Instead of a room in a hotel, we shall be staying in an apartment for the next couple of days. If you prefer looking after yourself then an apartment is a ideal but it’s a matter of personal choice.

Like hotels, apartments in a given price range can vary in quality and you never know what you are going to find until you arrive. This one is fairly comfortable and better than some we have experienced.

We were admitted by a housekeeper who showed us to our home away home on the second floor and handed us the key. The street door is kept locked and is opened by means of an electronic fob on the keyring.

The first task was to spy out the power points for our rechargers. There are enough and with our various cables we can arrange things nicely.

There is free wifi and I am already logged in so as to be able to post this!

The photos show two views of the living room which doubles as the dining room and trebles as the kitchen.

This is Bonapartes (no apostrophe) Café Bar on Temple Meads Station where we have stopped off for a cup of tea before confronting the city of Bristol.

We have yet to pass through the ticket barriers. Said tickets are no longer the small, stiff pieces of cardboard that they were when I was a child. These days, they are not even physical tickets but QR codes stored on Tigger’s iPhone. (Tigger is our travel organiser.) At the ticket barrier, she sends me through first with a wave of her phone over the detector then follows me.

What would we do without our phones? Lose your phone and your life grinds to a halt.

I’m not sure where we are but the clouds have parted to reveal the sun,

Perhaps we will be lucky with the weather after all!

Here we are at Paddington Station to take the 9:30 GWR train to Bristol. Unusually for us, we are starting the trip on a weekday instead of the weekend.

We arrived here bright and early and had breakfast at the Costa Coffee shop at the top of the escalators.

Paddington is a big, rough old railway station that still looks much as it did in the age of steam except for the lack of smoke and soot. Arriving from Praed Street, you have to run the gauntlet of smokers banned from the station premises.

It’s a dull cloudy day with intermittent showers – not ideal for a trip but the one thing you cannot plan is the weather, especially in Britain.

We have boarded the train and had our tickets inspected. All we can do now is sit tight and wait for our arrival at Bristol Temple Meads.

Here’s a sight I haven’t seen for a while but always enjoy when I do.

This barge moored in St Katharine Docks is called Aleph. Its rudder projects out from its stern with its straight flat top just below the surface of the water. The coots know this and find it a convenient perch for preening. They look as though they are standing on the water!

I have often seen an adult pair sharing the perch but today it is an adult and a chick. Mum is showing baby a good place for preening.

Coots have a vivid white mark on their foreheads which makes them easy to spot and identify. Though you can’t see it in the photo, the youngster has a red mark. This sometimes confuses people into misidentifying young coots as moorhens because moorhens, both young and adult sport a red mark.

There used to be ducks and even cormorants frequenting this basin but I haven’t see any of these for quite a while. I don’t know what has caused them to stay away. Happily, the resident coots are still here to pose for the occasional photo.