Travels With Sidd

Sidd - in the style of Van Gogh

The little guy with the suitcase is Sidd.  Sidd is a gnome. But he isn’t just any gnome – Sidd is a travel gnome and he's prepared himself for first stop on our upcoming trip together by commissioning a portrait in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. What can we say? Sidd's like that - he's a man of the world - he even had a brief fling with Miss South Africa and a friend!!!! And in the past ten years he's travelled! Boy has he travelled!
Big deal say most of you - so who doesn't travel these days? Yes but when Sidd travels he travels. He recently returned from a trip to Libya - yep Tripoli in these dangerous times, Sidd knows no fear. He's been to Albania, Australia and the North Pole,  he's had a lei in Hawaii,  gambled in Las Vegas and thumbed his nose at the Seven Dwarfs at Disneyland, and a few month's ago he was in Montevideo kicking up a storm with our buddy Harold and carrying on with those  beauty queens.

Sidd in Montevideo with Miss South Africa and a friend

Sidd accompanied me on a rather more staid trip to London in January – not much adventure there compared to Libya or Uruguay but I’m going to try and make it up to him over the next two weeks. He’s joining us on our trip to the Baltic. I’ve promised Lara - who Sidd lives with when he isn't on the road - that we will watch his vodka intake in St Petersburg, keep him away from the pot houses of Amsterdam and definitely not allow him to wander down the Reeperbahn alone in Hamburg, nor dance naked around a maypole on mid-summer’s eve in Stockholm. Poor Sid doesn’t look like he’s going to having much fun on this trip - bet he’ll be wishing he was back in Montevideo with Harold rather than travelling around the Baltic with us.

Posing on top of a post box in West Kenn
is hardly as exciting as Tripoli or the North
Pole but it was his first trip to London and
he did get to see Dame Edna.

Mind you Sidd is going to be travelling in style - Wednesday night he'll be heading for Frankfurt in business class and the next day speeding through the countryside to Amsterdam on one of those  sleek German trains.  And starting Sunday he'll have a veranda suite at the prow of a very nice luxury cruise ship - maybe he'll talk someone at the ship's bar into doing a Kate Winslet to his Leonardo DiCaprio?  He'll be making stops in Hamburg, Copenhagen, Helsinki, St Petersberg, Tallinn and Stockholm.  He'll be taking planes and boats and trains through Northern Europe and Scandinavia; sampling beer in Hamburg and Ronne; visiting the Tivoli Gardens and Drottlingholm Palace; pausing in a few churches and gawking at the wonders in some world famous museums. And who knows he may make some friends along the way who'll take his mind off Miss South Africa.  But he has promised that while I'm having an on-board spa treatment he'll try and keep the blog up to date as we bound over the main.  And if he misses a day or two we can blame it on the vodka!


05 June - 1883: The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris.