Tara & James Roaming Planet Earth: England and Wales

We headed south to England to discover that the UK can get wetter than the light drizzle we experienced in Edinburgh. After our few days in a room it was time to go back to camping. I wasn't very keen on this, though, so the first night we eased into it and got a pod at a caravan park instead of pitching our tent. This was at Hoddom Castle, despite being very basic it was more comfortable than our tiny tent. We went for a walk in the mud around the castle and down the river, making sure we enjoyed the north of England.

Our next destination was the lakes district because every British person we had spoken to on our trip told us we had to visit here. It was a beautiful spot with quaint little villages, beautiful lakes and lovely hills and mountains in the background. We found a nice little caravan park on a lake and set up in one of the only dry patches we could find. During the night we woke up to the sound of rain and, despite not being religious, prayed that our little tent wouldn't get flooded. Waking up in the morning we found ourselves dry but the lake had got a lot closer, and there were several tents in worse positions than us.

After checking the weather we braved another night next to our rising lake, and were rewarded with a reasonably dry day for us to explore the region.

Next stop was York a walled city of Roman heritage. This was very popular with the touristS, but we still enjoyed circling the city on the old wall and roaming the old cobble stoned streets, especially a small street called the shambles.

We started driving south from here and ended up in Stratford upon the Avon. We stayed in our little tent at the local racecourse where we watched some hot air balloons taking off before we headed into town for dinner. After a lovely stroll along the Avon into town, and seeing many references to Shakespeare we finally realized what the town was famous for; the birthplace of Shakespeare. We checked out the building where he was born, watched some actors do some soliloquays but we still weren't inspired enough to read some Shakespeare. It was a very lovely town though.

We headed south to Wales, where we stayed in Cardiff. This wasn't really on our list of places to go so I don't know why we headed here, it was a bit of a spur of the moment decision. It was really odd that they still speak welsh here. It is probably the strangest language we came across in our travels. Their words don't seem to have enough vowels. Anyway, it was a pretty cool city.

After cardiff we headed to cotswald country to get my fix on the type of England that Jane Austen wrote about. We even visited a little town called Laycock to have some cream tea at the site where they filmed the BBC Pride and Prejudice. It was delightful. We stayed the night in Bath, a popular location in Austen literature. Our highlight here was a night tour we did that taught us nothing about the history but drowned a stuffed rabbit in the river and made us laugh.

Making our way slowly to London, we visited Stonehenge where we walked around some pretty amazing old stones in the middle of a paddock. It was actually more impressive than I thought it would be. It's easy to forget, when you have modern gadgets like watches, that people used their smarts on different things in the past; namely things that we take for granted today and don't really think about - like calendars and time.