Jan 25
🔝5️⃣. Next and last up in my annual listing of Top Fives is Restaurants. I tell people that when I am travelling with work I’m either eating in Michelin starred restaurants, or sitting at an airport gate munching my way through a packet of crisps and overdosing on Haribo.
I did have some great meals last year, and occasionally I took the family! Here are my 2025 Top Five Favourite Restaurants 🍕
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ Another year, another list of my Top Fives. We will begin with Places. This year’s travels were almost entirely work related, and unfortunately a lot the places I visited were on repeat.
We did have one big family holiday, and that was to Qatar as we sought to open our daughter’s mind to another culture. The peninsula on the Arabian Gulf therefore took top spot, and here is a list of My Top Fives Favourite Places 🧳
Please click for moreAmerica has been in total eclipse meltdown today, although not literally hopefully.
Mind you I was standing on Wall Street in New York earlier and was about the only person on the street without those eclipse glasses. The sun was bright and I am not sure my ray-bans cut it.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣. Up next in my annual collection of Favourite things are Restaurants🥕. My ever expanding waistline is evidence of my propensity for eating out and that does not come without a lot of effort, and much good fortune to eat in some very nice places.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ They have been saying travel is back. I don’t think I ever got on a flight last year when there was an empty seat. Prices are high but people want their lives back.
I stayed at 19 hotels in 2022, as I had done in 2021. Last year that number increased to 32 due more than anything to work, meaning settings were function over thrills.
Please click for moreAs we pack up the house around him, our chocolate Labrador has looked a little bewildered in recent weeks (they do say that dogs take after their owners), yet more disorientation is still to come.
Due to the hot weather at both departure and arrival locations – Bermuda and Florida, which at the moment could be anywhere in the northern hemisphere, the airlines won’t take our dog. He is too big to go under the seat, and frankly we had neither the time nor the cheek to register him as a ‘service animal.’
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ In 2023 I stayed in the same amount of hotels than I did the year previous which was 19, although that year most of those came in the second part of the year.
Still, five was hard to narrow down last year, but led by our summer holiday location in Puerto Rico I have below selected My Top Five 2022 Favourite Hotels 🏨
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ My next 2022 Top Five is places. Travel was better in 2022 if not extensive and if I tell you until recently Accrington was on my list, then that tells me I need to get out more..
We did a few trips, nowhere new or too far, but were lucky to sample some new parts of some old places. Here are my 2022 Top Five Favourite Places 🏞️
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ A little bit of annual self-indulgence so apologies in advance. My 2022 Top Five’s begin with food.
The restaurant industry is in recovery mode after the pandemic, but sadly restaurant closures in the UK have been worse since as owners wrestle with rising energy costs, staff shortages and simply people not having the disposable income to splurge on going out to dinner.
Please click for moreOur daughter becomes a teenager this week, and to kick off her teenage odyssey we took her to New York this past weekend.
We’ve taken her to NYC a few times before, but she was much younger then and her fascination with life has matured.
Please click for moreI spent the last few days in New York, which has slowly come back to life with sidewalks and streets busier.
Downtown by the World Trade Center in an evening fog the city was as evocative as ever, and as I always do I walked past the two vast 9/11 memorial reflecting pools where water is sucked 30 feet into gigantic square basins on the site of the original twin towers
Please click for moreWaking up very early in Las Vegas is more precise this morning. My body clock and my eyes are not in tally at all.
I was 14 hours late arriving into Las Vegas yesterday after the plane was hit by lightning on it’s journey into New York’s JFK, thus meaning an unexpected and irritating stopover at this funky hotel at the airport.
Please click for moreWhen I was 18 I was in Henry’s in Bromley drinking beer, trying to chat to girls and get Scott Minto’s autograph.
Emma Raducano’s achievement tonight of becoming the U.S. Open champion is quite mindboggling. She came from out of literally nowhere. Just 18 and with a youth tennis path so different to child prodigy’s we have seen in the past.
Please click for more20 years ago. It seems implausible. What happened that day was almost implausible.
Everyone remembers where they were when they first heard about a Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel fly high into New York’s World Trade Center north tower at 8.45am on September 11th, 2001.
Please click for moreI was in Queens, New York yesterday watching the U.S. Tennis Open. It was a flying visit, one full day, two nights and four Covid tests. We had great seats for Tuesday’s afternoon session and in the first quarter final game watched Danill Medvedev beat outsider Botic Van De Zandschulp, ranked 454 in the world.
