Shane and Meg do Europe

Wales, Conwy & Caernferon, ie. excuse to add pictures The glorious Conwy Castle and exploration of the town. Doves & pigeons (are doves just white pigeons?). In this castle King Louis had himself a private privy built, eh. We looked down it. You really can’t understand Welsh at all. It is a lovely sounding language though. Hand gestures gets ye by. ... read more

Salisbury Cathedral in South West England (near Stonehenge) Holy House of God! We felt a touch blasphemous sneaking in for the price of one… It was impressive! Supposedly the granite columns holding up the tower are supposed to be the sagging under its great weight… Scary... Lots of really old graves in the floor and the foundation is only 4 ft deep (they showed us, it’s true)! Warwick My Grandma grew up here and my mum was born just outside in Leamington Spa so we paid a visit. Warwick Castle is famous, however, it seems to have been taken over by medieval impersonators so we opted to just break into a local garden (by accident, I swear). We also saw the free Military museum with its very enthusiastic curator; his pride and joy was the autographed ... read more

The lovely town of Bath, sort of I am not joking about needing a bath. I am not the best smelling of people on a good day. We are a bit behind on blogs as we have been having trouble coordinating battery power and free internet. We actually visited Bath ahwile ago but it was so awesome we thought a belated post was due. The place is called Bath because it is centered around some old Roman bathing pools (I guess all roman things are old at this point). The Romans thought the natural spring was a gift from god (which kinda explains why their empire fell doesnt it) so they built this big temple and associated structure around it. The Romans knew their engineering because all of the plumbing still works just fine and ... read more

The journey has begun We have officially begun touring Europe!! WooHoo! We picked up the van in London and Shane had an extremely stressful driving experience. Driving on the wrong side of the road, while sitting on the wrong side of the vehicle, shifting with his left hand in a large van in London which has the narrowest streets possible and the fastest most impatient drivers. Luckily we negotiated and managed to get 50 pounds off the van price as well as a TomTom (GPS) with western European maps. The TomTom was necessary in London..otherwise we would still be there... After leaving London we decided to drive to Kent, which seemed lovely in a movie we saw once about some tennis players and their balls.....unfortunately TomTom got confused (or we did!) and we ended up ... read more

We are going to look for vans today. We explored a few options such as long term leasing and Euro rail, but all either lacked the freedom we want or were too expensive. Actually the long term leasing was outrageous...one quote for the six months was $70 000!!!!!!!! Either way after some more internet detective work we found some good sites for buying vans and even got a reasonable quote for insurance that is good all over the UK. We found out today that Jenn, our intended travel buddy, wont be coming on our trip. We were disappointed but understood. We are going to have to re-evaluate our itinerary as our first 1.5 months of the trip we were trying to cover the paces Jenn wanted to see at a more break neck pace then we ... read more