There’s a version of a Netherlands trip that goes: fly into Amsterdam, walk the canals, spot a tulip, head home. It’s a perfectly fine trip. But if you want to understand what the Netherlands is actually capable of — the ambition, the creativity, the sheer refusal to accept limitations —
There is a moment — and I promise you’ll recognise it when it happens — when you round a bend in a narrow canal, the engine on your little electric boat barely making a whisper, and a thatched farmhouse appears through the willows like something conjured from a dream. The
Most people only hear about Zaandam when they’re already on a train to Zaanse Schans — and that’s a shame, because they’re missing half the story. This is a city where a Russian tsar disguised himself as a shipyard worker, where Claude Monet spent an entire summer painting in the
There’s a moment — and every traveller who has stood on the banks of the Moselle knows exactly which one I mean — when Cochem stops you dead in your tracks. You turn a corner, the river swings into view, and there it is: a fairytale castle perched impossibly high
Mannheim doesn’t try to charm you. It doesn’t drape itself in fairy lights and shove a pretzel in your hand the moment you step off the train. It’s a grid city — literally, the streets are laid out in a numbered and lettered grid like a chessboard — and there’s
There’s a version of Europe that most people never see — the one that exists after the last summer ferry has docked, when the Christmas lights go up over cobblestone streets and the fog sits low over the canals and the restaurants fill with locals who finally have their tables
There’s a particular kind of madness that sets in around February, when the grey skies refuse to lift and your phone keeps showing you someone else’s Instagram reel of a sun-soaked terrace somewhere in southern Europe. You know the one. A glass of something cold, a cobblestone street, a shadow
There’s a particular type of travel smugness that comes with telling people you’ve been to Luxembourg City. Not because it’s difficult to get to — it isn’t — but because most people you meet haven’t been, and the ones who have tend to look at you with that knowing smile.
There’s a version of Switzerland that the summer crowds never see. The one where the cable cars thin out, the air turns sharp and sweet, and the mountains reveal themselves in colours you genuinely didn’t think existed outside of a painting. October is that version. I’d visited Switzerland twice in
There’s a moment, usually somewhere between your second coffee and your third attempt at pronouncing “Vrijthof” correctly, when Maastricht stops feeling like a city you’re visiting and starts feeling like a city you’re living in. That’s the thing about this place — it doesn’t dazzle you all at once. It
Berlin in winter has a reputation — grey skies, biting cold, a city gone to ground. People will tell you to wait for summer, when the beer gardens spill open and the parks turn golden. But here’s what they don’t say: Berlin in winter is something else entirely. The crowds
There’s a moment — and if you’ve been to Nuremberg in winter, you’ll know exactly the one I mean — when you round a corner in the Altstadt and the whole medieval cityscape suddenly reveals itself through a veil of falling snow. The fortress looms above you, the half-timbered houses
