The Rest of the UK Trip

Man, I have really dropped the ball on blogging. I decided to blog about the rest of the trip in one big post so here goes:

On the 27th we went to Edinburgh castle. Must say, a little disappointing. I'm a sucker for "old" stuff, and although this castle is old, it's been updated so much. Right now, all it is is museums of war memorabilia and veterans memorials. Only semi-interesting. On top of that, it was raining. Hard.


We took a walk down the "Royal Mile" which was pretty much tourist trap central, but we did find a good kebab place to have lunch and some pretty cute baby kilts.


We drove to St. Andrews that afternoon, only to find out that the castle and cathedral ruins were closed. They should have been open, but apparently, they were thrown off by the snow and hadn't shoveled anything. Boo! They should have posted that on their website. Oh well. We had a nice walk along the sea, which Fabio LOVED.


I know it looks like I'm on the cathedral ruins grounds, but I'm not. I took this through the gate.


Since St. Andrews is a college town, and it was the holiday break, it was pretty desolate when we were there. However, we did find a quaint little coffee shop to keep warm in, and then we had a delicious Indian dinner in a secluded little cobblestone alley. It was lovely. We stayed the night at a B&B and had a wonderful talk with the owner over a home cooked breakfast the next morning. We called ahead to Dunnotar Castle about an hour north of St. Andrews just to make sure they weren't as lame as St. Andrews castle/cathedral people. They weren't lame. They were open! YAY. We were SO happy they were because this place was one of the highlights of our trip. Can you see why?


Fabio's favorite view:


Our trip took a slight downhill turn after Dunnotar Caste. We had to make it to the other side of Scotland by that night. We knew it would be about 4 hours, but we didn't realize the GPS would take us on the most remote, narrow, windy, snowy, foggy roads in the whole of Scotland. It actually took us about 6 hours, and by the time we made it to Inverness, we were done. We had a cozy dinner at a pub, cancelled our B&B that was another 2 hours down the road, got a cheap hotel in town and called it a night. If we had to do again, we would have spent a few nights in Inverness, which is a lovely city on the water.


For the next few days, we had a lot of driving to do. We needed to make it down to Stratford Upon Avon in England in 2 days. We made a few pit stops along the way, but we were mostly, again, navigating horribly remote and dangerous Scottish "highways" and sitting in traffic jams on the M6 motorway in England.

We did manage to stop at Loch Ness and Urquart Castle though. It was the only sunny day we had, and it was perfect.

Sadly, we did not see "Nessy," the Loch Ness monster:




The next day we stopped in Preston so Fabio could reminisce about his days at the MTC there.


We got to Stratford that evening, and we thought it would be tourist trap overload (yes, I realize we ARE tourists), but it was soooooooo charming. It probably helped that it was December and not the peak of tourist season. We especially fell in love with our hotel:


View from our room:


The common areas of the hotel were soooooooooo charming! We found out later that our hotel was built in the 1500s, when Shakespeare lived there! Whoa!


Of course, everything in Stratford is about Shakespeare, so we saw his home:


We took a walk along the River Avon:


We saw Anne Hathaway's family home and made friends with a local kitty:


For New Year's Eve, we totally broke out of our "homebody" reputation and went to a dinner theater, where the theater was a circus. We sat next to a lovely Indian couple and had great conversation and food all night. On a side note, I was wearing about 5 times as much clothing as every other girl there. Wow.




On New Year's Day we took a drive through the English Countryside, aka, the Cotswolds. We had a delightful light lunch at this little tea room in Stow-on-the-Wold:


Fabio typed in "manor houses" to our GPS, and it took us on some windy back roads to this gem, straight out of the Pride and Prejudice movie. Even though it was closed, we had a great time poking around the grounds and the adjacent chapel and cemetery.


Even though I took around 600 pictures, this is all that's going to make it on this monster post. We had a great time! It was cold, but we knew that. Every day, we put on thermals, wool sweaters and socks, hats, boots, etc. and we were just fine. There was a considerable amount of green considering the UK has had record snowfall this year. We met some wonderful people, ate some great food and made great memories.

One thing that was apparent to us during the whole trip was that this was our last trip for a while without a child in tow. Come July, our traveling ways are going to change!