Blogs from United Kingdom, Europe - page 2987

After 5 years of living in London my wife, Lisa, and I have finally decided to get away from it all and travel. We have resigned from our jobs and have the flat up for rent. This will be our first experience of backpacking but we are both very excited. We intend spending 7 months travelling to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and the Philippines before heading home to South Africa for close on two months. I stumbled upon the travelblog.org when doing a Google search on Ko Tao and have been hooked ever since. We will be flying from London Heathrow on 15th August and touching down in sticky Bangkok some 13 hours later. We are reasonably prepared without having gone into too much detail with the itinary. Apart from potentially booking our ... read more

Noon Saw the tail-end of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. I actually got into it and found it very cool to see our Monarch's residence. But these guards look so much like toy soldiers I don't know how anyone could take them seriously. As John reminded me, we have toy soldier Christmas tree ornaments and if they're hangimg on our tree then I don't see how they can adequately protect the Queen! It is amazing how controlled their movements are. Amazing - but what a boring job. We saw them stand, walk a few steps, stand and then walk a few more back to the little huts they stand in. There must be different ranks of guards b/c the lower ones had to pick up the music stands after the marching band left. ... read more

Tonight we are catching a night bus (9 hours) to Edinburgh since my paper is done for the women's studies/history class, and we are going to see the British Open on Thursday, before taking a day bus back all day Friday to catch the Harry Potter book release Queue Party on Friday night in central London and go home on Saturday. So I might not be updating this again until I'm back home, although the hostel we are staying at in Edinburgh should have internet access - if its anything like the one in Dover (£5 an hour) we won't be using the internet much.... read more

So far we're just getting acquainted with the idiosyncracies of being oversees. I almost blew up my hair dryer this morning trying to sort out the voltage adapters (nothing like have smoke blow out of the motor to wake you up)! Then we had our first introduction of paying to go to the bathroom when we arrived at Waterloo Station to start our day of touring the sights. Rode the double decker bus and saw all the notable landmarks en route. Big Ben is our fave! This is not just any clock - it's gorgeous. There is so much history here its amazing! Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge, Westminster Cathedral, Picadilly Circus, Scotland Yard just to name a few. BUT the highlight so far was at The Olde Kings Head pub where I had bangers and mash ... read more

Our 3-day Isle of Skye tour was amazing! We had a great drive up there - sunny all the way so you could see the Highlands well and get some great pictures. Our tour guide/bus driver, Duncan, was quite a character. He should really be an actor (perhaps a new recruit for the Robin in the Hood Festival?). We made a number of stops on the drive up to relax, eat and take pictures. We stayed in the small village of Kylaken (spelling is probably wrong). The following day we went out and about on the island. We went to the town of Portree where, coincidently, there was a bagpipe festival! What are the chances of being in Scotland and actually getting to see a piping festival? We could only watch for about 30 minutes before ... read more