Ponies and Sheep!

Tuesday already... needed about 4 more hours of sleep.

Work up in the hostel (Sparrowhawk... forgot to mention that from the previous post), showered, packed and ready to go around 10am. Trucked the backpack and gear back to the car (trip number 981 or there abouts) and headed out on a search for a hearty breakfast (still slightly famashed after our oh so amazing dinner the night before). Found a local cafe which had, much to our amazement of course, Full English Breakfast. For those of you who aren't familiar, this consists of sausage, bacon, hashbrowns, eggs, beans and tomatoes (sometimes with black pudding, sometimes thankfully without). What this really means is 2 grease covered slabs of canadian bacon, 1 or 2 (greasy) tasteless sausages, 2 (greasy) over easy eggs, heinz beans (for breakfast... wtf (Plus they are swimming in grease from the previous two entries to the plate), stewed or pan fried tomatoes and a blood enfused bad tasting brownie. Most of it either isn't good or shouldn't be for breakfast. Like seriously, how hard is it to mix in some spices when making sausage. Does everyone order the little triangle of hashbrown form the exact same distributor? At some point in time in the history of England was there this huge huge huge surplus of Tomatoes that they just had to get rid of and figured that they would make an excellent addition to an already weird breakfast... and then created a tradition out of it to make sure the surplus never happened again? And its everywhere. I sometimes think to myself how I would kill for some variety at some breakfast places when its always pancakes or belgian waffles for 90% of the menu... but now having had english breakfast (pretty much an exact same copy of the exact same breakfast in 3 different places), I would kill for a damn waffle or pancake.

Anyway.. rant over. English breakfast is amazing. I'm looking forward to what I'm assuming is going to be another version (read copy) of it tomorrow morning from yet another source (the B&B we are staying at tonight).

After breakfast, we purchesed two bagets from the cafe, went on the other side of the wall from the cafe and got an Ordinance Survey map and a couple of books, stopped by the store again and picked up some lunch supplies, stopped by a local fruit seller to get some peaches (which ended up being from Spain) and headed back to the car. Full bellies and lots of supplies in tow, we headed out to the Moors (Dartmoor).

So far I had pretty much either been on an M or A level road or in a small town where I expected the roads and streets to be cramped. Little did I know of the adventures I was in for driving wise. Andrea had picked out a few places she wanted to see, our first was a grave that was at a crossroads just a little before the Tors we were going to be climbing. What we didn't know was that it was 4 miles on a single lane road.  A single lane road with 10ft hedges on either side. A single lane road with 10ft hedges on either side that is so twisty and turny that you can see maybe 20 feet in either direction. A single lane road with 10ft hedges on either side that is so twisty and turny that you can see maybe 20 feet in either direction that locals like to drive about 40mph on. Its ok though right... how many of these roads could I possibly need to navigate for Andrea to see all the little odds and ends she has picked out.... (5 days into the trip, 3 of which a large portion was 1 lane roads just like this).

So anyway.. grave was nice.

Then it was out onto the Moors. We started by climbing up a few of the first Tors into the Moors and checking out an Iron Age village site. On the way up to the site and on the way back along the road, we were actually able to get really close to some of the Dartmoor ponies that inhabit the Moors (they roam all over them) and some of the local sheep that use it for grazing. Thus fulfilling 2 of Andrea's items at the same time. Had our lunch (bread, cheese, fruit and nuts) at the top of the higher Tor that we climbed and started our way back to the car.

Next on the list of activities for the day was to hike into Wistmans wood. So, 40 minute drive, 10 minute pee break at the hotel just off the entrance to the path, 40 minute hike in and OMG PRETTY TREES. Seriously one of the most beautiful stand of trees I have ever seen. Hell, one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in the world. Sitting there just 20 or so feet into this little forest, eating a small snack and just soaking in the beauty. It was just amazing. And then 40 old and out of shape German tourists show up... all ambiance had vanished. Pretty trees... full of talking people. Lots of pictures taken... lots of pictures missed as we were running out of time and there was just too much there to shoot. Headed back out of the little forest and back to the car as it was getting late in the afternoon and we had plans to actually get to bed one night before like 1am to get a good nights sleep.

