California city sues neighbor after Oakland votes to rename airport to include ‘San Francisco Bay’, arguing consumers will be confused

San Francisco and neighboring Oakland have long maintained a friendly rivalry, whether over sports or tacos . But a spat over an airport name is taking the feud to new heights.

San Francisco on Thursday sued Oakland over that city’s decision to change the name of its airport to the San Francisco Bay Oakland international airport.

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Would a £35,000 holiday help you live longer or just leave you bankrupt? A surprising number of people are paying to find out

Name: Longevity vacations.

Age: New, but I’ll be older, hopefully.

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A fishing village stay on one of the country’s less-visited large islands reveals a quiet Adriatic gem boasting green lakes, holm oak forests, and unspoilt beaches

The first thing that struck me about Luka was the silence.

My wife, Caroline, and I had driven our rental car from Split north along the Croatian coast to Zadar and taken an hour-and-a-half ferry ride to the island of Dugi Otok. Then we had driven the island’s length southwards, through pine forest and scrub, to arrive at this tiny fishing village, where we would spend the next week. Both of us were slightly wired from driving on foreign roads. But the strange spell of Luka put an end to that.

Nothing moved, not even cats. Before us was a sheltered bay that seemed almost surreally smooth, undisturbed by the faintest breeze. Plaster flaked from the walls of crumbling fishing cottages, their gardens bright with flowering cactuses and bougainvillaea. A row of empty beer bottles outside the shuttered general store gave the deserted quay a Mary Celeste quality. Travelling in space can sometimes seem like travelling in time, and it felt as if we had stepped back to the 1950s.

Dugi Otok (“Long Island”) is the most westerly of the Zadarian Islands off the Dalmatian coast, and one of the least-visited large islands in Croatia. Twenty-seven miles (44.5km) long and only three miles (4.8km) wide, the island’s slenderness makes it easy to explore, with a single road running from north to south. Its inhabitants – fewer than 1,500, many of whom leave in the winter months to escape the notorious Bora winds – are huddled on the eastern side, mostly in the “capital” Sali; the west falls away to steep cliffs and sand beaches. Cypress, pine, fig, olive and holm oak cover much of it, while the rest is blanketed in maquis, the scrubby evergreen underbrush of the Mediterranean. The plants comprising this dense weave are invariably spiked, hooked or barbed, as I learned the painful way when going off piste from a walking trail; the next few days were spent nursing lacerated legs. The maquis makes the island wild in a way I hadn’t encountered before, as swathes of uncultivated land are impenetrable to humans.

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Hundreds of cut-price, sustainable intercity journeys are on special offer this week for trips across England, Scotland and Wales

A transport company is offering £2 tickets for coach trips across the UK to be taken up to May 12. With a £1 service fee, that means travellers planning journeys can book long-distance tickets from £3 on the FlixBus website or app.

In England there is a government-backed scheme capping local bus tickets at £2 until December 2024, but this offer opens up longer routes and also applies to journeys into and around Wales and Scotland, where the £2 cap doesn’t exist. So, if you fancy a trip through the blossoming valleys from Bristol to Swansea, or from Glasgow to Inverness via the Cairngorms, now is the time to book. The deal is available until Sunday 21 April.

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A five-day mindful adventure on the Knoydart peninsula – one of the last great wildernesses in the UK – offers the chance to fully unwind and leap into the unknown

It’s a relief to lay my rucksack down, plunge hot feet into the cool stream and pause to revel in the fairytale surrounds. Foxgloves stand tall against a cornflower-blue sky, ferns look almost luminous, the water glints in the early summer sunshine. A patch of moss-covered ancient forest provides shade, a cuckoo calls in the distance, mountains layer on the horizon.

I’m in Knoydart in the Highlands of western Scotland, one of the last great wildernesses in the UK, on a hiking and wild camping adventure. No roads cross the 22,000-hectare (55,000-acres) peninsula, a rugged place where a trio of Munros soar skyward, sandwiched between sea lochs Nevis and Hourn (poetically translated as heaven and hell). Over five days our group of eight will explore this land on foot, carrying our sustenance and shelter on our backs, led by two guides from The Living Project, Josh and Emily.

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For days now, every time I try to book, a pop-up menu adds £42

I have been trying for days to book a £520 train and hotel package to Lille in September via the Eurostar website. Each time I enter my card details and hit “continue” to pay, a pop-up window advises that the trip has increased by an extra £42. Each time I have cancelled the transaction and started again. Each day it’s still advertised at £520 on the Eurostar site, but the same price increase pops up when I try to pay. It seems Eurostar is counting on me not bothering to cancel and go through the booking process again.
CB, Congleton, Cheshire

Eurostar seems to think that if it makes the right noises, customers will overlook shoddy service. “We prioritise the safety and wellbeing of our customers and staff above all else,” it explained last week when asked to justify a new policy that prevents staff pushing the wheelchairs of passengers with disabilities.

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An exhibition of the great British illustrator’s life opens this month in Ditchling village, in the South Downs countryside that inspired him

There aren’t many people who can claim to have seen a snowman fly over their house. It may sound fantastical, but every Christmas I settle down to watch The Snowman , Raymond Briggs ’s best-loved work, and watch as the red-haired boy and the plump, tangerine-nosed snowman swoop over the downs that surround the village where I live before gliding above the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Pier and on out to sea.

The Snowman , like many of Briggs’s works, unfolds against a backdrop of the East Sussex landscapes he loved, and where he lived for more than 50 years. So it’s fitting that the first exhibition of his life and work since his death in 2022 is being held not in a London gallery but at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft , just a couple of miles from his house in the village of Westmeston. Original drawings and illustrations, memorabilia, photographs and framed fan letters (including one from an American pastor enraged to discover that Father Christmas included images of Santa on the loo) give a unique insight into one of the greatest illustrators Britain has ever produced.

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The author and his partner spent six months with their toddler exploring the state’s wildest places in an old motorhome

As one of the most photographed, filmed and crooned about places in the world, California often feels like an idea as much as a state, deeply familiar even to those who have never been here. Yet the best of California is not what we have built. The source of California’s true power is its wilderness.

Wilderness gives us permission to be small, to be dwarfed by places that are greater than us and to feel awe at being part of it. Being in nature allows us to step into a timescale beyond ourselves, to unburden our cluttered minds and become totally engrossed in the present. That’s part of the reason why, after emerging from the depths of the pandemic, my partner, Caroline, and I bought an old motorhome and, along with our toddler, spent six months exploring and photographing the state’s wildest places.

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The essence of a Nordic summer is to lean into a slower pace of life and embrace nature, from staying in a Swedish summer house to gentle canoe tours in Finland

With swimmable harbours in Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki and across Denmark’s cities, not to mention plenty of ways to enjoy the sea, from kayaking to urban fishing, there’s often a seaside air to Nordic cities in summer, and especially in Oslo.

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