning and it’s now sold out and I’m not surprised. Very much looking forward to giving this a try and adding it to the collection.

It’s hot. It’s super hot, the Audi said it was 30 Celsius in the car at lunch time and I believe it. The weather is absolutely gorgeous and I almost envy those who are on furlough and able to make the most of being away from work. Aside from working I made a few small tweaks to the CSS on the blog, I added a footer for Github/Jekyll and adjusted the borders of those items. I think it looks a little better. Next task is to remove the social icons from the top for mobile browsers.

Today was homework day following yesterday’s Day Skipper Theory lesson. I managed to find time this evening at 9am to start and have only just finished everything now (it’s 11pm). Homework was actually good, during the lessons yesterday I was struggling to get to complete grips with finding location, bearing, etc but I’m now pretty comfortable with that. I was a little bit naughty and bought a pack of charts from the chandlery (£45!) so I could work out real-world information and check it against google. Good news is that I’m super familiar with the process now, I can do it pretty quickly and my answers are the same as those on the instructor’s slides. The YouTube videos I mentioned from Elite Sailing are new, or certainly have been uploaded new and they are really very good. Very clear and easy to follow, it’s

Good news of the day is that the window in the kitchen is now fixed. Annoying that it broke but at least it’s no longer full of condensation and looks like a proper window again. The guy turned up in full mask, gloves, etc and just got on with it. It’s good to see that people are getting back to work, especially in places where it’s relatively low risk (I didn’t need to get near the guy).

Anyway, it’s late and I have class number two tomorrow and the weekly 10:30am Verdant beer launch.

Blimey, it’s been a busy day since the last post! Last night was a lot of fun, I watched Iron Pier run a meet the brewer and can launch via their Facebook page. It was great, there were about 30 people on the live feed and the two brewers explained everything to do with their backgrounds to the canning process and their future goals. You can watch the video of the session here, I asked a few questions (and was the first to do so!). I’ve very much enjoyed their beers and am particularly looking forward to trying their Breezy Day IPA once it’s canned up in the next week or so.

Following yesterdays spur of the moment decision to sign up to do my RYA Day Skipper theory, today I completed my first lesson. In the morning I headed down to the marina to collect the learning materials and a USB stick with all of the guides. The call was at 18:30 via zoom and there were probably ten or so other students on the course. The experience via Zoom was actually really good, it was very easy to follow the instructor when I could hear him clearly and see the presentation on my own monitor right in front of me. Some parts of the lesson were a little too fast, for example where it is necessary to find a location and work out the lat/long but I will simply repeat these in my own time until I’m familiar. It was a little tricky having enough desk space for the large charts, I think I may use the big table downstairs for future lessons. I have some homework, nothing too major, an hour or two for tomorrow evening which includes some excercises, reading and watching of YouTube videos. I expect I shall have no issue with the latter task. By the way, the random name of these blog posts are fictional names of places on the charts, thought it’d be fun.

Last, Victoria and I were discussing when the ‘lockdown’ timer should end. At home we have a little black board where we update the number of days since we have been in government-mandated lockdown, we’re currently on day 62. We were a few days ahead of the official date, but agreed that our date was our date. With the gradual, well, I say gradual, there’s been hoards of people in Upnor for the last week, it’s literally the only time in my life I’ve seen people enjoying Upnor ‘beach’ and yes, there are people swimming. Anyway, with the gradual change in lockdown when are we considered to no longer be in lockdown? My opinion is that we’re out of lockdown only when the pubs are back to normal. Until you can go to a pub, sit down at the bar, have a pint of cask ale and not have to wear a mask or any of that nonsense, I consider us to still be in lockdown.

Oh, speaking of the pub, yesterday there were people sitting on the pub tables outside the Ship drinking ‘take away’ bottles of beer and eating a ‘take away’ roast dinner out of a foil take away container. This is NOT take away. If you’re eating and drinking it on the premises from where you purchased it, you’re not taking it away. I don’t normally give 2 seconds notice to what people do so long as it doesn’t impact me, but this one was just silly and I’ve seen lots of stupid things over the last few months. The rules are the rules, I don’t necessarily agree with the rules, you may not agree with the rules, but they are for whatever good it will do, the rules. And let’s be real, we can all go 60 days without a fucking roast dinner, let alone one in a foil container - GO HOME. Anyway, maybe they had a special reason to need to eat a roast dinner from a foil container whilst enjoying a cool, crisp bottle of Bud - who am I to judge?

Going to go and have a gin now.

In better news, the kitchen window is getting fixed tomorrow (it has moisture between the panes) and I’ve just booked the Audi to have it’s dents fixed too. I’m very excited about both of these things. They are going to cost me more than the Day Skipper course, but they will bring me much happiness.

This weekend couldn’t have come sooner, it’s been a long week, productive, but long. Yesterday I spent most of the day drafting out Leg 8 of the Train To Turkey blog post. It’s coming along but it still seems to take me absolutely ages to get it all together. I’ve got a bit of a process now which is 1. Sort through pictures, edit and prepare 2. Research and made notes 3. Write up post with support from research and pictures. This process seems to help me stay away from the Wikiedia research-rabbit-hole, although yesterday I did spend an unnecessary amount of time reading about Nazi occupation of Bulgaria and it’s liberation by the Soviet Army. Interesting, but not really a valuable use of my time when I should be blogging.

Aside from reading Wikipedia I did make a few adjustments to the blog. One thing that I really dislike is when I write a post it’s quite often about a trip or a thing that happened in the past. Leg 8 for the Train to Turkey is an example, I will end up posting it in a few days time when actually the event took place almost a year ago. I had no solution to this with Squarespace, but with Jekyll I can add whatever front-matter I like to posts and display it or process it in any way I choose. So I’ve added a ‘history’ field which I can optionally populate and have the date displayed at the top of the post. That way I no-longer need to mention when something happened in the body of the post, I can just write and get on with it. It should also be possible to have the archive page list posts based on this ‘history’ date so that posts show in the order they happened rather than when they were posted. That’s a project for another day but something that in theory shouldn’t be too difficult to achieve.

I also added a location field which you can see on this post too, which I thought would be cool for when I’m travelling (if we’re ever allowed to again). I did set it the location information up as a URL but I need to sort the formatting out so that it works better. Few other improvements too, I reduced the title size so that it now fits on my iPhone screen without rolling over to a new line and I added a little tag icon for tags and moved them to the bottom of the post. Not yet sold on them being at the bottom, I may bring them back up, but we’ll see how we go.

In other news, I’ve signed up to complete my RYA Day Skipper Theory course. This has been something I’ve been considering since last year and it seemed like now was a sensible time to commit to it. With COVID-19 the course is run online via Zoom which is much more convenient and easy to manage around work. It’ll be 3 weekday evenings for three weeks, so I’ll carry on my my imitation commute and then switch to learning mode. I actually started my Day Skipper a few years ago with evening classes at Cushman but I kept getting interrupted with work calls and had to quit. I was pretty disappointed but, well that’s in the past. This time round I’m going to study with Elite Sailing who are just across the river in Chatham Marina, so it should make transitioning to the practical much easier too. The course is essentially the RYA equivalent of PADI’s Open Water but it seems a little more involved. I’m excited, with this and perhaps some more water time I can confidently close off Number 18 on the list.

Great news! The £31 beer arrived today. My strategy of ordering Verdant beer bang on release time at 10:30 am on Wednesday is working out well. It arrived in less than 24 hours, which is pretty impressive by anyone’s standards. It went straight into the fridge and I’m currently enjoying a cold can of ‘There will be no intervals’ which is a Mosaic and Simcoe Pale Ale. I think it’s up there, but not my absolute fave. I love Verdant beer and the 4.5% stuff is really where it’s at, the DIPAs are just too heavy. They have their place in the world but you need to be in the right mood to enjoy them.

