I loathe monasteries and castles

Berlin - Reichstag

I do things much more slowly and carefully these days because I have been responsible for some colossal cock ups  - some of which I have admitted to in my blogs – and a couple of which were so awful that I have never confessed to anyone - simply because they were so FUBAR as to defy the imagination. 

I will only say that it is not possible to leave a place before you have arrived in it - and to try to do so can be expensive in terms of air fares and pre-paid hotels - and that if you get the checking out date of your hotel wrong you may find your belongings in Glad bags in the hotel cellar when you try to return to your room late at night.

So now I do spreadsheets and work slowly and carefully  through the issues – which does not always guarantee success because Cate gives me some significant challenges.

These will usually involve tacking a seemingly impossible task onto an already difficult problem – but the trap will not be sprung until I am well into the planning stages and she will say – ‘and by the way I want to go to the Benedictine Monastery in Plob’.

Plob of course will be nowhere near where we are going so I will need to develop a cunning plan to get us to Plob and back on track – bearing in mind that there are planes, trains and automobiles already involved – and that bookings have already been made.

And when we get to the Benedictine Monastery at Plob it will look – to me – like every other Benedictine Monastery I have ever seen in my life – and I have seen possibly 10,000 – just as every castle looks much the same to me – but Cate will savour every morsel of it and will take lots of pictures – and that’s all that really matters. I loathe castles.

Kirkenes Snow Hotel

However – Norway has proved to particularly tricky as we are taking a series of planes, trains and then a boat up the coast to Kirkenes where it will be very dark and where we will be staying overnight in the Snow Hotel.

We may also see the Northern Lights which we missed out on last year in Lapland. We will be much further North than we were last year – which hardly seems possible – but I have checked Google maps – which would not lie about something like this.