'Pane e vino' was the name of the restaurant we found in Todi for our long Italian lunch. A 45 minute train ride from Terni, Todi is a picturesque hilltop town with rather impressive public buildings. Yet again we encountered friendly Italians happy to help us along the way - beginning with the man at the train station who sold us our tickets and then handed us the train timetable and pointed out the right platform. Then there was the bus driver in Todi who ex...

Italy, I love you! Your food, your sun kissed landscapes, your 3 euro bottles of wine, your shoe shops, your espresso, your crumbling ruins, your terracotta rooftops, your gelato, your designer clothes, the way you talk with your hands and the way that that, somehow, you manage to structure your day around a four hour lunch and siesta!! Our stopover in Rome lasted all of an hour, before we hopped on a train for the Umbrian town of Terni. To cut down costs we ha...

'To blend in with the Parisians wear layers of clothing, preferably in black, with a scarf, and try to show no emotion on your face'... Interesting guidebook advice! It took us about two and a half hours to make our way by train from romantic Bruges to the city of love. The cost of the train tickets had stung (180 euros), but as we rocketed through the flat Belgian landscape on our high speed train I forgot the spent euros and began to get excited about what la...

Beautiful Bruges, what a surprise! Probably the second most romantic city I've ever been to (still doesn't surpass Venice where Dale proposed to me). Like Venice, Bruges has canals and lovely old buildings. Unlike Venice, Bruges has horse drawn carriages clattering along the cobbled streets and the smell of waffles and melted chocolate throughout its centre. There are also lovely green areas where weeping willows lean out over gently lapping waters in which w...

Symbolic to the city of Brussels is a small statue of a little boy gleefully urinating. This emblem seemed fitting to us, since our experience of Brussels was somewhat off putting. Arriving at the central station on a Sunday afternoon. We discovered that there was nowhere we could buy a map from and that anywhere we might have asked directions from was closed. Undeterred, Dale found a hotel good enough to give him a map and we began the cross city trek towards...