Some of my regular readers may be wondering why stories from my travels in 2018 are appearing on the blog again.
Well, there’s a story behind that!
Unfortunately, a number of my original travel blog entries were lost from WordPress. These were the accounts I wrote during my journeys, often at the end of a long day exploring somewhere new.
For a while, I thought they had disappeared for good.
However, with a little detective work, some help from modern technology and a fair amount of patience, I’ve managed to recover many of the original photographs. I’ve also unearthed my old travel itinerary, along with tickets, brochures and other souvenirs that I kept from the journey.
So I’ve decided to reconstruct the missing stories.
The first journey I’m revisiting is my great retirement adventure of 2018.
I retired on 24 June 2018, and on Friday 13 July, less than three weeks later, I set off alone on a five-week adventure through Europe and Asia.
It all started with a desire to visit Miniatur Wunderland, the enormous model railway in Hamburg. But, as often happens with my travel plans, one thing led to another.
Hamburg became Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, St Petersburg and Moscow. Then came Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan.
By the time I’d finished planning, what had begun as a visit to a model railway had become quite an adventure!
Along the way there were some wonderful experiences, a few surprises and, inevitably, the occasional moment when things didn’t go quite according to plan.
Among the highlights was an extraordinary visit to Star City, the Russian cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow, which very nearly didn’t happen at all.
I’ll be rebuilding the journey day by day, using my original itinerary, recovered photographs and whatever memories I can summon up eight years later.
These won’t necessarily be word-for-word copies of the original posts, but I’ll do my best to recreate the events as they happened, including the little incidents that made the journey so memorable.
So, if you remember reading these adventures the first time around, welcome back!
And if you’re joining Uncle Bob’s Scenic Tours for the first time, I hope you’ll enjoy coming along for the ride.
Next stop: Hamburg, where it all began.
TTFN
Uncle Bob
