We live in Barcelona and have driven up to Andorra in summer and in winter with the boys. On a clear weekday the drive is about 3 hours. On our pre-Christmas weekend it took 4–5…
In June 2019 we drove up to Grau Roig with Damian (6) and Marc (3) and walked up to the Pessons lakes. In summer the ski slopes turn into green meadows, and a gravel track…
Most Andorra-in-winter guides assume you’re there to ski. We weren’t. A few weeks before Christmas, around 2016, we drove up from Barcelona with Damian, who was about 3, and Marc, who was still a baby.…
I’ve lived in Barcelona since 2010. Before that, and for fourteen years afterwards, I worked as an account manager for a major online travel agency, looking after hotel portfolios across Spain — including this coast.…
Montserrat is the day trip everyone takes from Barcelona, and the one most people get needlessly wrong before they’ve even left the city — because there are four ways to get up the mountain, three…
Bunkers del Carmel: Barcelona’s Best View, and the Sunset Rule Nobody Mentions The Bunkers del Carmel have the best view in Barcelona. Not the best famous view — the best view, full stop. You stand…
What a Week in Barcelona Really Costs a Family of Four Every “how much does Barcelona cost” article I’ve read gives you a range. Eighty to two hundred euros a day. Which is useless, because…
Tap the square icon in the top corner to open this map in the Google Maps app and save it offline. Most Barcelona maps show you pins. They don’t tell you the thing you actually…
We went to Singapore in late April, flying overnight from Barcelona and landing on the 24th. We checked into our hotel on Sentosa and went straight to the pool, because it was my birthday and…
We live in Barcelona, and we’ve spent more than ten years taking our two boys around Spain: from toddler beach weeks in Menorca to a New Year in Seville, a winter road trip in the…
Osaka is the easiest of Japan’s big three cities to get wrong, because it looks like one city and behaves like two. Get the area right and you have the best-value base in Japan, with…
The short version Top 3 Family Hotels on the Costa del Sol Where we’d stay with two kids, ranked by what kind of family you are. Most to do Holiday World Resort, Benalmádena Pools, organised…
Osaka Food with Kids: How to Actually Order, and What It Costs Osaka is the best city in Japan to eat in with children, and the one where a European family is most likely to…
Rupit has 280 residents, sits on a rock in the mountains of inland Catalonia, and you can walk the whole village in an hour. We took three hours, because we had three children and there…
One weekend every October, more than 250 buildings across Barcelona open their doors for free — including a great many you cannot get into on any other day of the year. The 48h Open House…
In Tokyo, you are not choosing a neighbourhood. You are choosing a train line. That sounds like a technicality and it isn’t. Tokyo is too big to walk across, so where you sleep decides how…
I’m not going to tell you I’ve slept in every family hotel in Kyoto. I’ve stayed in one, and I’ll tell you exactly what it cost and what it was like. What I can do…
Three Chicago institutions, and people argue about them as if they’re the same question. They aren’t. Giordano’s and Lou Malnati’s are the deep dish argument — two pizzas that look similar in a photograph and…
We spent 19 days in Japan as a family of four in July 2023 — Tokyo, Nikko, Osaka, Nara, Uji, Kyoto and Kurashiki. This is what we actually paid. It’s also, unintentionally, a before-and-after. We…
Quick answer MNAC is the enormous domed palace at the top of the steps above Plaça d’Espanya that everyone photographs and almost nobody goes into. But during pandemics, with everything closed, once we were allowed…
