Only 2 1/2 countries left
We have made it back to Chesham Bois where we are staying most of the time from our trip to Scotland. I’ll try to get a picutre of the house up next time I make an entry. It’s very impressive.
Meanwhile here are a couple of pictures to whet your appetite for the forth coming looooooong slide show you will all be subjected to. We are currently sitting on a few more than 1600 photos.
Laura and I in front of Big Ben. The beautiful Welsh country side. (Click for larger image)
Reproduction of the latest email:
Hello again to all! Thanks for the many emails we have received. We hope you are all keeping well and settling into a nice pre-Christmas holiday routine.
Simon and I are now four countries down, with two to go, having tackled Scotland and Wales during the previous week. We arrived back at Simon’s aunty and uncle’s house in Chesham Bois yesterday after eight days of travelling around the greater United Kingdom. Our basic route was from to here to Cambridge, to York, to Edinburgh, to Ambleside, to Liverpool, to Chester, to Llandudno, to Holyhead, through Snowdonia National Park and back home into England.
It was a lot of travelling, a few inept navigational directions on my part, but a truly beautiful trip. It gave us the chance to see a bit of wilderness after all our pavement-pounding up until this point. And on wilderness and beauty, my goodness do Scotland and Wales deliver! They are just stunning countries with fog, cliffs, mountains, quaint villages and the most sheep I have ever seen.
Highlights for us were: 1. The gorgeous town that is York: lots of really cute shops for Christmas and the remains of the stone wall that used to run the circumference of the whole town. We met two Australian women at the youth hostel there and we exchanged numerous stupid tourist stories. By coincidence, one of them is catching the exact plane trip home that we are (I felt very Dowrick.) 2. Edinburgh: a stunning city that had the absolute best Christmas lights. If you are walking in the modern, vibrant main shopping strip, you can simply look up to see ancient Edinburgh Castle on an enormous rock right in the middle of the city. That was amazing. We also went on the very cool – decommissioned – Royal Britannia Yacht. 3. Ambleside is a breathtaking town in the famous Lake District of northern England. We stayed in a youth hostel right on the Ullswater Lake, so it felt very ‘Kellermans’ (watch Dirty Dancing.) It’s an incredibly popular summer destination, but even in the very cold, the surrounding mountains and views were just spectacular. 4. Liverpool: we didn’t see anything really fabulous about the city, but if famous for nothing else, it’s famous for The Beatles, so of course we went to the ‘The Beatles Story Tour’ museum which was fascinating. 5. Llandudno along the coast of northern Wales was my favourite town from the whole trip. Not simply because it’s home to ‘Down the Rabbit Hole: The Alice in Wonderland Centre’ (Jill, I took photos), but it’s a ‘Victorian seaside town’ where you can just imagine people in knee-length togs running from their grand old hotels down to the water.
So many, many photos later, we are back home recovering for a couple of days before we fly to Paris on Sunday. This is obviously a great cause for excitement, especially since we have both just read The Da Vinci Code (I think I missed a few towns along our trip because I couldn’t put it down for forty-eight hours.) So as well as some more happy snaps, we may just come home with the Holy Grail. Fingers crossed. Love to all, Laura