The Russian was cruising, but in the 3rd set the Dutchman made a game of it delaying our escape to find some shade. It was a hot day, the sun, motionless above us, was baking hot, thus the famed honey deuces were a necessity for hydration purposes. Medvedev, the no.2 seed eventually won 6-3, 6-0, 4-6, 7-5.
Please click for moreMy next 2019 Top Five picks surround food, and, well, more food.
My waistline is evidence of lots of good eating out last year, although I did seem to do that mostly in Miami and New York. It was tough to select my Top Five Favourite Restaurants but I narrowed it down to a handful in the end plus some notable mentions.
Next on my agenda for my 2019 Top Five’s is Hotels. Those that know me or have had more than a cursory glance at this Blog will have worked out that I have a fascination with hotels. My travels were way down on previous years, but I managed to still have 20 locations to pick from and these were my Top Five Favourite Hotels:
I spent 80 nights in hotels in 2018 staying at 29 different ones. No wonder the other half says I’m never at home.
Picking my Top Five Favourite Hotels from 2018 was extremely difficult as I was very fortunate to stay in some great places, a few I’d been to before such as last year’s favourite, the 1 Hotel in Miami.
Last one from last year. I like to explore, I like to travel, I like to eat.
I keep a list of the restaurants I visit, mostly away from Bermuda, and gee, last year was a difficult choice. It’s a little New York centric, but pride of place goes to an absolute gastronomical experience in my kinda town, Chicago. There were two or three great places that never made My Top Five Favourite Restaurants from 2018, but these ones did:
Time then for my annual self indulgence. I’ve always been a list and top of this or worst of that sort of bloke. My daughter is the same. What’s your top five she will say after a day out or when staring at the Christmas tree baubles. Anyway I will try to plough through a few of these this month, so apologies in advance.
Back from a birthday weekend in New York, which pushed my step counter to record highs. Ask anyone in Bermuda and we don’t walk anywhere here. So it was lovely to walk and walk especially knowing that the option of getting into a yellow taxi would mostly end in frustration as the driver won’t have any idea of where you are wanting to go, and unlikely to understand much English.
Possibly because my best mate is a black cab driver, but few things in life wind me quite up as much as a local taxi driver not having a solitary clue to where they are going.
We crammed a lot into the weekend and I ate more pasta than I have in a long while, mostly because Eataly, which was close to our hotel, was like a huge gnocchi shaped magnet for us. If you are a foodie and haven’t been in an Eataly then you should add it to your bucket list.
Hamilton has been sweeping the theatre world and has become one of the biggest musical shows of all time, and I managed to get to see it last weekend in New York, where it sells out every night and ticket sales are said to average $600,000 a week. Perhaps the almost 100-year old Richard Rogers Theater could spash out a few bucks on an additional toilet, as the three story Broadway building only has one in the basement.
Never mind, that’s the nit-picking out of the way. I walked into the theatre, well queued for a fair bit, with no pre-determined judgements, in fact no real pre-determined ideas of what the hell Hamilton was about either.
One thing for sure was that I sure as hell didn’t realize that the whole show is done in song, which made it initially hard to follow, especially as the majority of the songs are in the form of hip-hop, rap and RnB. However, I started to work out the theme of the story being told, although my one regret was not giving myself a quick Wikipedia brush up on my American history beforehand.
My brother and I have just got off the phone, we have worked out the visa system and have looked into hotels and flights. Problem is I’m talking about the Final, he is talking about the Semi, and to do that I have to seriously ditch some long planned work stuff this week. We will see.
Today’s game was as I had hoped more straight forward than the Colombia game, and was like watching a Premier League match at times. We always looked better, and should have long put the game to bed, Sterling culpable but he was a constant handful for the Swedish defence.
The second of my belated 2017 Top Five’s is Hotels. I stayed in 26 different hotels last year, but after much back and forth I’ve chosen five, so please join me to test the bouncyness of the bed, the 500 thread sheets and copious amount of pillows that usually end up on the floor as I guide you through My 2017 Top Five Favourite Hotel’s:
After a few days in New York working, or as my daughter calls it, on work vacation, I headed south for the rest of the week to Miami where I met up with the family.
New York was good, and I particularly liked staying across the river in Brooklyn, although at certain times of the day the Brooklyn Bridge bore close resemblance to the Dartford Bridge in rush hour. On my last night I met up with old mate New York Addick, where we talked Charlton and the unmitigated disaster of Duchatelet’s ownership.
