Travelling by boat to the UK's near neighbours

It was always at this time of year when I was a kid that the holiday programmes got shown - it was a big deal back then, holidays. The only time any of my older relations had left the UK it was to go fight in wars. How times have changed. Of course, being a kid it always struck me as odd that they showed the holiday programmes in the dark autumn winter months. I was too young to realise that this is when most people start to plan their next year's holiday. Anyway...

For 2011 I predict the phenomenon of the staycation to continue in popularity. All them biting spending cuts of the government are bound to translate into less spending on people's holidays generally. Soehow though I don't think this is too much of a shame - after all while places like Fuertaventura or Trinidad might be sunny, there's a whole lot on our doorstep that we forgot to discover in that age of long haul holidays.

And while the staycation will continue, I also foresee another as yet unnamed type of holidaymaking on the rise: similar to a staycation but not actually staying home, just visiting the next country along. If you're a UK resident this actually gives you quite a lot of possibilities - the island of Great Britain has a good few next door neighbours if you want to go on a mini cruise. (I'll exclude neighbours like Iceland here, simply because they'd be full-blown cruises and not fall under the mini-cruise category)

So, the next door neighbours of our smallish island are:

Ireland
France
Belgium
Holland (The Netherlands)
Germany
Denmark
Norway

Now, depending on where you start from, you can get to all of these places in the same amount of distance that it would take someone from California to get to somewhere in Nevada. Or someone from the southern part of California to get to the northern part. Not really all that far by anyone's standards.

I don't know if it's the oncoming winter weather but lately I've been thinking a lot about Norway - it's maybe not people's first place they think of when booking a holiday, but it's exactly the kind of place people can discover doing an almost-staycation.

Check out this pretty cool video of Oslo by night (and at great speed) it's too fast to do the architecture justice, but ends neatly with a shot of Oslo's main thoroughfare, Karl Johans gate: