Author: ryan

Well, we’ve been in York for the past couple days now, and it’s really a wonderful city. Beautiful, ancient, and fun. The York Minster (the big cathedral in the city) is amazing, and you can walk along the medieval city walls around the city. It’s been a lot of fun, and the weather hasn’t been bad either (cloudy, but not very wet).

Tomorrow we head south to Canterbury and then on to Brighton. Can’t believe we’ve been here for nearly two weeks already. Anyway, hopefully more to come from Brighton before the long flight home.

Been in Edinburgh for the past few days, and met up with my brother and sister-in-law as planned. Been having a good time, though it’s been pretty wet and rainy here (and cold! guess it’s been unseasonably cold the past couple days than it normally would be, figures).

Since I last wrote we’ve been all over. We never made it to Land’s End like I’d hoped, the time to get there and the weather were against us. After leaving our ‘second home’ with our friends Jo and David we spent a couple nights in Bath. It’s a great place, but driving into it was rough, got turned around a lot and there’s very few road signs telling you what street you’re on. The Roman Baths are very cool though, well worth seeing. After we left Bath we drove north to Bowness-on-Windermere, which was a very nice change from Bath. Very nice lakeside town, bigger than we’d expected, but much more relaxing than Bath.

Since being in Edinburgh we’ve toured the castle and St. Giles cathedral, as well as driven north to Stirling to tour Stirling Castle, and for me, the most important thing, we went to Doune Castle, the castle that was used pretty heavily in the Monty Python film, Holy Grail. I was excited to go anyway, but wasn’t expecting the castle to be as cool as it was. Much bigger than I’d thought, and not full of people so it felt like you were on your own exploring the place.

Today is Kelly’s birthday (Happy Birthday!!!) and she’s out with our sister-in-law shopping, while my brother drools over swords in this sword shop up the street. Tonight we’re all going to go out for the last time before my brother and sister-in-law leave for Austria, and Kelly and I head south to York.

Hope to write again from York.

Been in England now for the past two days, and it’s been wonderful. We got in yesterday at 7:30am UK time (so just before midnight Sunday) and have done quite a bit so far.

The flight to Newark, NJ wasn’t too bad, and while there we got to meet up with our friends Sean and Charmian for all of a half hour during our layover. Once we got onboard the next plane we we knew we’d be happy… when we booked our flights with Continental we were given an option of choosing our seats. We chose the last row, to the far right, which means unlike the rest of coach, we there were only two seats. With nobody behind us we didn’t have to worry about putting the seats back and leaving them there. The only problem with that flight was that somebody decided at the last second they had to leave the plane, which meant a 30 minute delay while the airport sent people to rummage through the luggage hold for the persons luggage. Since that delayed our takeoff we were put at the end of the line of jets, 14 in front of us, which resulted in another 30 minute wait. Oh well, the flight itself was fine.

We got here and wandered through the maze that is Gatwick airport to get to our car rental pickup and get our car. Thankfully I’d driven in Ireland so it wasn’t too jolting to be on the other side of the car and road, and we got on our way. Got stuck in some bad Monday morning traffic jams on one of the big motorways that go all the way around Londong (the M25), but finally reached our exit and after another hour or so made it to Stonehenge, which was really pretty impressive to see.

After that we drove another couple hours to our friends (Joanna and David) house in the town of Newton Abbot. Spent the past couple of days with them, letting them show us around this part of England, which is very pretty and it’s be a lot of fun seeing them again. They’ve been taking us to really great (and small, off the beaten path) pubs, and today we went to the city of Exeter. We wandered around most of the afternoon and got to see the big cathedral. Tonight we had dinner at what was a farmhouse built in 1437 and is now a very nice hotel and restaurant called Sampsons. Very charming old building with a thatched roof and thick wood beams, and a very good menu.

Tomorrow we’re considering a 3 hour drive to Land’s End, though from what we’ve been told it’s not that impressive, so we’re not quite sure what we’ll end up doing tomorrow. Anyway, that’s all for now, more to come I’m sure.

We’re just about packed up for our trip to the UK. We get picked up at 5:15am tomorrow (today?) and fly out at 7:30am. Going to be a long day of airplanes and airports. However, Kelly and I are both very excited. Sometime Monday morning (UK time anyway) we’ll be at Stonehenge!

I picked up a folding portable keyboard for my PDA today, so with any luck I may be able to use my PDA to blog and send emails from time to time. A surprising number of hotels / guest houses we found offer free WiFi now, even in the smaller more out of the way areas. We’ll see how that works in a few days.

Anyway, time to get at least some sleep. Hope to keep the blog updated while I’m gone, if not, expect a big dump of photos and stories in a couple weeks.  

Went for a walk today, only as far as Wilshire Park, but while I was there I snapped this shot of a squirrel. That park is chock full of ’em. Anyway, the photo links to a bigger version. Enjoy!

This past week has been fairly busy. I’ve been working furiously to finish off all my freelance obligations, while trying to keep up with my yard work and prepare for our upcoming trip (we leave a week from tomorrow!). It’s been nearly a year since we’ve moved in and so far it seems that I didn’t butcher the garden too badly, most of the plants are coming in nicely and it’s wonderful seeing all the new growth again after the bleak winter.

A few days ago I (with the help of my friend Andy) started getting some new electrical outlets installed in my garage. Hopefully sometime next week I’ll have 8 new outlets to work with (versus the 2 I have now). Hooray!

Yesterday I went to the local nursery and bought some starts for some pepper plants: poblano, jalapeño, and habanero. I have them potted and am now eagerly awaiting the hot peppers. The way I go through hot peppers (either fresh, pickled, or in hot sauce form) I am looking forward to having some of my own to pick from the plant. Yum!

Tonight Kelly and I had our good friends Amy & Rick and Ty & Aymie over for dinner. Had a great time, and as always it was gread to see everybody.