bath

Well, the hiatus has indeed been long, but there's pressure from the inside. Peer pressure. So here is my account of our visit to Bath.

We somehow managed to book our trip to Bath for the weekend of the opening of the famous Bath Christmas Market. This meant that the train was incredibly crowded, and our cabbie from the bath train station to the rental car company had to take a detour out of town, around the standstill traffic, to get us to the place before it closed. Then we got to experience that standstill traffic on our way to the super Radnor guesthouse, where we had fanagled an apartment rather than a regular room because some Bath Christmas market shopper cancelled at the last minute. Here are a couple shots of our lovely abode.

The (thankfully very warm) bedroom and bay window

The living area

We used Bath as a base to explore some of the other famous sites around, including Stonehenge, South Wales (including Tintern Abbey and Chepstow Castle) and Salisbury. Maybe we'll even post about those someday. In retrospect, we should probably have used a smaller, cheaper town or even village as a base, but hindsight is 20/20 and anyway, what we saw of Bath was delightful.

Despite the fact that it rained often while we were there - the clouds more or less gathered over the train station as we pulled in - we did manage to venture out and around the Bath Abbey, the Christmas market, the old Roman Baths, and a number of yummy restaurants, including the famous Sally Lunn's House. The slide show shows it all.



On our last night, we ate at the Hole in the Wall, an unlikely-named restaurant that provided perhaps the best meal we had in the U.K. (outside of our fabulous house, of course). Everything was exquisite, from the appetizers (olives for Joey and poached pear salad for me) to the wine to the delicious main courses. In all, Bath was a fun trip. If we had it to do again we'd choose another weekend to go, but the outings were more than worth it.

If you're still checking this blog, don't give up on us - we'll manage to get the last few posts in eventually! There are too many pictures and stories for us not to get them all on the blog, even if it takes a while.

North Wales

A second post after months off? Crazy, I know. Anyway, here's a slide show of pictures from our trip to North Wales which was actually before our trip to Scotland.

North Wales

Scotland

Way late, but here are some pictures from Scotland. We took the train up to Edinburgh which was amazingly only like 5 hours. Fortunate too, because I (J) basically succumbed to a nasty flu bug as we were boarding the train. I spent most of our first couple days in Edinburgh in bed while D went out for the precious few hours of daylight that far north.

One highlight was the Scottish National Storytelling Center, which was awesome. I dragged myself out of bed to go to the first event we went to (and managed to stay quiet ...). The first night was a collection of stories and songs (some in Gaelic) in memory of a late great storyteller who sounded like quite a character. This was no children's story hour as there were a couple raunchy stories, all made even more awesome by Scottish accents and people in kilts. We enjoyed it so much we went twice in the 5 nights we were there.



We also went to Stirling to fill my castle fix. Edinburgh castle is really a fort standing on top of where the medieval castle was before it was thoroughly demolished in one of the many sieges. Stirling was much more legit (no canons).