What do you think of when you hear the word ‘Transylvania’? Dracula, the Rocky Horror Show? What about ‘Romania’? Ceaușescu? Who can forget the awful images of the Romanian orphanages that emerged in 1989? Brutal Communist architecture? That’s pretty much what I had in my head when I booked a photo trip to Transylvania. To be honest, I didn’t even know exactly where it was in Romania!

‘Spain sounds a bit tame’ was the general response I got to my proposed trip to Albarracín back in June. Ok, it’s not Mongolia or China but, apart from a trip to Majorca as a teenager, I’d not been to Spain and I find any new destination exciting; it’s the discovery of the unknown that is the draw. And part of that draw was the fact that Albarracín is a medieval town that hasn’t changed much over the centuries.

Who remembers the 1980s marketing slogan “Glasgow’s Miles Better” to encourage tourists to visit and industry to locate there? I used to visit Glasgow fairly frequently in the late 1980s/early 1990s, but hardly since.