Drinking txakolina on the job. Photo credit: Robert Peyton

Each Monday, powered by Globalista, we bring you the best of the weekend’s travel pages. Looking for an escape? Look no further.

Drinking on the job
The life of a travel writer is tough – forcing some to turn to the bottle. At least, that’s the (admittedly pleasant) impression left from some of this weekend’s travel pages. The New York Times’s Eric Asamov gets his mouth around Txakolina, a Tongue-Twisting Name for Simple Pleasure, “the bracing, refreshing, often fizzy white wine that is enjoyed throughout Basque country”, while his colleague, Robert Simonson has the unenviable task of rounding up some of New York’s best beer gardens: “There is no drinking forum more compatible with summer than the beer garden,” he claims in Beer Gardens Bloom Around the City.

“If you like drinking wine half as much as you enjoy cricket, Australia is a brilliant place to follow a cricket tour,” Robert Joseph writes in The Telegraph’s exploration of Australian wine: a taste of cricket whites… and reds. And The Guardian brings us the mobile side of all-day drinking in One for the road, from a real ale tram trail in Yorkshire to vineyard cycling in Kent and Essex.

Sleep and the lack of it
The Independent’s Linda Cookson gets sleepy on Halki: Time out on a timeless Greek island, gushing, “Small, quirky and totally enchanting, it’s an hour or so from Rhodes in real time, but light years away in character – a wonderful scrap of magic set in the sparkling Aegean.” But while she’s taking catnaps next to the sea, her colleague Cass Chapman is staying up later – way late – in The Hedonist: Barcelona:  “Every time I go back to Barcelona, I make a firm promise that this time I will sleep; I will not get suckered into just one more drink in just one last bar and I will ensure the trip is cultural and civilised. Every time I go to Barcelona I fail on that promise.”

Chilly wake up call
There’s nothing of the hedonist about the chilly waters of the British Isles, but these intrepid writers are taking them on anyway:  “And here we are, my friend and his two teenage sons, in the middle of nowhere, on a remote beach on a remote northern island, on a chilly day, plunging into unsurfed waters,” the Financial Times’s Henry Shukman writes as he heads to the Scottish island of Islay to get Far from the surfing crowds. Just a bit further south, Kevin Rushby of The Guardian is trying a new kind of romantic day out, complete with a riverside picnic, a wetsuit and a bumpy 4 mile float down a river and over waterfalls… Making a romantic splash on a wild swim in Wales.

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