After many pints we came to the conclusion that Duchatelet hasn’t purposely tried to kill the club, but rather mass incompetence, utterly poor management and sheer stubbornness has resulted in the diabolical situation the club finds itself in. NYA’s most recent analysis of the club’s accounts are well worth a read by the way.
I’ve spent the last few days staying in Brooklyn, at a hotel at the foot of the iconic suspension bridge that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan across the East River. I hadn’t previously spent any real time in Brooklyn, one of New York’s five boroughs, but I did get a little opportunity to explore.
Close up the Brooklyn Bridge is an incredible feat of architecture with it’s immense granite towers and thick steel cables, not to mention its birds-eye views from a span of 1,595 feet. Built in 1883 at a cost of $15m, my hotel room looked out onto it and I found myself just staring at this moving art installation as the sun lit it, the mist hid it, helicopters flew over it, ferries and barges moved underneath it and 120,000 vehicles and 4,000 people criss crossed it on any given day.
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A quick skip and a jump across the Atlantic to New York for two days for some work meetings with my boss and a few other fellows from across the continent. Short and sweet, and cold (photo), although not as cold in the Big Apple as it was this past weekend.
Bermuda weather has turned a little chilly as well, as it tends to in January for a month or two of what we nominally call winter.
My 2nd listing of my 2016 Top Five Favourites. I stayed in 27 different hotels in 2016. Wow, that even surprised myself! But I do love a hotel, especially sumptuous fluffy slippers, flouncy beds and bubbly shower gel type ones.
So, here goes my 2016 Top Five Favourite hotels starts here:
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Recently I spent a day and a bit up in Long Island touring North Fork’s wine country. The day and time will dictate how long the drive out from Manhattan or JFK airport is, but as the crow flies it is only around 80 miles from the city to North Fork, stretching into a narrow peninsular surrounded by water, with the Long Island Sound to its north and the Peconic Bay to its south, creating an ideal climate for growing grapes.
Not so long ago the region was only known for potato and fruit & vegetable farms but since the late 70’s and 80’s it has become a stellar wine producing region and as we found out a great place to explore some very good wineries, nearly all of whom I had never heard off before.
We were informed that there are around 50 wineries in North Fork, but it seemed more as they lined up next to each other in lush surroundings, with the sea in the air on New York State Route 25, which is not much more than a country single-lane road.
We based ourselves in the Jedediah Hawkins House (below), a painstakingly restored Victorian inn with a well-heeled restaurant and, as you would expect, a well-heeled bar. I don’t think you’d drive out here and not taste wine, but the Jedediah Hawkins was worth the drive on its own.
Each room is individually named and decorated and the grounds deserve exploring (with a glass of course) with it’s gardens, fountains and gazebo. The inn was in Jamesport, a town with a bounty of farms, beaches, vines and charming roadside vegetable stands.
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I leave for Washington DC this morning for a conference in the nation’s capital and Pope Francis is coming too. No, I haven’t had a career change it’s just that his Papelness is making his first visit to the United States and starts his tour in DC tomorrow. He is also visiting Philadelphia and after DC, like me, he is heading to New York. I am sure we will bump into each other!
That’s all very nice but it does mean that New York and particularly Washington DC is going to be in a security meltdown for the entire week and getting around the capital is going to be nothing short of a nightmare, and to make matters worse, they have even banned selfie sticks. Disaster.
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With Charlton dominating an eventful January and already early February on my Blog, and rightly so, My 2014 Top 5’s have got pushed out, but I’m going to finish with one more, a subject close to my heart, hotels.
Future Grandchildren – when I am old put me in a plush hotel not an expensive nursing home, and I’ll let you visit.
Here are My 2014 Top 5 Favourite Hotels:
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Breakfast in Bermuda, New York for lunch, Chicago for dinner, Kansas City tomorrow for lunch. That is the itinerary and then stay a few days in the home of the barbeque, before Dallas and Miami next Friday night.
A week of work travel mostly at a conference in Kansas City, which is arguably the hardest place to get to in the world from Bermuda. Six airports, hopefully a bucket load of barbecue ribs and I have even got an invite to the speedway.
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I had another aborted attempt in trying to get to New York this morning. At least this time my flight was cancelled even before I had thought about packing last night. A fortnight ago I had to spend 3 hours at Bermuda airport where there is nothing to do except get progressively more annoyed at American Airlines’ incompetence.
