Explore every episode of the podcast Action Packed Travel
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Final Battle of the Countryside | 14 Aug 2025 | 00:20:50 | |
Because this means so much to us, we've repeated the episode! The Somerset town of Frome has seen many battles in its history, from the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 to a campaign to win Packsaddle Community Fields in 2025. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Is Japan The New Ski Capital? | 30 Jul 2025 | 00:41:54 | |
This week we're talking to Jay Stevens, CEO of Wayfairer Travel, whose passion is snowboarding in Japan. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Midlifing on the South West Coast Path | 22 Jun 2025 | 00:33:28 | |
Zoe Langley-Wathen walked 630 miles around the coastline of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset – and then she wrote a book about it. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Battle of the Countryside | 11 May 2025 | 00:20:50 | |
The Somerset town of Frome has seen many battles in its history, from the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 to a campaign to win Packsaddle Community Fields in 2025. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Walking Across Africa | 28 Apr 2025 | 00:45:42 | |
Forty years ago, Patrick Nash took a ten-month walk through the heart of Africa. We talked to him about the journey that inspired his latest book, Shots Across the Water. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Writing Around The World | 19 Mar 2025 | 00:33:27 | |
Jean McNeill, author of Latitudes: Encounters with a Changing Planet, is an award-winning Canadian-born writer, the first-ever female director of creative writing at the University of East Anglia, and a professionally qualified safari guide. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Alice's Journey Through Saudi Arabia | 28 Feb 2025 | 00:30:34 | |
Scottish explorer and Arabist Alice Morrison decided to take a long hike to talk to the ordinary people, particularly the women who live there. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Valentine Warner’s Wild Kitchen | 30 Jan 2025 | 00:30:36 | |
Valentine Warner is a celebrity chef who’s made no less nine TV series, and has written five books. He likes to cook in remote and beautiful corners of the world. His new venture, Kitchen in the Wild, is set in a private safari lodge with views of Mount Kenya.
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| Wild About Croatia | 20 Dec 2024 | 00:34:27 | |
Travel writer and author of My Family and Other Enemies, Mary Novakovich, explores her homeland, including the hinterland of Croatia most foreigners never visit. | |||
| Joanna Penn's Pilgrimage | 13 Nov 2024 | 00:35:27 | |
Author, podcaster, and creative entrepreneur Joanna Penn is a best-selling and award-winning writer of horror, thrillers, dark fantasy and travel memoirs. She's also taken up going on pilgrimages. | |||
| A Ride Across America | 23 Oct 2024 | 00:36:43 | |
Simon Parker has cycled in this election year across the whole of America, from the northwest coast of Washington state, all the way to the most south easterly tip of Florida. He's written a book about it. | |||
| Ride Like A Gaucho | 29 Sep 2024 | 00:35:10 | |
Sophia Ashe, hooked on ponies and horses since childhood, joined a team of gauchos at a ranch in Argentina and wrote a book about her experiences. | |||
| Bletchley Park Revisited | 27 Aug 2024 | 00:22:16 | |
Bletchley Park is a country mansion 35 minutes by train northwest of London, where Alan Turing and his team of cryptanalysts cracked the complicated codes of the German Enigma machine. | |||
| Loneliness of a Long-Distance Sailor | 30 Jul 2024 | 00:35:59 | |
How do you survive on your own for days on end? So far, seven women have completed the Vendée Globe, the toughest round-the-world race. Joan Mulloy, a brand ambassador for Helly Hansen and a mother of two from the west coast of Ireland, is determined to become the eighth woman to compete and the first to win it. | |||
| The Whale in the Living Room | 30 Jun 2024 | 00:25:27 | |
Veteran underwater cameraman, John Ruthven, talks to us about his book and a lifetime of exploring the deep. He is also a producer of Sir David Attenborough's The Blue Planet, a zoologist, film director, writer, editor and stylist. | |||
| A Century of Cottar's Safaris | 22 May 2024 | 00:31:36 | |