In other beery news I heard from Iron Pier in Gravesham who a few weeks back announced that they would begin to can their beer. They planned to release four different cans with some gorgeous artwork on each can. Unfortunately they said in a blog post that one of their beers, Breezy Day didn’t play too well when canning. They explained that it’d be a few weeks until it’s possible for them to can that beer again as they’re using a mobile canner. Good news is that tomorrow my pre-order of the other three will be available(!) so I shall be venturing out to pick it up. I think they’re a great little brewery so looking forward to giving it a try, glad to see they’re joining the trendy can scene. It’s the work quiz tomorrow at 5pm, so this will be the perfect treat!

Aside from beer, today I went out for another run. I’m trying to run every other day, which without just complaining is kind of hard because it’s not a daily routine. I could run every day but I’ve tried that in the past and I just end up hurting myself and then stopping for weeks on end. Today’s run was a repeat of Tuesday’s run, starting at home, running to castle street in Upnor then through the wooded footpath to Upnor hard, along the REs and all the way along Upchat Road, across Ratcliffe highway to Elm Ave and then down to Upnor. It’s a 6km route which is uphill basically the whole way. The last 500m is a drop but it’s too steep to run, so I have to walk (or really kill my ankles). I ran it in 36mins today which was pretty slow. My plan is to run it in reverse next time, which will mean the first 500m will be really shitty but the rest should be a breeze - we’ll see.

In addition to the running I’ve been contemplating doing some long distance walking. I think that this is my brain trying to find some adventure in lieu of any travel options, but I’m fine with it. My long term hope is to walk the South West Coastal Path, (a path so popular it has it’s own website). This is the longest path in the UK at 630 miles and covers all of the Cornish coast and much of Somerset and Devon too. Sounds great, but that’s the crown and I need to start smaller first. So the plan I’m weighing up is to walk some of the Saxon Shore Way in Kent. This has been something that has been in the back of my mind for a long time. When we walk Dexter in the morning, we’re walking part of the path and I think it’d be really cool to walk all of it. The path starts in Gravesend and I think a reasonable leg would be 30km which would take me to Strood station - kind of convenient. Debating this for Saturday/Sunday but we’ll see…

Oh, I discovered a new YouTube channel. Man, I gotta stop with YouTube. It’s called SV Delos, it’s a Swedish girl and American guy who live aboard a 51m cruising yacht who sail around the world. Literally living the dream. There are tons and tons of videos on their channel and I have no doubt that I will end up binging them over the next few weeks. I watched two last night and they were pretty good, not quite of the production quality as Beau Miles but certainly watchable content.

And that’s probably enough rambling for today. I’m going to find some dinner and drink more of this lovely beer.

Update (2020-12-21): I moved everything to Micro Blog, so this is a really confusing post now, if you’re actually reading it.

Update (2020-11-25): The ramblings concept mentioned here was a good idea, I’ve switched to using micro.blog for short ramblings-style posts. I’ve removed the hidden tags that stopped the ramblings posts from showing up in the main feed. Enjoy.

Was having a big ‘ol think the other day after I posted another Coronavirus blog. That post took me almost a day to write, edit, re-write and sort the images out for. And, well, it’s just a crappy blog post, there’s nothing special about it and it certainly didn’t need re-writing several times. I want to write more, but whenever I try to I end up making a total cake about the content and making sure there’s no grammar errors, spelling errors and all of that nonsense. I’m going to stop all of that nonsense. Nobody actually reads the stuff I post anyway, so most of the time I’m both author and audience.

This is the first post of what I hope will be many where I just write stuff. Probably useless crap, but stuff nonetheless. The idea is to stop being so picky about the content and to just actually write things. More content, less quality (well, quality was debatable anyway!) Hopefully in doing so I can bring some more of a human element back and get better at writing and sharing too. I’m going to post these ‘ramblings’ as hidden, so they won’t show on the main blog page but will still be accessible if you know where to look.

Anwyay… Welcome to the new ramblings, and yes I have had a beer. Actually I ordered some more beer today. Six beers, for £31. Yes, I know that’s insane but Beer is currently my only hobby and it’s also really very good beer. It’s funny thinking about it because I’m the same person that stands in Asda for 10 mins trying to find the best possible deal on a case of premium lager to save all of £1. This £31 beer is really quite good though: Verdant Brewing Co from Cornwall, Penryn/Falmouth specifically. It’s also not actually £31, this order was for 4 x 4.5% Pale Ales at £3.65 and 2 x 8% DIPAs at £5.50, plus £5 shipping. Six beers for £31 isn’t bad, right? Verdant are really quite clever, they release two new beers every week and for an addict like myself it’s really quite difficult to miss out on the new releases.

Today has been a pretty busy day at work but Victoria and I both managed to complete our morning and evening commute. The weather in the morning was great, we set out a little earlier than usual because we had a Tesco at 8am but that was all fine. We saw the Arco Avon go past the Yacht Club. The walk in the afternoon was a little windy and chilly but perfectly fine. For the first time in several weeks there is actually some activity at the Yacht Club, a boat was on the travelling hoist, so it looks like the bosun is getting stuff moving again. It’s a little odd seeing all the boats on the hard in May.

It’s been 50 days since I first posted about Coronavirus and it’s fair to say that in that time, the world has changed. 50 days ago there were 289 deaths in the UK and yesterday’s daily government briefing announced the total is now 31,589 - which puts our little island nation second in numbers only to the USA. Italy was at the centre of the crisis and is now barely even mentioned in the news. There have been plenty of significant events in those 50 days, an emergency hospital was built inside the Excel centre, Boris Johnson was diagnosed with the virus spending time in intensive care and the Queen made a historic and emotional televised speech to the nation.

This whole situation is now certainly one of the most notable and impactful events to occur in my lifetime, it’s up there with the news stories such as the death of Diana, the turn of the millennium, the September 11th attacks, the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the birth of Prince George and more recently, the UK choosing to leave the EU. More significantly than all of those though is what may come in the future, the IMF has projected that this event will trigger the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The government is paying the wages for almost 20% of the employed workforce through a furlough scheme and providing loans and grants left right and centre in order to try and protect the economy. We’re living in interesting and scary times, but I’m thankful that everyone close to us is safe and for now life goes - albeit in lockdown.

Victoria and I have been very fortunate, we’ve both continued to work and are busier than ever. There have been some small changes at Colliers and although the firm announced reasonable Q1 2020 results, the projection is for a reduction in revenue between 15% and 25% in 2020. At work I continue the effort of improving remote working technology for the business, with good success in adopting Microsoft Teams next month we will retire Skype for Business, a big step forward. The past month has been really rewarding speaking to colleagues across the company, hearing how they are adapting to work and how the technology we’ve implemented has allowed them to continue to do business.

The lifestyle change over the past few months has been interesting too. A few years back I was working from home full time and while it worked, I didn’t love it. I enjoyed and respected the freedom but the hours were debilitating. I lived and breathed work, it became the centre of my life, waking up at silly o’clock and grinding late into the evening took a big toll on my mood and wellbeing. Changing to a 9-to-5 office job was the adjustment in life that I needed and one of the key reasons for moving to Colliers. The change took some getting used to, I still don’t enjoy getting the train every day but I do enjoy almost everything else, I love my job and the people I work with.

