By some witchcraft, the notoriously rainy and foggy Faroe Islands were not playing true to form. We took advantage of the gloriously sunny skies by journeying to Eysturoy, the second largest island in the archipelago. It was a beautiful, scenic coastal drive, with a multitude of pull-outs to ogle the mountain views and inlets.

As my parents are avid bird photographers, no trip to the Faroe Islands would be complete without a visit to the famed island of Mykines. The westernmost islands in the Faroese Archipelago, it is known to be a significant nesting site for seabirds, such as puffins, fulmars and gannets. While I had spotted a lone puffin on our first day in the Faroe Islands, I was particularly excited to see my first puffin colony.

One of my favourite days spent touring the Faroe Islands was on Kalsoy, a small northern island that is only accessible by ferry. End to end, the island is only a 20-minute drive, making it perfect for a leisurely day trip, exploring the small villages and hiking to some epic vistas.

The first reaction I typically got when I said I would be exploring the Faroe Islands for a week was… “and where’s that”? This apparently little-known cluster of 18 islands in the North Atlantic between Iceland and Scotland is actually an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark (similar to Greenland). I’d glimpsed dramatic photos of its rugged, wind-swept landscapes over the years, and so it had occupied a place on my travel bucket list for some time.

Tuscany has always conjured up romantic images of golden-hued landscapes, with its rolling hills and cypress-lined roads. I had a mind to just jump in a car and drive--see what we stumbled across. As a result, I put much less planning into this portion of our Italian adventure than the Dolomites, taking a more on-the-fly sort of approach.

Our final stop in Italy was the famed Cinque Terre ("Five Lands"), part of the Cinque Terre National Park (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), along the northwest coast of Italy. These clusters of brightly-coloured villages, seemingly tumbling down the hillside into the Ligurian Sea, have so captured the imagination of travellers around the world that it should have been no surprise to find these destinations to be extremely busy.

There has always been a kind of magic to Venice, this floating city on the Adriatic Sea, built on over 100 little islands. Its unique appeal, perhaps unsurprisingly, has led to a real overtourism problem–over 20 million people visit every year (half of which are day trippers from cruise ships and the like), and indeed multiple friends warned me off Venice to avoid the throngs of tourists.

Three seems to be a magic number. Three Musketeers. Three Stooges. Three Men and a Baby. So perhaps it is no surprise that this trio of mountain peaks, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, is such a popular spot in the Dolomites. In fact, I seem to have a penchant for triple mountain towers, as hiking to see the Torres del Paine for sunrise was the impetus for my trip to Chile.

One of my bucket list items while in the Dolomites was to hike the Gran Cir Via Ferrata at Passo Gardena. Via ferrata literally translates in Italian as “iron path”, which are protected climbing routes found in the Alps involving steel cables, rungs, or ladders secured to the rock face, to which climbers would typically affix harnesses.

It was only a short drive from the Alpe di Siusi to what would be our base for 3 days, Ortisei, the main village of the Val Gardena. Fun fact for the linguists: the majority language in the area is actually Ladin, a Romance language which is now the officially recognized language in South Tyrol. This charming town of just under 5000 people had everything we needed and was centrally-located, serving as a good jumping-off point for the region.

Alpe di Siusi (or Seiser Alm, as it’s called in German) is a Dolomite plateau, considered the largest high-altitude Alpine meadow in Europe. As part of the Dolomites, it’s been classified as an UNESCO World Heritage site. It was to be our first stop in our tour of the Italian Dolomites. This epic mountain range, which was the impetus for my originally-planned trip to Italy in 2020 (which went awry due to world events), is located in South Tyrol, the northernmost province in Italy.

I am never one to pass up an opportunity to travel, least of all to Scotland, which is one of my favourites places in the world. So when the inaugural My Peak Challenge event was announced, celebrating Peakers from around the world, to be held in Glasgow, I was quick to grab a ticket. One of my Peak challenges for the year was to climb a Munro, a Scottish classification of a mountain over 3000 feet, so this was the perfect opportunity to tackle that challenge.