Adventures beyond the front door
– Bijaya Basic School (mid-build), Aarba Bijaya, Kaski (read about the PTN project here) Here at The Winding Trail we are proud supporters of the Pahar Trust Nepal, a charity that builds safe, durable schools in the mid-western foothills and the far-east of Nepal. As well as school building, the PTN also works on a… Continue reading Ride to the Sun for the Pahar Trust Nepal
At the guesthouse, our landlady ushered us into a wooden room with a view out across the valley to the mountains on the other side. She lowered herself into a chair and carefully began entering our details into a laptop computer. A moment or two later and the printer started into life. ‘Your guest cards,’… Continue reading Cable cars, climate change and loving high places – Valluga, Lechtal Alps
There was a whisper that, lying somewhere in the woods, or deep in one of the gorges and caves created in this rift in the landscape somewhere in the south of Sweden, was a sleeping dragon. It was, they said, very old. As old as the Söderåsen itself. This ridge was created some 150 years… Continue reading Sleeping dragon – Söderåsen National Park
When friends live in different countries it is not always easy to find time to spend together, so when we can capture the moment, we try to make the best of it. This time we met in Lucerne (Luzern) for a weekend by the lake. But while the town was welcoming and friendly, it was… Continue reading Queen of the Mountains – Rigi, Switzerland
As so often is the case when you approach somewhere new, we settled on a simple plan. From Lausanne station we would take the train that travelled east above the shore of Lake Geneva as far as our city pass would allow, and then we would walk home. It would be a walk that took… Continue reading On the terraces – Lavaux, Lake Geneva
A few weeks ago we headed out from Berlin to explore the salt marshes and tidal estuaries of Germany's North Sea coast. On the way we crossed the Kiel Canal, and discovered the Rendsburg railway bridge, an architectural marvel that dominated the landscape and became the subject for our latest Postcard from The Winding Trail,… Continue reading Postcard from The Winding Trail 06: Rendsburg
The village of Ehrwald sits at the corner of a valley in Austria, just across the border from Germany. The valley is about a thousand metres above sea level, a damp moss of drained moorland divided into neat fields for growing the hay that will keep the cattle fed over the long, snowy winter. At… Continue reading Mountain of the Mind – Daniel, Tirol
The new year begins as the leaves begin to turn, and those last warm summer evenings switch to an autumn chill, the smell of wood stoves in the village or small bonfires in the allotments of the city. We call it a new year because autumn is a time of beginnings as well as the… Continue reading Walking in Autumn – Berlin & Brandenburg
The mountain starts where the city stops. A final semi-detached house before a farmer’s field, at the end of which the slope starts to really rise into the mist. It was a winter morning when we travelled there, to meet Feargal and his friends at the very edge of the city. They were going to… Continue reading Through the mist – Black Mountain, Belfast
It was Friday evening when we caught the train from Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof. Two dads, two daughters, heading south beyond Dresden and towards the Czech border, climbing down from the train in darkness on the banks of the Elbe. Across the river from the station, the lights of Bad Schandau shone against the dark hills that… Continue reading A place like no other – the Schrammsteine of Saxon Switzerland
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