Hi!

As you’ve probably read on the Home page and in the About section, I’m Charles Gannon, I live in Dublin, Ireland, I’m in my mid sixties and I’m retired. I’ve been fascinated by foreign travel, different cultures and languages ever since I was a boy. When I was very young, before I started school, my mother used to bring me on the mail boat and train over to London in England, to visit her parents there. It was in their home at Harrow where I first learned to walk.

My first proper trip abroad with my parents was in 1966, when we flew to Switzerland for a short break and stayed in Interlaken, Lucerne and Lugano. I was enchanted by the high, snowy mountains; for me, the highlight of our trip was going by rail to the top of the Jungfraujoch mountain near Interlaken.

Since then, I have been on many trips abroad, with my parents when young, and on my own when I was older. As I’m also interested in photography, I always brought a camera when I went on these later trips.

I started writing a diary in 1970 when I was fifteen, and continued writing it until the end of 1999. After this date I just made short notes about certain events and trips abroad, but started writing a diary again at the beginning of 2020. Shortly afterwards we all received an unwelcome visitor, the Coronavirus, and were ordered to stay at home. In order to busy myself with some type of pastime that would be active rather than passive, I decided to start writing about some of my travels. I began with ‘Eastward Ho!’ (a pun on the title of Charles Kingsley’s novel of 1855, ‘Westward Ho!’), which deals with a rather crazy three-month cycling tour across Wales, England, France and Italy to Venice. After I had circulated my story among some friends and relatives, I hit on the idea of making my story available to the general public on a website.

The first four chapters of ‘Eastward Ho!’ are now in the Travelogues section for you to read, and the rest will follow soon. I hope that you will enjoy reading this travelogue, and that you’ll let me know what you think of it. Also included, as you’ve probably noticed, is a series of cycling trips made by my friend Andrew Robinson, who has kindly allowed me to put his contributions on my website.