France was always my first travel love, just a hop, skip and a jump across the English channel (or a ferry, plane and then eventually a train ride, I suppose.)

So I couldn’t help but smile when…

Here on Inside the Travel Lab, I pride myself on bringing you thought-provoking, thoroughly researched, inspirational stories from around the world.

But today, I’m doing away with all of that and showing you some cool sunset photos instead.

Umbria, Cumbria. How one little letter changes muddy, murky mulch into overflowing olive groves.

How do we know when we’ve arrived when we travel? Because we recognise the image we’ve already seen. We think we’re chasing new experiences but we’re actually chasing our memories.” Dr Gillespie

Birds. With one stretch of their wings they can soar and glide through the sky with a majesty and freedom that man (and woman) can still only dream of. They are majestic, magnificent and make driving home for Christmas seem insignificant when compared to their staggering migratory paths.

They also freak me out…

I found this beautiful image in the well-trodden yet overlooked town of Maun in Botswana, southern Africa. The town sits at the edge of the Okavango Delta and pilots, tourists and enterprising locals buzz around the small airstrip, restless to leave Maun behind and to let nautre brandish the blues and greens of the Delta beneath them.

There’s a moment when this seems like the most graceless activity imaginable. Spitting onto someone else’s property and clamping your teeth onto oversized rubber. Then there’s the waddle with the flippers (sorry fins) before a tumble over the edge of the boat into the water…

You know it comes to something when your own computer tells you to slow down (Wordpress, my blogging platform, often thinks I type too fast.) Now it turns out there’s a book that’ll tell you to do the same thing.

Go slow.

Today, I sat down to write about The Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism in Prague. It’s a fascinating subject (despite the turgidity of that last sentence) and it will be the lastest instalment of the #IronRoute project.

Hopefully, I’ll make the whole thing sound much more interesting than I just did there.

As a bit of light relief, though…

A golden sofa waits in the lobby of the Radisson on Mercer Street, its spine forming a glamorous backdrop that cannot be ignored. It’s nearly upstaged by the gilded birdcages and the gold leaf shaggy sheep – but not quite.

This glitzy…