While the cynic in me thinks American Airlines just didn’t want to fly a two-thirds empty flight and would rather save the fuel, the official reason was the weather, and to be fair the Big Apple is getting hit pretty hard this morning with a snowfall of upto 14 inches expected – bigger than the dump they got two weeks ago.
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I was in New York last week and I spent a lot of time walking Lower Manhattan’s streets which always wakens the senses. This part of NYC is the oldest part of the original colony of New Amsterdam that evenutally became New York City and is a maze of history and a myriad of architecture.
Wednesday night I was in Chinatown, the largest of its type in the west. A few pints in the Whiskey Tavern and we asked for a recommendation of a non-touristy Chinese restaurant with the only insistence being that it was licensed! The barman suggested Hop Kee, and we proceeded to eat ourselves into a MSG coma. You simply cannot get good or even average Chinese food in Bermuda and it was a big treat as we all live on the island.
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Almost a week after Sandy invaded New York and the entire Atlantic coastline of the United States, the impact is still being felt far and wide. Incredibly as many as 60 million people in 24 states were directly affected by what is now known as Post-Tropical Cyclone Sandy. At the peak of the storm, the diameter of winds stretched 1,040 miles and extended 520 miles from the center of circulation making it one of the largest ever recorded.
To give you a further sense of the scale of Sandy’s consequence, it knocked out power to more than 8.5 million customers across the US, and 2.5 million still remain without electricity. The storm caused extensive damage to electrical grids, mobile phone towers and nine oil refineries. Over 20,000 flights were cancelled in 4 days including mine, swarths of the famous New York subway was flooded and the NYSE was closed for two days, the first time for weather since the Great Blizzard of 1888. Over 100 died in the US alone.
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An early start tomorrow as I’m off to New York for a couple of days with work. NYC saw its first real snow of the winter on Saturday (photo) but fortunately for me it has rapidly cleared as the temperatures warmed with it supposedly set for 50°F (11°C) tomorrow.
The trip will be typical of many, i.e. airport, office, bar, restaurant, hotel, office, airport but I’m looking forward to being away from my desk which has been a bit mental since the new year.
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I was walking back from lunch with a client just by the steps to the Lloyds Building in the city when we heard a few whispers that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York City. The whispers got more frantic and we walked into a nearby office and watched the tragic drama unfold on a television.
My client had a sister in New York and was desperate for news of her, while I thought about my colleagues that occupied 8 of the top floors in the No. 2 South Tower. 176 of whom sadly lost their lives, 2,606 altogether at the WTC site and 2,977 in total not including the 19 cowardly hijackers.
That terrible day still doesn’t seem real, it was so horrific that even the most creative of film writer hadn’t thought of a plot so deplorable.
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With one eye on the telly watching CNN’s saturated 24-hour hurricane coverage and one eye on my daughter in her playroom yesterday I suddenly saw out of the corner of my eye her inflatable turtle, which earlier she’d been sat in half full of water, fly by the window followed by a couple of garden chairs.
I rushed outside and there he was Tropical Storm Jose careering past Bermuda 50 miles away packing winds of 40mph. My little excursion out to the garden got me soaked and when I returned to the telly there was Anderson Cooper on CNN stood in the middle of a deserted New York’s Greenwich Village desperately looking for sign of rain, let alone a hurricane.
Hurricane Hyperbole is nothing new, especially since the invention of 24-hour news channels, and the American’s have rarely been known to overreact, but when one anchor proclaimed that the storm to be as “big as Europe” it was enough for me to turn over.
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Back to Bermuda yesterday and it is with relief that I don’t have to travel again for about six weeks – home for the Bournemouth match in fact.
New York was fun. A flurry of midweek work meetings was sandwiched between two wonderful long weekends.
The first one was at friends in a lovely little town called Madison in New Jersey. We knew that by flying into JFK on a Friday that we could potentially run into nightmarish traffic. We hadn’t a clue.
A two hour flight delay meant we landed at 2 .30pm and we then had the gruelling task of batting it from Queens into Lower Manhattan and through the Holland Tunnel to Jersey with bazillions of others the day the schools broke up.
We spent five and a half hours in the car and by the time we got to our friends there was 45 miles on the clock and my daughter had learnt a whole new range of vocabulary! It was almost funny, no you’re right it wasn’t funny at all.
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City of London