With the virus, Colliers like almost all office-based companies enacted a work from home policy. I was a little nervous, fearful of seeing a repeat of the experience at the last place - but conscious that things were both temporary and necessary. I’ve learned over the past few months that the problem wasn’t working from home, it was working in the wrong way and with the wrong hours. In complete contrast, working with a regional team with most colleagues located only a few hours East, having support over deliverables and encouragement to separate working hours has made all the difference. Victoria and I walk Dexter at 8:30 before work and at 17:30 after work, separating the day. I’ve been busy, really busy and some days I don’t get everything done that I had hoped, but it waits for tomorrow. When I check my emails in the evening, and I don’t often, there’s nothing unread to lure me back to my desk. The removal of the train commute has given me hours back in my day which I spend cooking, walking, running or with Victoria - it’s made me happier, healthier, more appreciative and much less stressed. Not perfectly healthy, I’ve had more beer recently than I should but I’ve enjoyed drinking that beer, I don’t overdo it and end up on the last train home. I’m hopeful that once things are back to normal, whatever that looks like, there is an increased element of working from home. I’m enjoying it and making the most of the time.

Aside from work, we’ve been doing our best to make the most of being at home, its been good, I feel closer than ever to Victoria and am enjoying being away from all the distractions in the world. It’s made me appreciate things more, the things I’ve done and the freedom we all used to take for granted. It sounds a bit nuts, but when you go to the pub, restaurant or the gym sometimes you’re just there - when actually the value in all those things is who you’re there with. I’ve been thinking a lot about the trip Owen and I took last year, it was such a fantastic, amazing adventure, we were so lucky that it worked out. The trip now is much more than the journey to me, the countries we visited or the trains we took, it was the time we spent together, the stupid jokes and the weird people we met. I don’t know when something like that trip will be possible again, but I know I’m going to appreciate it all the more when it is.

Despite the lockdown, I had the most fantastic #StayHome 30th birthday. We opened presents in bed and took things easy, it was fantastic. This year I was very lucky with presents, Victoria treated me to a stay in Spitbank Fort in the Solent, a surprise she kept for many months. The original plan was to be there for our birthday, but we’ve rescheduled for August and are hoping that this is all over by then. It looks fantastic, you take a boat over and then stay there until it’s time to go home - totally up my street and I can’t wait to be sitting there with her enjoying a nice dinner together. The weather was beautiful on the Sunday and we spent time sitting in the garden drinking beer and playing ‘Who Knows Where?’, another great gift. I enjoyed wearing my summer shirt which I bought (for too much money) while we were on honeymoon in Malaysia, I thought it complimented the celebratory moustache well.

The week after our birthday weekend we had originally planned to travel to Glasgow, unfortunately, that was cancelled but instead, we spent time at home. I planted up some seeds which are coming up to three weeks now, most of them are doing great. The Cos lettuce is doing particularly well as are the tomatoes. I had almost written off the tomatoes because they didn’t surface for almost two weeks, I think you’re supposed to dry them out first. Speaking of tomatoes, the food and supermarket situation is much better now. Almost everything is available once again and food shops are open and being reasonably sensible about how many people they let in. Going shopping is actually pretty great, yes you have to queue but parking is easy and when you get in the shop there aren’t hoards of people.

This past weekend was the 75th anniversary of VE Day, celebrating the end of the war against Nazi Germany in Europe. We put up the Union Jack, made some bunting and had some drinks in the front garden with the neighbours. It was refreshing and demonstrated that celebrating things at home can be just as fun as going out or travelling. We got rather sozzled towards the end of the day but had a rather lovely time. I vaguely recall carving a chicken for the dog at about 10pm! Oh and yes, I know that my flag is the wrong way round (wide white top, broadside up) - too late, I’d already attached it to the frame.

It’s fair to say that this is the part of the journey we were most worried about. The daily train between Serbia and Bulgaria is the one which we have invested the most research and nervous phone-checking during our trip. We even had the staff in the hotel double-check that the train is actually a real train and contacted people online who had been on it before.

We woke early that morning and taking no risks had the hotel arrange a taxi to drop us off, there is no Uber here in Serbia so it was conventional transport methods only. The driver seemed to be completely clear about our destination, but after 10 minutes we arrived at the wrong station, luckily it was on the way to where we needed to go, which was just another 10 minutes or so away.

The train to Sofia departs from a different station to the one which we arrived, I’m guessing that this is because following the closure of the older main station trains were moved elsewhere while construction on the newer station (where we arrived from Zagreb) is completed. The (presumably temporary) Topčider Station was a much smaller station seemingly in the middle of nowhere, in a big park. In our taxi we passed several backpackers who were walking, I’m glad we weren’t because the weather had now turned and it was tipping it down with rain.

Now at the right station, we paid the taxi driver in what remained of our Serbian Dinars and made our way to the station building. We were at least 30 minutes early, keen to make sure we had time to take some pictures too. Topčider is a confusing station, it doesn’t have any departure boards, it doesn’t really even have any platforms and it didn’t have many other passengers either. A few locomotives were standing in what is more of a railway yard than a station but none of them looked much like what I had seen online. A very Serbian man seemed to ask where we were going and understanding Sofia signalled us to wait here. So wait we did, in the rain.

Several other trains passed through, one magnificent blue train with steamed up windows arrived and dropped off some passengers before making its way on. The man at the station reiterated his sign language for us to remain standing where we were. Another train shunted some empty wagons around, they appeared to be vehicle carriers, a little like those used in the channel-tunnel, just much, much less fancy. Finally, our train arrived and the man at the station pointed for us to go and get on it. I’m still unsure if the man worked for the railway or whether he was just a man at the station. To our relief, the train had some paper stickers which confirmed it was ‘The Balkan’ with a destination of Sofia, Bulgaria.

We walked up and down the train, there weren’t many other passengers at this stage but they all soon started arriving. There were two carriages behind the locomotive, one was an open layout and the other was made up of compartments, much like the train from Zagreb. One of the compartments we walked past had a policeman laying down and fast asleep. We decided that we’d play it safe and sit in the open carriage. There were a few local passengers but it was mostly backpackers, there were some guys from Germany and two people from Norway (I think).

Without much fanfare at all and right on time, we got moving. Owen settled into his seat and we prepared for the long day of travel which lay before us. We slowly passed through the park and then through the suburbs of Belgrade, we were surprised at how hilly the outskirts of the city were and how quickly that it changed from city to countryside. We stopped at a local station just outside of town which again looked more like a railway yard than a station, there were old wagons, locos, cranes and all sorts. A few locals got on and a few got off, I don’t think this stop was on the schedule but I wasn’t able to note the name of the station.

Continuing on it didn’t take long before we were in the full-on countryside, the train line was effectively a straight line down to Niš in the south-east, right through the centre of the country. We passed through small villages and occasionally stopped at a station where a smartly dressed station manager would greet the train, the proceed to bang something under the carriage with what looked like a hammer on a long handle. Very few passengers on the train changed, occasionally people would get on at one remote stop and then get off at the next.

There was a conductor on the train, a very stern looking lady who shortly after leaving checked everyone’s tickets. Almost everyone has an Interrail Pass and she diligently verified that we had updated everything correctly and stamped it with her special Serbian railway stamp. After the one ticket check we never saw the conductor again, I assume she stayed on the train, but I can’t be certain. The rules on this train were a little different to those which we’d travelled on up to this point, this was the first train where smoking was acceptable. Only in the vestibule mind, but still, that’s a little unusual. Whether it’s permitted or not we weren’t sure, but it wasn’t particularly bothersome.

