Archive for the ‘Travel’ Category

I recently stayed at the Arora Hotel in Manchester. Given I paid £220 for a room, I have to say I was very disappointed. Especially as that was room only, breakfast was an extra £28. Things I didn’t like about it:

• There was no manual in the room explaining things like breakfast times, how the room worked, how to use the internet, etc
• The room was very warm and the cooling system didn’t seem to do anything
• Despite this, the cooling system continued to make a noise all night
• The windows didn’t open very far
• The wifi didn’t work properly as far as I could tell. I was supposed to get 30 minutes free (there was a charge for using it longer) but when I connected to the wifi network, it wouldn’t let me select hotel guest and any other option required me to login
• There was no 3G signal, so I couldn’t hotspot on my phone
• The heated towel rail did not work
• The shower was very weak

The “Cloud 9” bed was okay, but nothing amazing. It did have some nice features – there was a bidet in the bathroom and the breakfast was good. Overall, I was quite disappointed though.

Photos from our trip to Jersey.

Photos from our trip to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Centre on Jersey.

While in Finland, we spent the final three days of our time in Finland with Elina’s family, in Laitila.

We tried to swim in a lake at 2pm, but it was still freezing cold at this time, so in the end we gave up and spent the day enjoying the sunshine from the bank.

This is a rose from Riitta’s garden. She has a lot of beautiful flowers.

The view from Henry’s garden.

Henry’s cat.

We spent Friday evening at a summer cottage by a lake. This is the view as the sun went down.

It was surprisingly warm when we went for a midnight swim.

I wasn’t particularly impressed by the Helsinki Sea Life Centre. It had some cool animals in it, and you did get to walk through a tunnel with sharks swimming over your head, but it was fairly small and over quite quickly.

The first photo is a shoal of piranhas. They just sit there waiting for something to happen; it’s quite unnerving. I took a video.

A dolphin skeleton. They don’t feel much likes the clowns of the sea when you see how many teeth they have.

Every single diorama in this museum depicted one animal eating another.

The history of life exhibit finished by talking about modern times – including a chainsaw, skateboard, first aid kit and mobile phone.

Roughly translated, this means “an exhibition on animal poo”.

Cathedral in Helsinki harbour.

Helsinki Cathedral.

View of the harbour as we took the boat to the zoo.

The Elina shop, were I took Elina for her check-up.

They don’t seem to have KFC in Finland, but they do have SFC.

The Finnish Parliament building.

Finland’s coastline as we flew home.

Finally, some panoramas…

Helsinki harbour. Click for full size.

The view from the observation point at Helsinki Zoo. Click for full size.

Given Elina’s hate of onions, I’ve occasionally joked I wanted to go to an onion restaurant that has a giant onion for a logo. Turns out there is one in Helsinki.

It wasn’t all serious business in Torquay – I got time to take some photos too.

Flying to Dublin we had to go with Ryanair as I couldn’t find anyone else doing the flight times we wanted.

I think it’s quite an expensive airline in comparison to Jet2. We wanted to sit together on the flight, but to reserve seats cost us £10 per person, per flight, so that was £40 down, and just to pay for the flight (on my Visa as they don’t accept American Express) cost me £6 per person, per flight, so that was £24 as well. Altogether that is an extra £64 added on top of the price, which is a lot.

The outgoing flight was then delayed by almost an hour, which is basically the entire flight time.

Thanks to a legal requirement to have emergency exits on planes though, I did get enough leg room to stretch out fully.