Our Word of the Week is Travel

It’s Friday morning and although I could do with some more sleep, I roll out of bed to write about today’s post as I didn’t do one last week. We love sharing in this blog linky where we try to use one word or so, to sum up how our week has been. This week we have chosen the word travel as it’s really what we did this week.

The easing of Covid restrictions in the UK, and the resulting ticket sales by certain airlines made us want to test out the waters again and do some traveling. So on a whim, we booked cheap tickets to Bulgaria! Why Bulgaria? No special reason. The tickets were cheap and we also found a cheap hotel stay and a lovely little Airbnb stay too. As it was just shy of a week’s stay, we crammed what we could into our backpacks so that we didn’t have to pay for extra luggage nor stand around at the carousel to wait for luggage after landing.

So off we went this week to check out Bulgaria!

 

The flight

The airline we went with is Ryanair. By the way, when we were leaving yesterday, we saw that Ryanair had another sale on, so check it out. Some tickets were as low as less than £20! Ours was a bit more expensive as it was half term.

The flight was completely full and there were a lot of kids with their parents or other guardians. Apparently, a lot of people go to Bulgaria at this time of the year for skiing, but we didn’t know it (until it was too late.)

The flight itself was just under three and a half hours from Birmingham airport and it, in itself was smooth.

We had decided that to keep ourselves safe, we wouldn’t remove our masks to eat or drink on the flight. But yes, they did sell the usual crisps and drinks and sandwiches. A lot of people seemed to have our thoughts too.

Instead of eating, we started reading the books we bought from WHSmith in the airport lounge. The books were The Twins and The Couple Next Door. Ever read those? I still have about 10 or so pages to read in The Twins and I am in shock and confusion! We might do a little book review on those later. But it was really good to get some time to get back into reading again.

I just found out that the books are much cheaper on Amazon so here goes:

 

Our stay

We stayed in the capital city, Sofia. For the first night, we booked into a really budget hotel called Easy Hotel Sofia. It was about £23 for the night. Why did we book that one in particular? Well, we are not good with Geography but on the map, it did look like the closest budget hotel to the airport. So we caught a cab to the hotel and settled in for the night. By the next morning, we took another cab to our Airbnb (which we found out was closer to the airport and about the same price).

The place was small and cozy and it was a 1 bedroom apartment in a high-rise building. It had everything we needed for our stay, except a stove. It even had a balcony with a new grill! As it was brand new and still in its packaging, we didn’t feel that we should touch it. So it was fast food for the whole week!

We went out during the days, had breakfast on the go, walked about and did some window shopping, then walked some more to check out the parks, palace of culture, etc. Then we bought dinner and headed home before dark. This was how we had to do it because the apartment was on the 5th floor of this building and there were no elevators! Of course, this wasn’t pointed out before we did the booking on Airbnb! So one time up those stairs each day was enough! Remember we are old?

Anyway, we enjoyed the long daily walks, the views, some of the fast food, and the time to read and just relax. Would we do it again? Maybe in the summer. It was cold and also one day we had to be indoors as it was rainy.

What we’ve learned about Bulgaria as a result of our travel

• They drive on the right side of the road
• Rose oil and rose water are produced there and exported. It’s from a special rose
• The people can seem crass and short-tempered but that’s their nature. (You’ll notice this when you go to pay for something; the money is ‘snatched’ from you!
• Food is fairly cheap
• They only joined the EU in 2007
• The capital is called Sofia
• Most young people speak English with a lovely accent!

We had to do quite a lot of reading up and form filling and printing or storing on our phones to keep all the necessary documentation for our travel. That was a bit tedious and made us feel a little bit nervous about what if we didn’t have everything. For example, the flight on the way back actually left a young lady who didn’t have proof of her Passenger Locator Form! We also saw another lady running up and down and trying to find hers which was actually left on a seat she had sat on for a bit.

The travel this week just reminds us how much we enjoy it and getting our feet wet this way has set the passion alight for another trip hopefully soon. Watch this space.

ps. See our YouTube channel to see what we got up to for the week in Bulgaria. We’d love it if you subscribed too.