The landscape changed as we travelled across Serbia, there was sometimes a town with a factory of some kind, many fields and small rural villages which don’t look like they’ve changed in 100 years. We held out until 12 for lunch and then tucked into our nice cool sandwich from the cold bag. The beers were too nice and cold, we were certainly the only ones with a cold beer and I was very smug about it too. The only problem with drinking was that the toilet on this train was absolutely the worst toilet I’ve ever experienced. It wasn’t far away from “The Worst Toilet in Scotland” from the movie Trainspotting. How it is possible for a toilet which is just a hole in the floor to smell as bad as it does is beyond me.

The day went quite quickly and before we knew it we were approaching the outskirts of Niš. This city was not like Belgrade, it was much smaller and clearly not as visited. To our surprise, the train hung around in Niš for about 20 minutes or so. The group of Germans which has been on the train since Belgrade had somehow managed to arrange a rendezvous with some locals who had bought them beers (the 8% variety). I don’t quite know how they achieved this, but it was pretty impressive and I was a little jealous. We were joined on the train by two french girls who appeared as if they had been travelling for several months (they needed a shower) who promptly proceeded to fall asleep. The train got moving again and to our surprise, we were reversing out of Niš, this was good news as our carriage was now at the rear of the train.

As we kept moving we passed through the stunning Sićevo Gorge where the train followed a narrow track along the Nišava river, it was absolutely brilliant! I stood by the filthy rear window to try and get a few pictures, almost all of them are completely unusable but the view was fantastic nonetheless.

As we were passing through the conductor reappeared and woke the two French girls who it turns out had no ticket and no money. I can’t quite remember what happened but I think they sort of handed over whatever they had left - a very strange situation which left the conductor quite cross.

Passing through the gorge we were on the final leg through to Sofia. About halfway through, we reached Dimitrovgrad which is the border town between Serbia and Bulgaria. We stopped at the station and were boarded by Serbian officials who collected up everyone’s passports while briefly checking the photos. Everyone on the train waited in a rather confused state hoping that we would see our passports once again. After about 15 minutes or so the men returned and in reverse order to their collection redistributed the freshly-stamped passports to passengers.

The train continued into Bulgaria where we promptly stopped once again for another passport check. Rinse and repeat of the last encounter except for this time we weren’t blessed with any ink as we had returned to an EU member state (although not in the Schengen area). At this point I think the driver swapped with the train on the other line, presumably he was from the Bulgarian State Railways rather than the Serbian counterpart.

The journey through Bulgaria to Sofia was quiet and uneventful, the train continued on and we arrived right on time, 20:30 EEST. Our 11 hour and 20 minute trip had taken us 203 miles as the crow flies from Belgrade, our longest day time train yet and we were quite tired despite having done nothing but sit down for an entire day.

The past few weeks have been quite extraordinary. The current Coronavirus pandemic has begun to affect our lives in the way nothing like it ever has before - and I suspect that we’re very much still at the start line.

on Friday (20th March 2020) in a live TV address to the nation the prime minister, Boris Johnson directed that as soon as reasonably possible all pubs, bars, cafes and restaurants should be closed to the public. I had settled in my mind that the point at which the pubs are closed is when things change from being a concern to being something quite serious.

Since we got back from New York in February the news has been an endless stream of information on the Virus. It has been headline after headline of infection and death statistics, event cancellations, speculations and nonsense from the US President, Donald Trump. Brexit which was set to continue to plague news stories for yet another year has seldom been mentioned, with a brief exception for when the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier confirmed he had tested positive.

Right now each day reveals a new record, change or policy:

• Monday 16th: The PM advises everyone to avoid non-essential travel and contact with others, encouraging home working where possible.
• Tuesday 17th: The Chancellor announced a £330bn support package for businesses. All nationwide cinema chains announce closures. The NHS postpones all non-urgent operations.
• Wednesday 18th: The PM announces that all schools are to be closed except for children of key workers. This year’s Glastonbury Festival (it’s 50th anniversary) is to be cancelled.
• Thursday 19th: The Bank of England base rate was reduced to 0.10%, the lowest rate in its history.
• Friday 20th: The Chancellor announces further measures including the government paying 80% of wages for those who are now out of work as a result of the Virus.

Ultimately, the country still thinks much of this is a novelty - but the UK has only suffered just 289 deaths. Many people over the weekend were ignoring advice to stay at home, some were even relaxing at the beach in Whitstable! Conversely, Italy which has been severely impacted suffered 793 deaths in just a single day on Friday despite the entire country being on a government-enforced lockdown with all access to the outdoors forbidden. Things are set to get worse before they get better.

On a personal note, Victoria and I are at home and have been since we last went to the pub on Tuesday 17th. Work continues for us both, I have been working on the deployment of Microsoft Teams to Colliers' in EMEA and Victoria is working on managing cases remotely for the CCG.

Thankfully we have plenty of food and drink at home so will hopefully be able to see things through without too much trouble. Let’s hope for the best. Expect more blog posts to come.

After spending an entire day on a train the day before we woke ready to explore the city of Belgrade. Weather was in our favour and pulling the curtains we saw everything for the first time in daylight, Europe was truly behind us, we were now in a place that neither of us were familiar, with another currency and another language - one which we had no chance in deciphering!

Outside the window of the Mercure Excelisor we were presented with the House of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, a huge building which during WW2 is was used by the German High Command for Southern Europe - quite the building to pick! The view from the hotel was certainly better than the Ibis Budget, despite booking the cheapest room available. There were many cheaper hotels, but we thought we’d play it safe expected we’d need some proper rest.

We got ourselves ready and enjoyed the luxury of being able to leave our things in the hotel room, taking just what we needed for the day. That doesn’t sounds like a big deal, but after lugging a backpack around it really is liberating. With the confusion of the train station now behind us we thought it’d be worthwhile to walk to where we thought we were going to end up yesterday: The Main Railway Station. Turns out that is very closed and had been for the last year, the station building was in a much more central location, right on the banks of the Sava and easily accessible from most of Belgrade. The station was surrounded by plenty of traffic and of course, trams which clinked and screeched their way along the waterfront.

We headed North keeping the Sava to our left and absorbed the sights and smells. This part of the city is clearly under regeneration, there is a mix of construction and abandoned buildings, many seemed very historic but all were covered in graffiti and overgrown. We later learned that there is a significant government-led project to regenerate the waterfront, there will even be a St Regis hotel! Presumably this is the reason for closing the train station, perhaps why so many buildings were vacant too.

Continuing on we found ourselves at Kalemegdan Park, Belgrade’s most significant monument - the park is absolutely huge and takes up an enormous amount of land on the tip between the Danube and the Sava. Walking up to the park we were able to see the rivers and the two islands which split the Danube. The park itself was very well kept, with gardeners pruning trees and cutting grass, an interesting contrast to the derelict buildings we were walking past just a few minutes ago. There was history everywhere, from pieces of old wall to mounds it was a very interesting place.

Owen and I realised at this stage that 1. we had not done enough research for where to go, 2. we hadn’t brought enough water and 3. we should have brought some local currency. It was beginning to get pretty warm and the few places we passed that were selling water didn’t accept credit-cards. We soldiered on and found ourselves at a Military Museum which was located between the fortresses walls. This place was enormous! I’ve never seen so many tanks, howitzers, AA-guns, torpedos, boats and whatever the rocket thing is in the picture below. We wandered around all the exhibits and were able to identify several WW2 German and Soviet tanks. It was an absolutely fantastic display of military engineering, oddly most of it was just sitting in grass as if it had been dumped. Disappointingly though, we weren’t able to visit the inside of the museum as they didn’t take card. Whoops.

With it getting ever-hotter we thought it sensible to properly try and find something to drink. we continued to walk around the fortress walls and eventually came across the very impressive, mid 15th century Zindan Gate. While the gate was lovely, just around the corner was a pizzeria and what would be our oasis in the desert. It was hidden down a really rather spooky set of stairs but opened up to a beautiful terrace with views across the river and down into what looked to be a Zoo(!). There was nobody else in the restaurant but we sat down and soon enough we had a drink in our hands.

We enjoyed an impossibly large £5.70 pizza and plenty of delicious, fresh cold beer. It was absolutely perfect. We sat and enjoyed the view, soaked up the sun (well, I did - Owen had a fleece on) and for the first time on the trip laughed about how far we’d come on the train, all this way, to such a different place in about 36-hours. It felt very different having arrived over land (and under the channel), we felt like we had earned our right to be sitting where we were - we hadn’t cheated by jumping on a 3-hour flight.

Fed and watered we made a deal with the Pizzeria to let Owen leave his fleece behind the bar, promising that we’d return later in the afternoon for more beer. It was time for us to hit what we were now sure was a Zoo. Despite the blistering heat it wasn’t a long walk and luck was in our favour because the Zoo accepted credit-cards! I’ve been to many-a-zoo in my expectations were that this would be a rinky-dink operation with a couple of goats and a parrot, perhaps a monkey or two. I was wrong. We learned during our visit that I am an idiot and don’t know anything about zoos because this zoo had plenty crazy-critters to go around, almost 150 different types and what’s better is after our visit I learned that Belgrade Zoo is kind of a big deal and has very some cool history. My two favourite facts are: 1. It holds the worlds oldest alligator, Muja who was born in 1936. Regretfully we spent all of 20 seconds looking at him, because we just thought he was a regular old-ass alligator. 2. In 1989 after his visit to Belgrade for the 9th Non-Aligned Movement Summit, Muammar Gaddafi donated six Arabian Camels which he travelled with in order to ensure he had fresh camel milk. I can’t corroborate the later fact, but I thought it hilarious regardless.

The Zoo did have some very cool animals and we spent a lot longer than we expected walking around and enjoying our time. We were absolutely the only visitors who spoke English and it made it kind of fun because all of the signs were in Serbian Cyrillic and impossible for us to even attempt to understand. My favourite animals were the Balkan Lynx (which is critically endangered), the Black Leopard and African Ostrich (because I find them hilarious). Joking aside, the zoo was good, but it certainly doesn’t receive the best funding and in comparison to Western-European zoos the animals really do have tiny enclosures, which is kind of sad.

We headed back to the Pizzeria and had another quick beer and drew up our game-plan for getting back to the hotel and getting some food. The strategy was simple: Walk back to the hotel and have a rest. Walking back took us through the main part of Kalemegdan Park which had even better views of the river than where we were in the morning. There was a very cool vibe around the park with people doing archery, some chilling with a picnic, some people doing slackline and others exploring the ancient walls. We continued our walk and eventually made our way back to the city, we were both very exhausted but before long were back at the hotel, very sweaty.

The following day’s travel plan was the sketchy bit of the trip. We were to take a train from a station on the outskirts of the city to Sofia in Bulgaria, it was a full-day train ride and all of the blogs I had read suggested bringing plenty of food and drink. If the train wasn’t working or delayed, we would be pretty screwed for the rest of the trip so it was pretty important that we were ready. After a quick shower we headed to the store downstairs to stock up for tomorrow. We bought plenty of beer, water, Haribo and snacks. On the train to Belgrade we learnt that some cheese, bread and salami makes for quite the cost effective the meal so grabbed some essentials for this too.

The construction of the bread rolls was kind of difficult, the hotel room only had a spoon in which to slice open our rolls. We used some British ingenuity and dismantled a disposable razor and fashioned a knife which worked surprisingly well. In the below picture you can also see our improvised sock/underwear drying rack which also worked very well indeed. I assure you that is the genuine reason for it, we weren’t trying to flag down Belgradian talent from our fancy hotel.

Picnic prepared and continuing our theme of improvisation we emptied the hotel mini-bar of it’s treasures and carefully filled it with tomorrow’s food and drink, so that it is as cold as possible in the morning. We dressed ourselves up and headed out on the town for some farewell food and beers. The concierge recommended that we head to Skadarlija which is a trendy street of bars and restaurants. Once we found it, it was completely as advertised, a trendy, hip cobbled street, which was just about off of the tourist path, but only if you didn’t speak to the hotel concierge, but it was certainly no La Rambla and had a good vibe. We found a decent bar, checked the train times for tomorrow a couple more times and watched the world go by. Wanting to keep things simple (and to satisfy Owen’s desires) we grabbed a Serbian McDonalds for dinner and headed back to the hotel. A long, hot, but very fun day. Onwards east! …and back to the EU, briefly.

When I started diving five years ago I never could have imagined that I would certify this far on the PADI tree. Passing my Tec45 has taken a lot of effort, the knowledge reviews and exams really do require some serious investment and the training and certification dives require confidence, practice and second-nature ability in the water. That’s before I even considered the equipment requirements! But, by the skin of my teeth (and with a very good instructor!), I managed to get through it all inside of 2019, with a final and very chilly dive at Vobster in late December.

It certainly hasn’t been without challenge, there have been several embarrassing SMB launches - it’s a whole lot more difficult to launch an SMB with a frozen face while wearing dry gloves than it is in the Maldives!! And during an early (and shallow) training dive I managed to ‘kill’ my instructor, Tony by dragging him out of an underwater plane (while he was acting as an unconscious diver), I got him out, but over-inflating his wing sent him straight to the surface, which of course is a huge no-no in technical diving. Thankfully he forgave me and repeating the skill again we succeeded in saving his life! Frankly, the amount of times I’ve stopped him trying (acting) to breath a gas he shouldn’t be at depth, he should be the one thanking me!

The final certification dives were very cold indeed, it’s the first time I’ve ended up shivering while on a decompression stop despite wearing my typically warm and cosy dry suit. Perhaps next year I will invest in the fancy Santi Heated Under-suit. Speaking of expensive investments, I am now the proud owner of a brand new 12l twinset, an XDeep Project Wing, Apeks Tek3 Regulators, a Luxfer 11l stage cylinder, Apeks XL4 Stage Regulators, a Suunto D5 Computer and a rather fancy torch too. All of which certainly wasn’t in this year’s budget! While not cheap, I absolutely love my setup and diving with it on the HMS M2 earlier in the year was an absolute dream. I’m sure too that it will all see plenty of use over the next few years.

My shiny new certification card permits me a few more things; I can now dive with a mix up to 100% oxygen(!) to a maximum depth of 45m with unlimited decompression time. Principally though, I set it as my baseline ahead of diving Scapa Flow in Scotland. Scapa is the UK’s Wreck mecca, I won’t do the story an injustice by trying to tell it here, but if you don’t why Scapa is so important, please do read this… Now that Tec45 is out of the way, I need to get myself a ticket to the Orkey Islands because I cannot wait to see those huge ships underwater.

A big thank you to Tony and Janine at Southern Scuba for everything and a thank you to Aaron Hogg as my fellow student and Luke Tanner for diving with us too.

Want to hear something frightening? Since I moved my blog to Squarespace I have given them $1,210 dollars. That is INSANE. It’s enough for a trip to NYC!

Time for a change and today I’m very pleased to welcome you to my new blog which as you may have noticed looks remarkably similar to the old blog. The key difference if that it no longer costs me $19.20 a month to host but it also now fully supports Markdown, can be updated and drafted locally and allows me to stay in control of my content.

