Advertisement
Alas, we did not make it to the pencil museum, but we have seen an absolute plethora of English history over the last week, enough to fill many many blogs.
But first, I have not told you about Greece. We were in Greece for about a week, for a day before Turkey and then 6 days after Turkey. Katherine and I visited Athens in a whirlwind, one afternoon adventure which was magic. Athens is a truly truly amazing city, on the same level as Rome for history, but I found it much more pleasant, less people and much cleaner. We were staying increadibly close to the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is located. The 2004 Olympics obviously helped the city enormously, and the subway system is fantastic, a planners dream! We walked up to the Parthenon, which like every other building in Europe has scaffolding around it, but this scaffolding has been there since 1982 when the restoration project started, so it is really part of the tourist attraction now! The view over the city, especially down to the old town, the Plaka was amazing and all in all Athens secured its spot as our favourite place on this journey.
After
Can you see us!
She's a biggie that old Parthenon Turkey Katherine and I were joined by Stacey, Kelly and Kirsten and we spent 5 days on two different Greek Islands, Santorini and Mykonos. Apart from a day of rain all we did was sit in the sun and take in the views, so i'll let the pictures speak for themselves for that part of the trip. The best part about it was that it was a holiday within this crazy trip and it was very welcome!
Since last Sunday, Katherine and I have been on our own again, traversing the English countryside in our little hired VW polo and seeing a lot of this tiny island. On Sunday we visited Salisbury, a lovely little town that is dominated by a huge church, which has one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta. That was a little piece of added history we weren't expecting. And of course, as it happens on this trip, we ran into someone we know, two girls who were on the Kamuka tour in Turkey. Really, do we know everyone in England!?!
From Salisbury we travelled north and went to Stonehenge, it was a rainy, chilly, windy day and I thought it was the
The girls do United Colours of Benetton
A view along the ridge of Santorini, where we stayed is in behind the girls on the cliff. best kind of day for us to visit that place. It really is an eeire feeling standing there in front of this amazing structure built many thousands of years ago. What really got me was the noone knows why it was built. Of course the tourist buses and two motorways that pass the site add to the modern day feeling, but it really is worth a visit.
From Stonehenge we continued our stone circle day and went to a little town called Avebury which also has a much larger, but not as impressive stone circle. Again, they don't know why it is there, but it was fantastic to see another example of old England, these stones were old when the Romans got to England, so it shows what an amazing timeline of history this place has. That evening we visited Stratford-Upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. We encountered the two most annoying tourists ever, this couple who literally spent 10 minutes hogging the building of Shakespeares birth trying to take photos. Honestly, if you have never used your camera before, don't whip it out there and give it a go! The annoyance leves subsided though as we headed off to
Look at all the pretty dresses!
We're all ready for the wedding... we even managed the colour co-ordination! a pub (one of many we've visited) and had a huge desert, these Brits, they sure can whip up a good apple crumble!
The next day was Wales, which we did in less than 24 hours! Wales is stunning, it is very New Zealand, but the stone walls, tiny towns and houses that date from the 1400s show why it is on this side of the world. I re-discovered myself at the Centre For Alternative Technology (the whole reason we went to Wales) where I set free my inner hippie and had a great time at the display and interactive areas, turns out i'm quite sustinable... except for that air travel, I must find a way to buy carbon credits! We drove around the coast and saw a pretty impressive castle, one of many to come.
Driving from Wales we then went to York via Liverpool. Now, we may have not visited the Pencil Museum, but we did go and see the Super Lamb Banana - yes, that is why we went to Liverpool. The Super Lamb Banana is this sculpture about GE gone wrong or some Japanese crap like that. It is located outside a building at the University
It sure was cold
And I dubbed it the day I wish I hasn't worn shorts! and the looks we got taking photos made me think that people thought that lambs really did look like that. Oh, and we walked past the Cavern Club where the Beatles got their start, but really, the Beatles? Thats nothing compared to a giant yellow lamb.
We blatted along the motorway towards York - there doesn't seem to be any real speed limit on the roads here and its no uncommon for some fool to go cruising past you at 140km/hr, even in the rain. But everyone seems to get there in the end. York is not car friendly and I got my strop on as we were trying to make our way around. Luckily, the next day we caught the bus in and York redeemed itself to me, we visited the York Minster, a huge church and you can go underground and see a small part of the ruins of the old Roman Basillica that was on the site about 1500 years ago, and then another 500 years after that the old Norman cathedral. There is a stained glass window that they found from the Norman cathedral that has colours in it that cannot be reproduced as the technolgies
We got there in the end
I finally got a photo of Kathy and a touristy thing with no other people! It was a mission though! This is her in front of Shakespeares house have been lost to society. How do we lose things like that, doesn't someone write these things down?
From York we went deep into the country to a tiny town called Penrith and did nothing. It was great. From Penrith we drove across country again along the route of Hadrians Wall. Hadrians was a very enterprising Roman Emperor and built this large wall along the entire width of northern England, mostly to keep the Scots out and the Brits in. It followed the natural contours of the land and some of it still exists. Now, England really does do rolling countryside well, and on one of the little backroads I went over a little bridge a wee bit too fast and we actually flew off the ground. So there you go, I could be a rally driver, we like to refer to it as the time we were airbourne in Northumberland.
We also visited the Alnwick Castle, or Hogwarts as it is more popularly known, very cool, but of course now i'm all jeleous about not being able to live in a castle. I want one too! From there we drove north along the coast into Scotland. This is a
Where's Harry!!!
Hogworts, how cool! wild part of the island, and astonishingly beautiful.
The level of history, especially the amount of preservation that the Brits have been doing for the past century is astonishing, wherever you go in this country you can see some old church or a castle, they use old walls as their modern day fences and life just carries on. Of course, our run of good weather is over and it has rained a little bit at least every day since last week, but we had 6 weeks of stunning weather, so it had to catch up with us sometime eh!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.066s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 45; dbt: 0.0393s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb