all the ways you wander Neil & Orla

When it comes to style, comfort and packing light, it took me years of travel to finally learn the importance of multiway clothing. From backpacking across Asia to European city breaks  or even campervan road trips, my bags have become increasingly smaller and lighter over the years and it’s only through experience that I got to understand the meaning of “less Disclaimer: I received a complimentary Ultimate Travel Dress and 5 Way Cardigan from Kameleon Rose in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. On our road trip along Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way recently (coming up in our next post) we needed to pack light as we would be living out of our newly built campervan (more on that in the next post).

Another couple of glasses of red to linger over in Fabrik gave us enough time to digest one of the finest pasta dishes we've ever had. Our first port of call was Bologna’s famous weekly market in Parco della Montagnola held every Friday and Saturday which dates as far back as the 13th century. A tremendous riot of colour and activity, the market is huge and takes up all of Piazza dell'8 Agosto and the bottom half of the park. Everything from vintage clothes to vegetables, hippy clothes and incense, knock-off designer gear and second-hand knick-knacks, the mix of street traders and shoppers from near and far, it’s really easy to spend an hour enjoying the atmosphere.

The advice to start the walk from the Brooklyn side is worth abiding by because you get the best views of the Manhattan skyline along the entire walk, which are some of the best to be found in the city. In our previous post about seeing New York’s attractions with CityPASS, there was a choice between the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum and the 9/11 Memorial & Museum. It was on the advice of a couple of seasoned visitors that we chose not to visit the 9/11 Museum as the Memorial itself is free and there was a lot more variety to the Intrepid Museum. The craters are engraved with the names of almost 3,000 victims from that day and each of the victim’s birthdays are remembered with a single yellow rose, placed by their name.

We took the Age of Invasions Tour which detailed the arrival of the Vikings, the Norman invasion and the ongoing excavations of the site of the first Anglo-Norman castle built in Ireland, on the Hill of Carrig. The channel, created by the confluence of the ‘Three Sisters’, the River Nore, Barrow and Suir, gave easy access for the Vikings to sail their ships up river and settle Ireland’s first city, Waterford and by the time the English invaded, it was evident how important this vantage point was for landing their armies and protecting the gateway to Ireland. Regnar, King of the Vikings, sailed into the Waterford Estuary and up the River Suir to establish a new home for the Norse Vikings after years of raiding Ireland’s monasteries. By the twelfth century, with the invasion of the Normans, Ragnar’s fortification was replaced with a stone tower, now known as Reginald’s Tower and the last King of the Vikings, Ragnar’s descendant was thrown into the Tower’s dungeon, a prisoner of the new Lords of Ireland.