I signed up for Sqaurespace in October 2014 after moving from Wordpress where I believe it was hosted on a small VPS server I was paying for. Here is what it looked like back then, not much but it was something. The hope by moving from Wordpress to Squarespace was that I would focus more on content creation than screwing around trying to keep Wordpress patched and secure. The additional cost of moving to Squarespace would also work as an incentive to actually write blogs more frequently too. It’s fair to say that mindset worked I’ve got a fair few posts in the collection, some which I love others which are just a snippet into the past. I’m confident that I’m invested enough in content creation and I cannot wait to write more this year so the ‘blog tax’ can stop.

The new blog is hosted on Github Pages which has become a bit of a go-to for hosting small websites, the combined integration with Github is very useful for tracking changes and over the past few weeks I’ve learnt a lot about how Github works. The site itself is built using Jekyll which is a static site generator, a process where the programme runs through all the content, templates, etc and outputs a flat html site. Github Pages has native support for Jekyll so all of that happens in the background so long as the raw content is uploaded correctly.

Jekyll can also run locally on my MacBook which allows me to store and draft all posts and changes locally before committing to GitHub. This feature would have been hugely helpful when Owen and I were on the #TrainToTurkey where connectivity to the internet was very patchy. Of course it was possible to draft in Markdown and then copy/paste to Squarespace but I then had to mess around with images when I had a connection, now I can do everything and just hit commit when I’m ready - easy!

The theme for the blog is a fork of a theme by LeNPaul called Lagrance which was pretty simple to interact with and very close to the theme I was using on Squarespace. I have adjusted a bunch of things in the CSS file but nothing major. I have added the jekyll-redirect-from plugin so I can keep my slugs working from the old site, I don’t know how much these are used but I know some of the posts reference other posts so this will save updating them. Another feature I added was some code and a script from Long Qian which allows me to keep tags working too, this is a very clever little setup that I’m a huge fan of!

Moving all of my posts has been a bit of a Christmas-break challenge, I’m about half way through and expect to have the remainder completed before Squarespace is finally switched off in late January. So far I have moved all of the posts from 2018 and 2019 most of which were very content rich. There was a resonable amount of manual effort to move things, but I was able to cheat a little by exporting an XML from Squarespace, importing that to a free Wordpress site. Once in Wordpress I was able to bulk-download the media and use a script I found online to convert the posts into Markdown. Once in Markdown format I just review each post manually and add tags, and correct the image URLs. Not too bad… The benefit is that I’ll have a nice clean content-set for the future.

Kyiv wasn’t on the itinerary for the #TrainToTurkey because there are unfortunately no trains across the Black Sea. Or ferries either, for that matter. Thankfully economics were in our favour and we were able to make a literal flying visit.

There are direct flights from London to almost all capital cities in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, except it seems to Turkey’s second-largest city and national capital, Ankara. To get home Owen and I would either need to back-track to Istanbul on the train or take an indirect flight. Most of the indirect flights were via Istanbul too, which makes sense since it’s such a large aviation hub, but all of these flights were expensive and with lengthy layovers. There was a cheaper option though: flying via Kyiv. A longer route and a smaller plane but the same ultimate destination.

Even more fortunately, it worked out cheaper yet for us to leave Ankara in the very early morning and then take a late-night flight from Kyiv to London. Just £90 quid each would get us home, which was cheaper than most of the trains we’d taken over the past week. The catch, of course, was that we’d be flying over the recently Russian-annexed Crimea region, flying not far from where Malaysia Flight 17 was blown from the sky and landing in a country which is not only one the most corrupt in Europe, but which is fighting an armed conflict on home soil. But the FCO said it would be fine, so no biggie.

Our flight was the first out of Esenboga Airport that morning and we had opted to sleep in the ibis Ankara Airport, as close as we could, to not miss it. Unfortunately, the hotel isn’t within walking distance so a taxi at 4:30 am was our only option. Ankara airport isn’t particularly big and at this time of the morning, it was completely empty, although the duty-free and coffee shops were all open for business. Of all the flights in all my years this particular flight had hands down the strangest collection of passengers - there were a few rugged, well-travelled Americans, Ukrainian nationals heading back home from holidays and a few business people in the mix too. We were almost certainly the only Brits, which I always love because it’s a sure tell sign that some real travelling is going on. We boarded via bus and Owen was rewarded with a fantastic window seat, no photos of the take-off I’m afraid.

It was a very strange feeling having travelled a very long way by train to then be taking a flight and an even stranger feeling going from a city where we were completely unfamiliar to one which we were not only unfamiliar with but for which we hadn’t even researched. The only research I had done was to confirm that my Three mobile SIM supported roaming - because not having connectivity would’ve been kind of a big deal (as we’d discovered in Ankara).

The flight was short and we landed with apprehension and excitement - we were in Ukraine! We filtered through to security and it quickly became clear that this place was no Disneyland, at least two people were sent back from the border check for not having completed their landing card correctly. The agent took a good look through my passport, took interest in my Russian visa but after a swift stamp handed it back with a perfectly rehearsed “Welcome to Ukraine”.

Easy - we’re in! Unfortunately, my mobile data wasn’t working and despite Three saying they operate their Data Passport in Ukraine, it seems that it doesn’t really work. Thankfully, a few Ukrainian Hryvnia’s got us up and running with a tourist SIM - drama over. Since we were still on a train holiday, we did the natural thing and headed for the train. One of the strangest trains we’d been on for sure, I don’t really know how to describe it other than it was a brand new, short, wide, industrial but perfectly fine little train. It took us directly to the Pasazhyrskyi Railway Station in the city, after passing several other stations, bridges and over the enormous Dnieper river. The scenery, architecture and surroundings were a world away from anything we’d seen yet, high rise soviet era tenement blocks, ragged old cars, trucks and of course, vintage, packed railway trains ferrying blue-collar workers out of the city. It was all very bizarre, even more so when viewed from a brand new airport train.

The train station was enormous, it had a strange 50s vibe and was full of people going about their business, as you’d expect in a train station. It wasn’t like any other train station I’d been to before, it was overwhelming and intimidating and where I’d usually hang around and take pictures I wanted to do nothing but get out on to the street. Passing through the big wooden doors of the main hall we were presented with the city, it was raining, not a lot but enough to be gloomy and annoying. The atmosphere was live, everything was moving and happening, busses, cars, taxi touts and plenty of soldiers geared up and presumably heading west.

We took shelter in McDonald’s just across the street but there was no escaping the madness, it was just as busy inside. We’ve been spoilt in recent years, with the advent of the multi-lingual self-serve ordering system it doesn’t matter what language you speak or what country you are in, you get exactly what you want with no confusion. That doesn’t yet exist in Ukraine, the menu was just as familiar as you’d see in London, but of course, everything is in Cyrillic and completely illegible to me and Owen. We queued up and got our pointing fingers ready. The girl who took our order spoke zero English (which is naturally understandable) and despite my pro-level pointing ran away to find a manager, who also spoke no English but seemingly understood my pointing better. A short while later and after a few minutes of embarrassment we ended up with two breakfast meals and a large coke.

Owen and I headed to the upstairs of this enormous McDonalds and found ourselves a table. We sat there for about 15 minutes laughing about why on earth we thought it was a fun idea to come to Kyiv and how much of a fool I had made of myself in front of the McDonalds staff. It was about the point where we started to relax that the man behind us got up after having finished his breakfast and strapped to his belt was a handgun. We don’t have many guns in the UK and the guns we do have are only ever seen in public in the hands of the police. Seeing a handgun strapped to someone’s jeans isn’t just a bit weird, it’s completely alien. Our thoughts then turned to whether this man was making some kind of point or perhaps making his presence known to the obvious tourists in the room - I have no idea, but we got the hell out of there after sneaking a quick snap.

