British Isles in Depth

Somehow this blog entry got out of sequence. It was supposed to come before the one of meeting up with Kim in Scotland. Oh well….

As many of you already know, the reason we flew into London was to connect with a 21 day Cosmos tour of the 'British Isles in Depth'. Murray and I had done a 7 day fly-drive visit to Ireland in 2004, and we had been to London City, but other than that, we hadn’t seen much of the British Isles.

When our friend Nadia mentioned that she was doing the trip and invited us to join her, we thought what a great way to see it all. I hadn’t done a tour like this before, so I was keen to see what they were like. It sounded like a dream come true to be met at the airport, hotel accommodation sorted, breakfast and many dinners provided, and being driven to many places that we had only ever heard about. Sadly the dates that Nadia was travelling did not include seeing the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and as that was on our list of things to do, we decided to time our tour to include tickets to that event. If you look at the itinerary map, you can see the red dot where we start in London. If you follow the black line north, you will see a black dot with the number 1 inside it - that means we stay there one night. Where you see the number 2, we stay there 2 nights. As you can see, we go as far north as the Scottish Highlands, then meander south along the west coast of Ireland before passing through Wales and the far west of England then back to London.

So on Saturday 16^th August, a group of 42 people plus one driver and one tour guide set off north along the east coast of Britain on our British Isles in Depth adventure. Most of the group come from Australia, and a couple from Canada and 2 couples from the USA and a gentleman from New Zealand.

We stopped off at Hampton Court Palace and went past Runnymede where King John sealed the Magna Carta. We did a walking tour of Oxford and lunched in a market place normally buzzing with students who gained a coveted entry to this prestigious college. We walked past the hallowed halls...We drove through the pretty Cotswold area and ended up having afternoon tea in Stratford on Avon – home of Shakespeare. In fact we had our bus group photo taken in front of Shakespeare’s wife (Anne Hathaway’s) cottage (see it behind the group?) and then spent our first night in Coventry.

The next day I walked a bit of the section of the old wall around the ancient city of York while Murray visited a railway museum, and we stayed that night in Newcastle. The following day our drive was past remnants of Hadrian’s Wall which the Roman’s built as their first line of defence, and then we crossed the border into Scotland, and met our first Scotsman playing the bagpipes to welcome us. By this stage I was getting excited, as Kim was flying in to meet us in Edinburgh the same day that we were driving in.