England to Wales and the educational path....

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What a week (and a half)! We left off in the South West of England, we had just been to the beautiful St Ives and were headed back to the outskirts of London for 2 days. It was a miserable day when we stopped off on the way at the old mine shaft in St Just. The shaft is supposedly on the coast but we couldn't tell as there was so much fog we could hardly see any further than 10 metres into the distance. The cashier advised us it was "Heat Haze", still no idea if she was serious or just not very funny but we paid our money and headed into the mine. The tour was interesting, predominantly about copper mining, and it was nice to learn a few things about something I wouldn't normally been interested in. We chatted to someone that had worked at the mine before it closed in the 90's which at that point made it felt really eerie, it was hard to believe that the old, cold machinery run not that long ago. It probably didn't help that fog gave the place an edge.

Our next stop was Tintagel Castle, apparently the birth place of King Arthur. This place turned out to be pretty amazing, we went down to the ruins of the castle and explored the surrounding bay and the caves that were accessible at the low tide. Eamon called this place "Camelot" which I need to point out that it isn't, its just his way of remembering "that place we went to that time". We decided to camp that night close by and try and catch the sunrise in the morning. As it turned out the weather wasn't in our favour and our 4.30 am rise was all in vain. At least we were up and about, so shower, breakfast and away.

Luckily the bad weather had cleared over once we got to Stonehenge, it was now, for the first time in 3 weeks that Eamon and I spent some time apart. Eamon wasn't too interested in the idea of looking at "some old rocks" and for the price of the admission, 15 Pounds (30 AUD) pp, I wasn't going to push him. It was probably a good thing too, Eamon's attention span is shorter than a midget's midget, so away I went with audio tour in hand! I must say, contrary to friends feedback, I rather enjoyed the Stonehenge, I mean, when was the last time you were in the presence of something that was older than you can comprehend? The henge is over 3000 years old, and they are huge, some are over 7 metres tall!!! I can tell you they were amazing but perhaps you have to be there to feel the awesomeness of these large, ancient formations, and I suspect it will mean something different to everyone. Eamon was still very confident he made the right decision to stay after a rambled on about their magnificence, showing pictures and dictating history....if only there was a pub in the complex then I could have retained his attention.

After we left the henge I was gleaming and happy that we had a few more sight seeing adventures to check out in the next couple of days. We stayed in the outskirts of London, close to Windsor, for those next couple of nights while we visited the likes of the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace. Both are over a half day tour if you do it properly so you can imagine we were pretty pooped at the end of each day. Touring is tiring and as we are trying to free camp we also need to allocate time each day to search for accommodation each night. Accommodation so far has varied between quiet streets, carparks near sporting grounds, train stations etc. Our finding that night was a carpark located conveniently close to the train station and opposite a park, twas lovely!

It was nice that the 2 nights we spent in the Cotswolds provided a fairly comfortable next few days where we could chill out and go for our first proper bike ride. The Costwolds is a region North East of London and are considered what they call here in England and AONB - Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The country side is full of rolling green hills and small stone built towns within a few miles of each other and it was lucky we chose the nicest day we had in the week to use one of the pre planned Cotswolds rides and do a 60km loop. It probably wasn't the greatest organised ride, we stopped frequently to look on the map, wonder if we were on the right track, complain a little and then continue on. We did manage to finish without killing each other and decided a shorter ride would be better next time. The terrain is quite hilly out there so 60km took us 6 hours, including a lunch break, which is a little longer than either of us had anticipated. I may have forgotten that its more like riding the Dandes rather than Beach rd. I planned on giving it another go in a couple of days but turns out the English weather had other plans and instead bucketed down and hailed. The forecast was looking grim to we decided to head off - shall we go to Wales? Yes!!!!

What a great move, Wales is Beeee-u-tiful!!! The rolling, organised hills of the Cotswolds is nice, but the roaring mountains of Wales are astonishing! I'm not sure if its a mental thing where the idea of being in another country makes you look around your surroundings a little different, but we were amazed as soon as we crossed that border. The towns are quaint, yet have a rugged feel to them, they soak in their mountain surroundings and give you the feeling you're in something special. We prefer this over the England countryside so far. But what is there to do in Wales? Hmmmm, not much according to the Lonely Planet....so following the guide we avoiding the capital, Cardiff, and went straight up to the Snowdonia National Park where the next day we would climb to the highest summit in Wales, Mt Snowden and we would do this totally unprepared.