With a bit of a google in McDonald’s, we had established that the best way to get to the places we wanted to see was to jump on the metro, which happened to be just across the road. Easy, we thought. The station building had an entrance and an exit and the entrance was completely backed up with hundreds of people slowly entering. We queued up and after a lot of shuffling and pushing managed to get into the building. We then discovered that we’d followed the wrong queue for if we wanted a ticket. This presented a problem as we were now in a nether-zone where we couldn’t get out (since we’d need to pass the barriers and had no ticket) and wouldn’t be able to get out of the entrance we’d just squeezed though on account of it being a one-way door full of people. So we stood back and had a bit of a think, perhaps it would calm down a bit. Well, it didn’t, the door was the only way out. We rolled up our sleeves and prepared to do the impossible, this topped the embarrassment of McDonald’s but we managed it in the end.

With the Metro off of the cards we decided that we’d just walk, how far can it be anyway? I have to admit, after walking 20mins or so and seemingly ending up nowhere further than where we were I was getting a bit peed off and Owen certainly was too. After trudging through the pouring rain (in shorts!) we pulled into a restaurant/cafe to have a breather. The best thing we did, it all cheered up from here on! The coffee shop was cool, we have a drink, used their loo and best of all, remembered that Uber is a thing. No more walking for us!!

We took an Uber to the city centre which wasn’t all that much further away and engaged tourist mode. Independence Square wasn’t quite what I had expected, despite seeing it on TV frequently during the 2014 revolution. It’s big, well, massive, but because the buildings are so absolutely huge it doesn’t feel nearly as big as it is. That said, it is pretty impressive and has a strange, sombre feel to it, probably as a result of those who were killed. It’s an absolutely iconic part of the world though, so I’m glad we were able to visit. We set off from the square heading north and up towards St. Michael’s Square and Monastery.

We were getting a bit more comfortable with the city now, the madness of the station behind us and after a wander round found of all things, a funicular railway. We were a bit surprised to see such a thing but having failed in our attempt to ride the metro thought that this would be a reasonable consolation. The funicular was opened to the public in 1905 and takes passengers between the top of the hill, Uppertown and the district of Podil on the banks of the river below. There are two funicular cars, left (Λ) and right (П) which counterweight each other and are driven by an electric motor at the top station, there is a passing loop in the middle of the track which allows the cars to use the same track in the station buildings. A ticket on the funicular costs 25 pence or 8 hryvnias and the ticket booth exchanges cash for a small plastic town which is used in the entrance turnstile.

At the bottom of the hill in Podil, we went in search of a bar so we could dry off and have a quick break and after quite a lot of walking, we found a place called Punkraft. We had seen little in the way of craft beer during the trip so far and I was particularly keen to have some been that wasn’t just macro-brewed lager - this was the place. We walked down an uninviting staircase to a basement bar which wasn’t open but the bartender (who thankfully spoke English) was happy to serve us anyway. The best bar of the trip by a long shot, we played on the vintage pinball machine and had plenty of delicious Ukranian local craft and laughed about the man with the gun in McDonald’s.

We left Podil and headed back up the funicular to another little bar, but it wasn’t nearly as good so didn’t hang around for long. We walked back to the square feeling a bit more comfortable in the city and grabbed a burger for lunch. Walking around the city we explored the Golden Gate a restored version of a medieval city gate which had a church on top. With a renewed confidence in Kyiv we thought it was worth a second attempt at the Metro system. We boarded at Zoloti Vorota (Золотi ворота) and paid for some tickets with no intention to actually go anywhere. The metro stations in Kyiv are incredibly deep, this particular station is 96 meters below the surface and the deepest in the world, Arsenalna a little further towards the river is 105 meters down. For context, the deepest London station is just 58 meters down. As a result of the depth, the escalators are steep and very long, it’s almost a journey in itself.

We rode the metro train to Lukianivska just one stop, but a fantastic experience. The trains go FAST and they have a wonderful vintage vibe about them, whilst being perfectly serviceable. They are somewhat similar to those I remember in Moscow, certainly the station architecture below the surface is similar if not completely comparable.

Metro ride over we visited a local craft shop and Owen bought some Russian dolls to bring home, this took far longer than it needed to, there were hundreds of different options. Just after that, we realised that we should probably think about getting back - that’s when it all went wrong. We had just two hours until check-in closed and the airport isn’t exactly around the corner - whoops. We dialled up an Uber and hoped for the best, a little Dacia Logan turned up with Boris (Борис) at the wheel.

This was the slowest journey in history. We hit traffic for almost all of the 38 miles from the centre to the airport while Owen and I sat in the back sweating about the impact of missing our flight. It did reach the point where I waved our boarding passes insistently at the Uber driver for him to get a shift on. In fact, it got so close to us missing the flight that I was researching where we were going to stay that night if we did miss it. The one good part of the ride was that we were able to see the Motherland Monument from the car, the traffic was so slow we probably could have got out and walked up to it. Thankfully we arrived in the nick of time and ran like madmen through security and to the gate, with just enough time to pick up some incredibly cheap Ukranian vodka!!

We arrived back at Gatwick exhausted, smelly, tired but full of stories. A flying visit to Kyiv, complete and the longest train journey of our lives in the bag. What an incredible week!

The Maldives were lovely, but there were no wrecks. It was time to do some real diving… The M2 is WW2 submarine with the unique feature of a hangar and her own sea plane, a kind of submersible aircraft carrier. She was one of three M-class submarines built for the Royal Navy and after the accidental sinking of her sister, the M1 she was pulled from service and retrofitted with the hangar. Sadly the M2 also sunk shortly after in 1932 after what is believed to have been a failed launch exercise off Chesil beach in Dorset. The wreck lies in around 32 meters of water and sits perfectly upright making it very easy to make out key components of the boat.

We launched around 9am on Saturday morning in pouring rain, of the many dive boats in Portland Harbour we were the only dive boat going out - which was a little alarming. The journey out wasn’t too bad, there was some swell as we travelled down the eastern part of Portland Bill. The sea picked up considerably once we were unprotected from the south-westerly winds and everyone including me got a little bit sick!

This was a big dive for me, since passing my PADI Tec45 I have bought my own twinset, regulators and wing, a significant equipment investment. It had taken quite a lot of logistics to make sure that I had everything for this particular dive, but thankfully everything arrived in time. I was a little apprehensive since I had not dived this particular rig before, but confident that everything was working as it should.

Once we were above the wreck the skipper threw the shot and a short while later we were getting kitted up. I buddied with Art, a technical trained diver who I had dived with before at Vobster Quay in the UK. We were planning for a 30 minute bottom time before heading back up the shot which should take around 20 minutes, giving us a planned 45/50minute run time. Art was to run against his deco plan I was to copy, relying on my computers for if I were to lose Art. Art was running 21% back gas plus a 50% deco mix and I was on 21% back gas for the entire dive.

We dropped down to about 5 meters where I checked my equipment was all in order, Art hung slightly above to confirm. We reached the wreck in just a few minutes after a steady decent, the visibility at the bottom was good, at least 5 meters, which given the weather was surprising. There was some current but this dropped away once we reached the bottom.

At the bottom of the shot the submarine emerged, the hangar was right on the line. I adjusted my equipment and buoyancy and checked my backup regulator was still working correctly. We headed off towards the bow on the starboard side, the wreck has deteriorated after all these years and there were a number of holes on the side of the hull. On the top of the boat there were the visible catapult tracks for the aircraft, leading out of the hangar and steel chains could be seen through the tracks. At the bow there was a lot of sea life, all cosied inside the wreck, protected from the elements.