This week we're in Kenya talking to safari camp owner, Calvin Cotter, whose family came here from the Great Plains of the Midwest in the years before World War One. | |||
| The Ultimate Childcare for Skiers | 29 Apr 2024 | 00:28:59 | |
This week, we're exploring the fraught subject of taking small children skiing for the very first time. We're going to start and end with a warning to listeners: If you want to book a nanny service-inclusive holiday for the coming winter, there is really no time to waste. You need to book right now. | |||
| The Secret Resort of Le Grand-Bornand | 24 Mar 2024 | 00:23:41 | |
Le Grand-Bornand is not a name like Morzine or Chamonix that trips easily off the tongue when we mention skiing, but it's typically and traditionally French. | |||
| North American Dream in the French Alps | 06 Feb 2024 | 00:19:36 | |
It's the twentieth anniversary of Arc 1950. The resort began as the idea of Canadian resort developer, Intrawest, creator of Mont-Tremblant in Quebec and manager of some 20 other resorts in North America – from Whistler to Mammoth. | |||
| Wild Travels In Africa and Asia | 02 Jan 2024 | 00:21:07 | |
This week we're talking to someone who specialises in creating holidays that are entirely different – taking you to places you probably thought were out of bounds to all tourists. | |||
| From Fjord to Snowfield | 02 Dec 2023 | 00:21:42 | |
We caught up with Rory Dixon who organises skiing-touring trips off a boat in Norway and Greenland, life-changing adventures to distant corners of the world. | |||
| Jess the Horse Nomad | 27 Nov 2023 | 00:17:09 | |
Jess Isbrecht is a digital nomad who travels full time with her horses. | |||
| The World's Most Travelled Man | 05 Nov 2023 | 00:31:51 | |
Harry Mitsidis has travelled to every country in the world, at least twice. He's the founder of a website called NomadMania. | |||
| Walking to the South Pole | 27 Oct 2023 | 00:23:03 | |
To discover a little of what former Royal Marine, Sam Cox, will experience living alone at -30°C, podcaster Peter Hardy spends time in an industrial freezer. | |||
| An American in Paris | 28 Sep 2023 | 00:33:15 | |
No, not the 1951 movie starring Gene Kelly and Lesley Caron... Jay Swanson moved from the USA and now lives in Paris where he calls himself: 'a YouTuber, writer, and puppy wrangler.' He publishes a guide to the city called Paris in my Pocket. | |||
| The Van Life Revisited | 09 Sep 2023 | 00:25:43 | |
We're on the road exploring a thriving sector of the travel industry that continues to explode in popularity across Europe. | |||
| Wild Skiing in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan | 27 Aug 2023 | 00:28:31 | |
Untamed Borders sets out to satisfy the hunger of that rare breed of traveller who's already been to the far corners of the earth, got the T-shirt but still wants more. Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy | |||
| Chefs, Cars and Skiing | 15 Aug 2023 | 00:27:15 | |
This week, we're talking to travel guru, Amin Momen, whose London-based company Momentum Ski organises bespoke holidays. | |||
| Extreme Travel Dreams | 17 Jul 2023 | 00:31:19 | |
Turn your wildest travel dreams into reality, with superyacht voyages to the end of the earth, intrepid journeys to deserts, jungles, polar regions and the oceans. | |||
| The Tennis Champion Who Escaped the Nazis | 01 Jul 2023 | 00:27:32 | |
We're in Vienna for an unusual episode of Action Packed Travel – unusual because our principal guest is Felice herself. She's just published a book about her grandparents' dramatic escape from Vienna to London on the eve of World War II. | |||
| Cycling From Antarctic To Arctic | 21 Jun 2023 | 00:32:16 | |
Chris and his girlfriend Phoebe are in the saddle, for what you might describe by any standards as a rather long bike ride. | |||
| Thermae Bath Spa – A Fusion Of Old And New | 28 May 2023 | 00:21:28 | |
With the sunny weather outside, we felt it was time to republish this episode about Bath Thermae Spa. Bath in the southwest of England is famous for its Roman baths. In its Regency heyday, the supposedly curative waters attracted the cream of British society…and of course, Jane Austen. 2,000 years later, the waters were re-harnessed in the magnificent thermal spa located just a soap bath's throw away from the original. | |||
| Travels With The Hungry Cyclist | 19 May 2023 | 00:28:25 | |
