England: 5* Hotel Boat Kailani – Cruising The Grand Union Canal, The Midlands

Hotel Boat Kailani

Last week we were invited to spend a few days onboard the luxury Hotel Boat Kailani on its journey from Braunston to Blisworth on the Grand Union Canal. Having never cruised any of Britain’s canals we really didn’t know what to expect from our trip. We arrived at Braunston Marina at 2.00pm to find the beautiful 5* Hotel Boat Kailani, a 65 ft long x 12 ft wide beam narrowboat and her owners Dorenda and Gordon together with their beautiful dog Bonnie.

The Netherlands: Amsterdam Again? You bet!

Amsterdam is the city outside of England I have visited the most in the world. The two main reasons for that are:

a) it’s a cheap overnight ferry ride from where I live. 

b) it’s a pretty awesome city with a lot to do and see which appeals to people with many different tastes.

Denmark: Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

‘Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. Friendly old girl of a town’ and how very wonderful she is. I really didn’t know what to expect of Denmark’s capital but what I did find was very pleasant. Mr ESLT and I love to spend our birthdays exploring a city and creating memories so for Mr ESLT’s recent birthday we travelled to Copenhagen. The first thing I loved about this city was the fact that it only took 90 to get there from the UK, I hate flying you see but with this flight we had just reached cruising altitude when we started making our decent into the very modern Copenhagen airport. I think we landed at the furthest gate from the exit, so it was a good job our carry-ons are on wheels and we had a monster walk to get out of the place.

Amalienborg, the Danish Royal Family’s winter home in Copenhagen

Denmark: Cruising the Canals of Copenhagen

There are numerous canal tours in Copenhagen and I could not recommend doing one highly enough.  Having walked the length and breadth of the city and hopping on and off the site-seeing buses to our hearts content it was great to see the city from another perspective, from the water. There are two places in Copenhagen that you can board one of the cruises, the colourful Nyhavn and where we started from, Gammel Strand. I had pre booked our tickets via Viator for £7.50 each which in my opinion is a bargain. Of course you don’t need to pre book tickets as both ports, for want of a better word, have ticket booths. They run every hour starting at 9.30am from Nyhavn and 10.00am from Gammel Strand and early August when we visited many of them looked full or nearly full. So I’d advise not simply rocking up at the last-minute as you may be left disappoint.

Canal cruise boat in Copenhagen, Denmark