An infusion session in a European sauna usually means the pouring of something with a nice smell onto the coals and wafting the aromas around with a towel. But a "beer" infusion - that was a new one on me! Fortunately it didn't involve turning the beer into vapour, but instead involved the handing out of free bottles to be drunk and raised in the air with the exclamation "Prost!". Someone dropped a bottle on the floor, which was followed by the awkward sight of...

It seemed like a gloomy day on the bus to Saalbach-Hinterglemm, and we found it hard to believe the images on the TV at the gondola station, being beamed down from a web-cam high above. But sure enough, the early morning ride whisked us steeply through the clouds and deposited us on a sun-drenched mountain ridge with perfect views of the High Tauern and the rest of the Kitzbühel Alps to which this ridge (the Pinzgauer Spaziergang) belongs. It was a challenge t...

Goulash soup and hot chocolate with rum - a perfect lunch for a rainy day in Salzburg. It's always raining when I come to Austria, but having hurried through by car and by train in the past, this time I am staying for whole a week with Helen. We're hoping that statistically speaking, we should get a dry day or two. In the meantime, there are plenty of indoor things to do, particularly if it's related to Mozart. We visited the house where he was born, attended an...

It never occurred to us that taking the back roads home would lead us directly along the Western Front of the First World War. Neither of us had seen any of the cemeteries before, so it was a surprise to find ourselves driving alongside fields full of white crosses that stretched up the hill as far as the eye could see. We had stumbled across the site of the Battles of Champagne, the last of which marked the start of a relentless Allied advance that culminated ...

I last saw Mont Blanc 19 years ago when I spent a fortnight trekking all the way around it with my old friend Steve. So it was quite an emotional sight when it suddenly came into view across the valleys from the mountain ridge of La Tournette, and made the hike in the heat all the more worthwhile. This was a very interesting mountain in its own right though, and we followed a colourful route, with marmots scurrying through fields of flowers and wild raspberri...