Goodbye 2023 and Happy New Year and best wishes for 2024

It’s that time of year again when the clock ticks over, and as one year closes another year starts.

Inevitably, I suppose as we look forward to the coming year we also look back to the year that is closing as well. So with that in mind …

For us 2023 has been pretty good and we really enjoyed the places we went to and the people we met – there’s loads of clickable links in the post below if you wnat to check out any of those trips..

Travel & Trips included

We enjoyed a really good break for our first trip of the year when we stayed in Kelso in the Scottish Borders,

Although it’s an area we know quite well, we still found new places to visit.

Our trip to Krackow in Poland was quite superb as was our trip to Hungary when we spent a week in the wonderful capital city of Budapest

The final trip of the year that we made was to Pembrokeshire in Wales – which was really enjoyable and I wrote about that last month (see this link).

It wasn’t a bad year for football either

I know that watching football isn’t quite everyones cup of tea, but we have enjoyed had a fine year watching Manchester City pretty much clean up again as records were smashed and new standards laid down.

My son and I had another couple of fine visits to Wembley, the fist for the semi-final against Sheffield United and then the second against a team from just outside of Manchester, and which I included in the These are the Days for us to Remember post.

And over on the …

motorbikes blog I wrote about short trips and travel in Ireland and then Scotland before wrapping my 2023 motorcycle travel up with a really decent time in Spain & Portugal.

So what are the plans for 2024?

Our first trip will be when we take a break at a pretty remote location near the Isle of Skye. We absolutely love spending time on the west coast of Scotland and are both particularly looking forward to this trip.

Later we have a trip scheduled to the Dumfries and Galloway area and will be spending time in and around Newton Stewart. On that trip we hope to make another visit to the Red Kite feeding station – at Bellymack Hill Farm. The last time we were there was the back end of 2021 so it sort of feels a bit overdue.

We’ve got some ideas about a European trip but haven’t quite got that one sorted just yet, although I do expect to be making another solo motorcycle trip to Spain and Portugal later in the year – there will be more details about that in due course over on the motorbikes blog

And a re-union as well

Ordinarily I’m not one for ‘reunion type events’. So it was slightly out of my normal routine to find myself agreeing to meet up with a few folk that I had worked and ‘played’ 5 a side football with back in the 1980’s (and I use the word played quite loosely).

We agreed to meet up in central Manchester, and if I’m honest I wasn’t really quite sure how we would all get on after such a long time. For me it had been around 36 years or so and I think for the others the shortest gap had been around 20 years or so when they had met.

Rolling back the years

What was actually quite odd and I suppose a little bizarre was that as clichéd as it might sound it really was a case of rolling back the years and the conversation almost seemed to pick up from where we had left off. I hadn’t expected that.

We’ve agreed to meet again fairly early in 2024 – there’s a couple of picture below, clicking any of the images will open a scrollable gallery.

 

And last but not least

Regular visitors to my blogs will know that I tend to take plenty of pictures when I  travel and I’ve got some plans about adding something a little different than what I have done before. Don’t forget to check back for news of that in the coming weeks.

… and finally very best wishes for the coming year