Got back to the car, mapped the directions to the next B&B and headed out. Got in about 7:30, got freshened up, had dinner and got to bed about 11 or so after getting everything ready for the next morning. Sadly, neigther this B&B or the night before's Hostel had internet access, so posts are a bit behind. Also, the toliet was some sort of monster from the the 80's, the room was warm but somehow the window wouldn't bring in a breeze and there was maybe 10% of normal shower presure the next morning when a nice hot and powerfull shower would have felt great... but they did have English Breakfast, so that was pretty awesome.

Well, it is 12:14 am here and I'm tired. I haven't proof read this much and I know there are some errors, but its pretty early state side. So I'm just going to post this and let you guys read it as is... tomorrow morning I'll have Andrea go back and fix everything for me and we'll repost it for those of you who haven't already read it. For those of you who to read it before fixes... I don't care if it doesnt read well and needs a 3rd grade english teachers touch... its late and I'm tired. I'm also still a day behind. But there are pictures! Hopefully the blogger app posts them in some sort of way that makes sense and actually posts them for that matter.

More (and hopefully catching us up and making us current) tomorrow.

Monday... the first day out on our own.

So on Monday, we said goodby to V, George and Percy until next weekend and headed out on our own to start exploring. After grabbing some supplies and breakfast from Asda (the British version of Walmart), we headed out on the road down to Somerset (Hi Carol and Quillhaven family.. from Somerset, PA) where we started our day touring around Glastonbury Abbey and its surounding grounds. After looking over the Abbey we climbed up on top of the Glastonbury Tor (tor is a hill) where the wind was actually stronger and more constant than in WY...  we were impressed. The story of the Tor is that it used to be surrounded by water and was the point from which King Arthur threw his sword back to the lady of the lake. Andrea doesn't buy into it, but I think we should look around the hillside just in case.

After looking around the Abbey, scaling the Tor and back we headed off to Moretenhomatoeoadndeakkzkdy (Mortonhampstead). We got there about 8pm. After finding parking, finding the hostel, going back to the car to get our clothes for the next day and hiking back and forth between the car and the hostel about 8 times (slight exageration, but they weren't close to each other so it seems about right) we finally started to get ready to snag some dinner for ourselves before being ready to drop off to sleep. It was now about 8:50. We started looking for places to eat online and found a few local locations. We called the first one to start to get an idea of what they would be like. Well first, they didn't serve dinner that night and second, they and all other resturants in the area stopped surving dinner at 9pm. It was now about 8:55 pm. I quickly called the store that we had visited on one of our 30 trips back and forth to the car to get 2 toothbrushes (we couldn't find ours from the day before) and they also closed at 9:00 and the lady who answered the phone didn't think I would be able to get there in time before closing to get anything (also implying she wasn't willing to stay open long enough for me to accomplish the task either). After taking an inventory of our food stocks, we enjoyed a nice dinner of sliced carrots, an apple each, about 8 tea biscuits each, a tart to split, a snack size bag of sun chips each and a few glasses of tea. It wasn't hugely filling, and tea biscuits are just about tasteless (Andrea disagrees and thinks they taste like animal crackers)
... but we didn't go hungry, so there's that.

We did have a long day of driving, a full day of climbing and a bit of picture posing... so after our wonder dinner, sleep was happily accepted from the matress gods.

Sadly, all of the pictures so far had been taken in a .raw file format which means they'll have to wait till we get back to convert to .jpg in order to post online. From here on though we've been shooting the pics in .raw + .jpg, so we'll have pics to post in the following blog posts, if I can figure out how to get the blogger app to correctly post pictures.

Driving in the UK.

