Travelling Over The Countryside

Right now Adie and I are sitting in Athens feeling rather warm... although I must admit that the weather throughout the UK was stunning and we had no cold or wet weather at all.

We started our four days of Uk travel with Cambridge, the university town. Some really interesting history and gorgeous buildings. Here we are on one of the many shopping streets.

Our next stop was York where we visited the Shambles and saw a lot more old and interesting architecture. We were are so able to wander around on the old city wall. This is a portion of the city wall that Adie thought was fun. Actually it had these turretty things at various intervals along the wall and they really helped to consider how the people defended themselves back when it was a necessary thing to do. On the other side of this rock it says England. They really do only unite for the Olympic Games! Otherwise they see themselves as being totally separate and have a strong rivalry.
We were able to go on a really interesting tour of Edinburgh Castle with a funny Scotsman who made many jokes about Mel Gibson being the man responsible for a huge increase in tourism. This is a canon that was given to a King at some point as a wedding gift... now why didn't we think of that when we were putting together our registry!? We spent a very relaxing day in the Lake District, so relaxing in fact that while in Grasmere we forgot to take a photo of ourselves. You can get an idea of the general surrounds from this picture though.
After Grasmere we went to Lake Windermere for a boat cruise. Here you can see me leaning against the railing while listening to the park ranger tell us some random fact about some floating island in the middle of the lake. After the boat we took a steam train... would the fun never end?! It was smellier than I thought it would be and made me think of Puffing Billy... which in turn meant that I did not really pay all that much attention to the scenery. Oh well, consider that 10 minutes of my life not utilised to it's full potential.
The last town we visited on our tour was Stratford-Upon-Avon. While totally swarming with tourists, it really was a pretty place to visit, and yes, we did visit Shakepeare's birthplace. We spent most of our time down at the river feeding the birds and watching the longboats. I think Adie and I may be looking into hiring one of those if we ever come back and making a trip from Stratford to Bath or vise versa. I think that would be lovely. Anyone else interested?Now, although we've made it to Greece, I'll not be posting about it yet as all we've really managed to do it sit on the beach watching the sunset and finding this Internet cafe. The sunset was spectacular though. Ahhh, life's tough.