Atlanta has one of the world's biggest airports, but it needs a bigger team of border guards. Of all the places I have been in the world, this was the longest and most frustrating delay. From the narrow bottleneck at the bottom of the escalator where a pile of people was almost created to the electronic finger-printing and passport stamps, it took over two hours. But unlike my previous experiences of America, at least the border guards were friendly. So, by the ...

Fox and badger - that's not the name of a village pub but the wildlife sightings during our first ten minutes on the Isle of Wight, and from the car window too! The famous red squirrels were a bit more elusive, but once we had seen one, we saw lots - and they weren't shy either! This has been what you might call a week of two halves. The first half was spent camping over on the East of the island where we were subjected to high winds, and were worried every ti...

The waitress brought us a wine list, but why would I order wine in Belgium? The bar next door has a menu with 300 beers on it. Still, the local fish stew was excellent, as was the starter of beef stew with carpaccio and truffle oil. But that's enough about food. What about those beers? I must confess that I never really had much of an appetite for Belgian beer before, so I was here to learn. What better place to start than De Halve Maan brewery where we learnt h...

It looks like an optical illusion from the top of the dyke, even though I know it isn't; the houses really are lower than the sea on the other side. Cycling along these wide paths is great fun, even though we have to weave in and out of hordes of people who have headed to the beaches for the Bank Holiday weekend. There are some great beach hut cafes on the dykes too, which are perfect for a lunch stop. Our original intention was to cycle to Zeeland all the way f...

Every morning I stand at the kitchen window waiting to hear the whistle of the kettle and the buzzing of the mechanical tree-shaker, and then I look out across a sea of olive trees to see if I can spot the one that is shaking. It's great being here during the harvest, and sometimes we have passed the harvesters whilst out on a hike and watched the olives come rolling down the hillside into the nets. It's mostly been hiking this week, across the vast green mead...