I've found that the best way to drive in the UK is to find some crazy local driver who halls ass down the roads and doesn't seem to give a damn about possibly hitting the person from the apposing lane. That way I can follow behind, see when to break and have the other drivers forced into their side of the lane a little further instead of riding on the line. The ultimate is to find the crazy lorry driver who's willing to go near or over the speed limit with his huge truck in these tiny ass roads. Then I don't have to worry about anyone being near my lane (to an extent) and yet still go fast enough to get somewhere.

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about;  I used to think that the cross country drive, during road construction, with a Jersey barrior on one side and an 18 wheeler on the otherside, at night, while raining, after 7 other hours of driving, and with 2 cats in the back seat was the worst type of driving ever. Now I clearly know that the worst type of driving is actually any time of day (even just after breakfast and a nice night of sleep), during any type of weather (even a nice clear sunny day),  while on anything of "A" level road or smaller. Its like these people have a death wish for at least thier side mirrors if not the entire damn car. Any road thats labeled as 2 lanes is actually lying to you, its at max a 1.5 lane road. Now thats not an AZ 1.5 lane road where each car has about 1.5 lanes of room with which to wander around in before crossing any lines; it's 1.5 lanes for you, 2 sets of wall height hedges, a few sign posts, oh and a full size shipping truck coming at you at 50mph with little regard for your or your car's life (all of this while doing pretty much only short to medium size turns with about 20 feet of visual warning before coming across said truck, god forbid they design or implement a straight road here).

Driving a stick shift (manual) car again is fun though.

England... day 3?

Ok so I think today is day 3 but I'm not 100% sure. So much done, so much to do and so much driving.
So far, we've flown on a very nice flight with no incidents and landed at Heathrow. Once off the plan we snagged our bags and changed into some fresh clothing. While taking our backpacks out of their duffle bag cover thingies I found that the TSA doesn't like Aunt Jemimas Syrup being in your bag as they took mine apart to find it and didn't really bother putting it back together again. They pulled lots of stuff out of the backpack and only kind of just stuffed it back in the duffal outer bag thingy instead of back into the backpack proper. Once that was all cleaned up and put back together, it was off to rent the car. Tiny little car... but it keeps up with traffic, holds all of the bags with ease and so far has had great gas milage. After about 4 minutes on roads around Heathrow to get used a stick shift again and driving on the left, it was onto the M25 and on our way to Vrinda's house.

We got to Vrinda's house pretty much without incident about an hour later, said hi to everyone and brought in our stuff. This is Saturday by the way... about 2:30pm by the time we got the car and drove to V's house. Once settled, George took us to an old Roman Amphatheater (at St. Albans) and ruins area where we looked around and spent some time in the dedicated museum. All of it was pretty interesting and they had some beautiful  mosiacs and stuff that was recovered around the site. After that closed down, we went to get some dinner. We ended up at a mexican resturant of all things. So while I wouldn't go so far as to call it mexican, it was pretty good none the less. I do think that will be our first and last mexican meal while in the EU area. After that it was off to home, and I think setting up a bed and getting into it, but I don't really remember as I was pretty much a zombie at that point.

The next morning (Sunday), we went off to an outdoor mall to get some supplies and a cell phone. After a few hours shopping we had needed supplies and a brand new 5GBP cell phone and 20GBP worth of minutes (not sure how much that actually turns out being, but we'll find out if we run out of them). After shopping, we went back to Vrinda and headed off to a cool little shopping area called Hitchens. Quaint little alley size streets and about 4 pizza places all within a 2 block radius. Sadly most places were closed because of it being Sunday, but we did end up going to one of the pizza places and it turned out being really good. After lunch, we went to a castle ruins area and also visited an old church (for Percy, Vrinda and George's five year old son) and its graveyard (for Andrea). Once everyones questions were answered and many a gravestone inspected, it was back home for a quick dinner, an inflating of the bed again and then sleep.

Today we did a road trip by ourselves, but thats a story for tomorrow. Also, pictures tomorrow. Anyone know of an android app that will allow me to open up Raw file format pictures?

Anyway.... adios for tonight, more tomorrow.