We spent the day today walking through Edinburgh and visiting as many nooks and crannies of the city as we could. Suffice to say, the city is absolutely gorgeous and we have added it to the list of places we wish we could live in. We tried to get a sense for the city as a whole by walking through the New town and Old Town, both with very different architecture. The old part of Edinburgh was the original area which existed during the middle ages, so it has typical medieval achitecture. It includes the Royal Mile, which we spent lots of time walking up and down (it runs from the Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Hollyrood- the Queen's current home in Scotland and the previous home of Mary, Queen of Scots. We didn't have ... read more

Today we set out on a quest to see the coast of Wales - by foot. The city of Cardiff itself is not right on the coast (the water being the Bristol channel which eventually goes out to the Atlantic) but a borough of the city, called Cardiff Bay, sits (surprise!) on Cardiff Bay. The actual bay is separated from the channel by a series of large locks. We'd heard that Cardiff Bay (the city) is known for being one of Europe's most modern waterfront complexes, so we wanted to check it off the list. So we started walking in what we thought was the right direction, and didn't feel the need to consult a map. We were going the right way, but what we didn't realize was that we were on the wrong side of ... read more

This morning we hopped on a coach and 3 hours later we were in Cardiff, Wales. As soon as you get into wales, you realize you're in a different country because every sign is in both welsh and English. Welsh is so confusing looking because words consist of a long array of consonants, and I can't imagine how many of the words are pronounced. Fortunately most people in wales speak English (they take both english and welsh at school). Cardiff is quite a small city, and you can tell that it was heavily bombed during the 2nd World War because the buildings are generally very new. It was a big target because of its port and because of the large coal mining industry of the region. When we arrived, we spent a bit of time wandering ... read more

So now we're settling down into life in London, and Mike has survived his first week back at school. It reminds us that we're not really on vacation, and that there is a real purpose as to why we're here.... but we still have the weekends to travel. Mike usually has Fridays and Monday mornings, so we'll have more time to travel, but this weekend he had to go to class on Friday so we stayed local for the weekend. This is fine because there's just so much to see here, that there's never a dull moment! On Saturday we stuck around London, and spent much of the day in Hyde Park. Because we are missing the accessibility of our beloved Bixi bikes (for those who don't know, they're the bike share program that recently started ... read more

Wow. Welcome to London, indeed! We landed in Heathrow around noon, picked up our Oyster cards and packed all of our luggage to the tube station for the final stretch of our journey home. Of course, saying it like this makes it sound so simple... but we had a lot of luggage! So, it wasn't that simple at all! We loaded all of our stuff onto the Picadilly Line train, and sat down for the hour or so journey into town. The train slowly filled up, and by the time we got into London proper, the train was so packed that there was no way we could get our stuff off the train! We were very worried that we wouldn't be able to get our bags through the crowd, but luckily, by the time we got ... read more