When we got there, we were surrounded in hikers and their fancy boots, fancy pants and fancy sticks. Feeling somewhat out of place we decided to take the hardest route up the mountain. If kids and dogs can do it, we can do it too in our sneakers and jeans and football jackets! After what seemed like a tough 3 hours we in fact made it to the top, too cold to stay longer that an overpriced instant coffee, and headed back down. The way down we were in much better spirits, things are always happier when the hard part is over. We were clearly on a rewarding high, and so we should be, we walked 15 kms and we spent 6 hours (there and back) battling the mountain.

So after 3 weeks touring, we are at the point where we don't know the day of the week, we are truly the a vision of envy for every senior citizen. We are also now in the swing of things and "managing" The Wiz. We know that we can fill up water (for showering) at service stations, and have bought a number of devices to charge electronics bar the laptop. We can shower at pools if we need a proper shower but right now there isn't much desperation, we are fully equipped and its only if we need to spoil ourselves will we need to find a camp site. The hardest thing right now is emptying our black waste - that's our poo poo ka ka... It probably doesn't help that I'm super embarrassed to do this, especially when a public toilet it involved. We emptied the waste in a public toilet a few days ago on the sly, they were individual pay toilets and seemed perfect until the 2 of us walked out with rubber gloves on and a foul look on our faces with about 10 tourist staring at us. It was dead quiet when we got there, god knows what they were thinking - what else could 2 people be doing in a public toilet making grunting noises right? Emptying poo of course!

Eamon has been amazing, I don't know what i would do with out his sense of humor. Lately he has found the likes of making up songs (and then forgetting them). His latest song "i wash myself with a rag on a stick", sung in a country tone, has made it to the chart and is currently sitting at number one. I'll wait patiently until its bumped off the top by his follow up single which i guess will be another country song about taking out trash or cutting toenails, this seems to be a running theme. At least he is keeping himself (and me of course) entertained. I too can be entertaining if course, for you're amusement here are a list of things you may find interesting - all new learning experiences:

- Sheep have tails....omg what!? (i hear you say). Well yes they do, apparantly they are docked to avoid butt infections. Hee hee I said butt...

- There are hardly any flies here - probably explains why sheep tails don't have to be docked (omg is this blowing your mind yet!?)

- Cheese is so cheap it's dangerous. What we pay 20 AUD a kilo would cost around 6 AUD a kilo in England. Its really cheap and delish and if it wasn't for Eams i would easily replace dinner with cheese. Not surprisingly Eamon is concerned for my cholesterol

- On the other foot of concern, beer is cheap also, its about half price of a standard slab. So far we have been pretty good, yet to have a "can't find my way to my home with the wheels and the place of the *vomits*" kind of night. By the time we have dinner and beer we tend to watch a movie and fall asleep pretty quickly.

- Coffee is still crap. I can't say anymore about this as I will get cranky.....

- Dogs - where are all the lovely fancy dogs in the UK? So far the most exotic dog i think we have seen is a Border Collie. Most dogs here seem to be small terriers or Maltese. Only one golden retriever has been spotted and that makes us miss Fricakes. Dogs are welcome pretty much everywhere but we know its a good idea she isn't here. She would have killed herself on Snowden for sure!

- People - holy cow people here are nice, like really nice. Not only have we been saved (go back to our first night), had adoptive parents (J & S in Wokingham) but also parking inspectors have directed us to free parking - who does that!?? Nice people, thats who and we have been lucky. Time to pay it forward i think.

- Walking has no system here. Keep to the left? Nope, more like keep to the middle and guess where the guy coming your way is going to dodge and avoid dancing with them if you can.

Anyways that's as much as I can pull out of my hat at the moment. I hope in some ways you have been educated more by these interesting facts in my blog.

So whats next? Well we are still in Wales at the moment. Eams is currently performing surgery on The Wiz while im sitting here drinking a soup bowl latte. We have no real plans for the next few days, we do want to visit one of the local castles here and soon we will need to head toward Liverpool as we make our way to the Isle of Man TT, a fatal motorcycle race on an island between England and Ireland. I guess you will all have to wait until the next blog to even guess what we get up to in between.

Over and out till then xxx

PS. Can someone tell me what day it is? :p





TL:DR

- On the road and totally in the swing of things - nothing bad happened this week - yay!!!

- Visited; St Just Copper mine, "Camelot" Tintagel Castle, Stonehenge, Hampton Court Palace, Tower of London, Cotswolds, Mt Snowden (Wales)

- List of fun facts such as - sheep have tails....bizarro I know!

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