Tom Kevill-Davies has managed to carve a highly successful career for himself out of his twin passions, cycling and eating. | |||
| The Future Of European Skiing | 09 May 2023 | 00:26:33 | |
Only a handful of ski resorts in the Alps will in future offer reliable snow cover throughout the season. These include Val d'Isere, Tignes and Val Thorens in France, Cervinia in Italy, and Zermatt in Switzerland – not forgetting the Austrian glaciers. | |||
| The Ultimate Ski Chalets | 24 Apr 2023 | 00:28:03 | |
Globally, there's just a handful of specialist operators who look after their guests on this giddy level. London-based Consensio is the leader of the pack. | |||
| Music On A Train | 12 Apr 2023 | 00:29:36 | |
Cheryl B Engelhardt is a singer-songwriter who composed and recorded her album, Passenger, on a train journey from New York City to Los Angeles. | |||
| Sea and Ski With Melody Sky | 03 Apr 2023 | 00:26:49 | |
Action woman extraordinary – mountain and ocean photographer, skier and freediver, Melody lives her life on the edge. | |||
| Cervinia – On The Italian Side Of The Matterhorn | 13 Mar 2023 | 00:24:51 | |
It was three years ago that we launched our podcast and today we're in a village that dates back to 1930. It is now evolving into what should become one of the most important future destinations for skiers in the whole of Europe. | |||
| Short Break at Longueville Manor | 20 Feb 2023 | 00:20:03 | |
The island of Jersey's top five-star hotel is a very special place indeed. | |||
| Jersey's Occupation in the Second World War | 08 Feb 2023 | 00:28:53 | |
We went on a lightning tour of some of the crumbling coastal defences linked by a network of underground passages and even an underground German hospital. | |||
| Morzine: A Bird's Eye View | 30 Jan 2023 | 00:28:18 | |
A vast ski area, environmentally-friendly chalets, and birds of prey are just a few of the attractions of Morzine. | |||
| There's a Lot More to Cheltenham than Racing | 20 Jan 2023 | 00:20:07 | |
With its glorious terraced houses, tree-lined promenades and grand public buildings, Cheltenham in Gloucestershire is said to be the most complete Regency town in Britain. Of course, it's best known these days for horse racing. | |||
| The Secret Gardens Of Somerset Revisited | 13 Jan 2023 | 00:26:46 | |
We first visited in summer and are now looking forward to better weather to come when we can explore the gardens of The Newt once again – all 17 acres of them. | |||
| The Man Who Skis Faster than a F1 Car | 23 Dec 2022 | 00:28:31 | |
Jacob Perkins' idea of fun is to travel down a mountainside in a straight line, reaching impossible speeds of up to 150mph without any form of motor. | |||
| Secrets Of The Royal Family | 05 Dec 2022 | 00:33:43 | |
For the past 40 years, Richard Kay has been the expert on the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace and has travelled the world to report on the comings and goings of the Royal Family. | |||
| Lacock, In Photography and On Film | 17 Nov 2022 | 00:17:22 | |
The village of Lacock was once a quaint medieval community with cobbled streets, cottages and coaching inns set around a tumbling stream. It all looks rather familiar because we've seen it in the cinema, movie theatre and TV screens – scenes from Pride and Prejudice, Downton Abbey and Harry Potter were all shot in Lacock.
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| More Brown Bears in The Pyrenees | 06 Nov 2022 | 00:28:34 | |
High in the central Pyrenees, a one-hour drive from Toulouse Airport, we're in search of big and beautiful brown bears. | |||
| Adventure Sailing For Beginners | 29 Oct 2022 | 00:32:57 | |
Explore a world of polar bears and icebergs, or cross the Atlantic to forgotten corners of the Caribbean. You need the right spirit, but absolutely no previous seafaring experience is necessary. | |||
| Is the Saalbach Ski Area the Best in Austria? | 10 Oct 2022 | 00:15:39 | |
Cows that milk themselves, oysters up a mountain, and a sommelier who plays Mozart to his wines...find out more when we take an intimate look at one of Austria's largest, most diverse and exciting ski areas. | |||
| Winging it in the Mountains | 26 Sep 2022 | 00:31:18 | |
We loved last year's episode featuring Geraldine Fasnacht so much that we've decided to air it again. Geraldine’s idea of a little light, adrenaline-fuelled recreation is to climb one of Europe's highest peaks and then dive off it in a wing suit at speeds of up to 180 kilometers per hour. | |||