We headed round to the port side and swam back towards the stern. A number of crabs were crawling on the side covered in barnacles, experienced in evading fishermen! We reached the hangar and swam around the conning tower. This was my favourite part, the ridges on the circular tower just above the hangar can be made out in the picture, looked identical underwater. The tower still had many of the antenna and steel masts, many of these had remnants of lines tied on by boats or other divers. Rounding the tower we descended slightly again and went inside the hangar, we penetrated maybe 3 or 4 meters before being faced with a huge bank of silt which I didn’t want to go near(!).

Backing out of the hangar we called the dive and agreed to head back up the line. We followed Art’s deco plan well and at 20 meters he switched to his 50% mix. Ascending slowly we worked our way up and at 6 meters Art threw up an SMB. We both continued up and after a slow ascent I was left with only a few minutes at 3 meters. We surfaced just off the shot line to a choppy sea and all other divers on the boat. I had about 108 bar left in my twins with a consumption of 17.3l/min so probably could have extended the dive but was happy to keep it short and safe.

Back on board we all spent the next half hour talking about the dive and what we saw. Brett and Jayne had followed around to the stern and were able to see the two horizontal stabilisers, which would have been an interesting sight - perhaps next time! We powered back to harbour and were relieved to reach calmer waters on the eastern side of the bill. A fantastic dive, my new equipment worked a treat and I don’t think I can recall a more comfortable dive. I was warm, had good natural trim, perfect buoyancy and had enough movement to reach valves and gauges. I was far, far more comfortable at 32 meters than I was sitting on the boat!

I came across some old photographs of Lower Upnor the other day and wanted to share them online. I’m not too sure when the older pictures were taken or by whom, but perhaps somebody will be able to help. They show an fantastic glimse into how upnor has changed over the last 70 or so years.

This first picture (above) is the most recent, taken in 2006 by Alan R. Fuller of Albion Place. Not a huge amount has changed between then and the present day. The things I notice are that the pontoon at the bottom of the picture has been removed, the bushes outside the sailing club have recently been removed in order to install a disability ramp and the tree outside of the Waterfront is no longer there. There is a small yacht stored for decorative purposes on the hard area outside of the Pier which has been thre now for some time. It’s difficult to be certain but I believe the covered boat on the bottom left, stored in Patman’s Wharf is still present, or has been replaced with a similar looking boat.

This picture I’m unsure on the age but it’s certainly after 1955, which was the year Courage Brewery merged with Barclay, Perkins & Co to form Courage and Barclay - this can be seen painted on the side of the Ship pub. The most significant change from this picture is that the houses north east of the Pier and behind the Ship are no longer there, replaced with the present Brissenden Close and Margetts Place in the late 80s.

Patman’s yard is a little different, with a mound of what appears to be some kind of aggregate piled up. Some of the present day concrete yard is yet to be built but some of the yard must exist as it has been there a very long time. The photographer is also presumably standing on the (now dismantled and removed) travelling crane.

The cottages between the Waterfront and Ship have changed too, although I don’t believe they have been rebuilt completely. Certainly the doors, windows and even chimney stacks have changed. From what I can recall, the inside upstairs of Upnor sailing club is resonably old, with visible beams supporting the roof.

The village green can be seen with a structure of some kind too, which I believe is a shelter. The concrete base for this still exists but not sure why it was removed.

This is my favourite picture, I think that it is from around the same time as the second. The thing that I love is that you can just about see where our house now sits, to the left of the Ship.

The shelter can be seen more clearly, on the village green and the two barges give upnor a much different look. Surprisingly the dinghy park is still present although the ramp has since been converted into a pontoon.

The number of houses that would have been demolished to make way for Margetts Place and Brissenden Close seems quite mad too, it must have been quite a controversial development at the time.

With an hour before our train we didn’t have much time to spend in Zagreb and we were very keen to make sure we don’t miss the train. We left the station and headed towards to city in search of supplies for the trip ahead. We failed, but probably went the wrong way or something. The parts of the city we did see were good, a very different Croatia to that in Dubrovnik. Giving up on our quest for food we walked back to the station and managed to find a small convenience store, there were a few other backpackers here too which was a good sign. With limited options we stocked up on beer, bread, cheese and salami.

After a short wait on a buy platform a train turned up which looked like it could be ours, it was longer than I expected. We were waiting in the wrong part of the platform, all the rear carriages were on their way to somewhere in Austria and only the front two carriages were headed to Belgrade. We figured this out after seeing our two Canadian friends boarding there. Also boarding were a 30-strong female dance troop, much to Owen’s dismay.

On the train we found ourselves searching for a compartment, both carriages consisted of 6-seater compartments with a sliding door - very old school. We settled into a cabin with a Slovenian guy who had bagged the best seat, facing forwards and by the window. The group of girls were frantically searching for somewhere to sit until about 10 minutes in they decided that they had reserved several of the compartments and kicked people out. Our friends who had sat in an adjacent cabin were among the victims and ended up sitting with us.

The train set off under electric power with a big red locomotive at the front and before we knew it we were out of the city and heading across Croatia. It was quickly getting pretty warm, and we opened the window to get some air in our small compartment. The bloke who was already here wasn’t too happy and insisted that we only have a small part of the window open. Owen was pretty hot and made a bit of a cake of it, sure it was warm but it wasn’t like we were in the Sahara desert or anything. As the countryside passed us by we saw sunflower fields, corn fields and rapeseed oil plants too. It was field after field after field, the land was flat and the track felt like it was built by the romans, straight as an arrow. Thankfully this meant that the engine got some speed up and there were times where it was recalling making some pace.

It was a long journey, we managed to enjoy it for the most part, drinking some beers, eating our sandwiches which we constructed on the train and of course smashing out some blogs too. We spent time sharing stories with Tony and Helen who we later learned had taken a similar journey in the 1980s where before they had met had even crossed paths(!). The best story they told was during a camp when a black bear had stuck his snout on their tent, which was a frightening thought!

The train itself was good, the journey was nothing to complain about and made good headway. The toilet wasn’t ideal but we had some water so were able to wash our hands. Since it was a straightforward drop onto the track there wasn’t much to go wrong, although I wouldn’t have wanted to be a girl! Seats were comfortable and the cabins covered into three beds, the girls in the adjacent cabin had a bit of a party in theirs and were having the time of their lives! The music could be heard when the door was open but otherwise wasn’t a problem.

At the Serbian boarder we had a ‘Papers please!’ Situation, a Croatian policeman checked passports as we left the train then moved into Serbia where we were boarded once again for another check, this time we were stamped but again a very painless process. We had accumulated late-ness on our way and arrived into Belgrade about 60mins late, which wasn’t really a problem. The last stretch into Belgrade was painful, it was slow and since we knew we were close took an extra long amount of time.

We pulled into Belgrade Centre Station which still seems to be under construction, mostly by China Railways. This wasn’t the station I was expecting and with no mobile data proved to be a bit of a problem. Luckily there was a city map printed on the wall so we were able to find a route towards the hotel. A Hot and sweaty 4km walk later we found ourselves at the hotel. It was a pleasant sight, we were tired, hot and in need of a shower!

This was the first decent hotel of the trip, we were staying at the Mercure Excelsior at 70 euros a night wasn’t too bad either. We dragged ourselves out in search of food and walking down the main shopping street found lots of small bistro restaurants. A beer was £1.30 the food was equally cheap and we had no complaints. We had made it to Belgrade.