Home, Sweet Home

Well, despite my last night of no sleep, we made it to the airport no problem and I was able to catch some sleep on the plane. It was really a wonderful vacation, and I'm so grateful for the means and health to travel. We are already planning our next trips!

Sadly, we both caught covid somewhere along the way, but thankfully, neither of us has suffered too badly, it feeling more like an annoying bout with hayfever than anything. Also very grateful for that. I tried to table all of my fears of traveling, and they are usually many, high on the list being that one of us would need emergent care abroad.

I can't wait to see Mum, and bring her and my sister their wee gifties from overseas. In the meanwhile, phone chats are keeping us in touch as they had during our vacation. I am so excited to be home in my own bed with my own stuff and return to a sense of routine that is, while slightly boring after such excitement, a relief to settle the soul into winter's pace. I've been enjoying cooking homemade meals, and we're thoroughly loving the autumn colors and cool windy weather. The perfect season!

Here's a couple last photos: first is Greenland from the plane, the second is us with brother Dave!

Final days

I’m currently feeling extremely frustrated because despite not feeling well, being travel-exhausted and having now a double dose of melatonin coursing through my blood, I cannot sleep. I’ve tried all of my tricks and nothing is helping my tired ass eyes and body fall into sleep. It’s freezing in our hotel room, London sucks because it’s populated with about 6 million too many people, it is bright and banging loud at all hours, and no dinner to be found because all the pubs seem to say they’ve run out of food, so all we had for dinner was a few crackers and cheese. I’m not in a happy place right now. 

We need to be up in 4 hours to get ready and head to the airport for a long travel day, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to sleep on the flight. I should’ve taken a NyQuil pill, but didn’t want to because I knew we needed to be up early. Now it’s way too late to take one, and I’m super pissy. Hrrrrrmph. 

Other than this rant, our final time on our trip was fun! We had a great time on the London Walks tour, which included a river cruise and much walking and a trip on the Tube, then dinner at a great pub, The Mayflower, with the tour guide. After 5 hours, we finally got back to the hotel to chill a bit and get ready for our show at the Apollo theatre in Piccadilly Circus. Upstart Crow live on stage was fabulous and hilarious! 

Then today, after a delicious breakfast at Sandwich Street Kitchen, we met John’s brother Dave around 10 am, took a two hour London Walks tour about The Beatles, had lunch at a pub called The Globe, then hung around the British Library for a bit, and then stopped off to get a couple of small gifties to bring back home. We said our goodbyes to Dave, then wandered until we found a pub that was serving any sort of edible thing, which ended up being a pub we went to on our last trip, The Queen’s Head.

Hopefully once we get home I can edit the blog and get some of John’s great shots put in and maybe make more sense out of the order of them! Anyway, it’s 1:11am and I’m going to try again to sleep. I really can’t wait to get home. 

London!

We made it from York to London, and we booked our same hotel as our last London visit, the Jesmond Dene, which used to have a great breakfast included but now,sadly, doesn’t. So instead of an English Breakfast, which I was so looking forward to, we are going to have Lära bars. But whatever, maybe we can grab a proper English brekkies somewhere tomorrow.

We ended up having dinner in the same place we had lunch on our last trip here. It was quite by accident because we first tried a pub called The Boot, but they said they had run out of food, so she directed us to the The Norfolk Arms, and we realized we had been there before. We had to wait until 6 to order dinner, but we had a beer while we waited, and had a lovely chat together. We were amazed with the dinner, it was really delicious! We ordered a started of “roasted vegetables mezze” and the roast pork belly dinner and they were incredible! 

We opted for two twin beds in this hotel and we are glad we did. There is something to be said for having your own bed so that someone else’s movements or wakefulness doesn’t bother the other person. I got a solid night sleep and feel refreshed and ready for our fun day! 

We are heading out soon for a tour along the River Thames, then lunch at the Mayflower Pub! Then we will come back to the hotel to chill for a bit, change clothes, figure out dinner and head out to the Apollo Theatre to see Upstart Crow! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s hilarious!

Bamburgh to York!

We made it to York! The demographics have changed radically since leaving the sleepier towns. The guys and gals all seem much younger here, and as I remember from our last visit to York, all the ladies are completely dolled up. Like, kind of weirdly so. But we figure it’s Saturday night and all the youngun’s like to party, so I’m hoping to stay far away from that scene! 

The place we got up for tonight is a renovated warehouse looking building and is all contactless, and is very cute. We are just a couple doors down from a pub that must have a sports game on because all the dudes are hooting and hollering. 

Right away, we decided to walk over to the Jorvik Viking Center and we’re able to get in right as they were closing. They have a funky little ride thing that takes you through a recreated town that emulates an old village as York would have been back in the day, and the museum was filled with loads of incredible artifacts dug up in that area. 

Then we walked down to a cool little pub we had eaten at the last time we were here, The Lendal Cellars and both enjoyed delicious fish entrees. York was a bit nutters with all the ladies for their “Hen Nights” (bachelorette parties) and the guys with their Cock Nights, as John dubbed whatever they call all-guy nights here, but after the massive table of “hens” all decked out with teensy skirts, cleavages displayed and wearing, oddly, hats made of balloon animals that looked like they were supposed to maybe be erotic, took off for the night, the evening chilled out to our normal pace. Then Cock Night next to us disbanded for the eve, and a lone card magician who I would guess to be in his late 70s (who had them enthralled for well over 45 minutes) was left alone at the table looking a bit forlorn, and we wondered when and why he suddenly crashed their party. Tips, maybe? They all seemed to know him, so maybe he was just a friend that they ran into there. We then headed back to the hotel where we got a good start on sleep, but both suddenly awake at 2:30am and not a great finish to our sleep.

We had to check out by 10am next day, so we utilized a very cool service that stores your luggage for a fee so we could do the two mile City Wall hike, which is an old fortress wall built around the city of York, most of which still stands today. It was a real cool hike with great views, and we took a detour into beautiful gardens. See all the photos of our meals and last walks in Bamburgh and time in York below! 

View of the dune walks around Bamburgh Castle

John’s delicious supper of sea bass and various peas and pea purée 

Cute view of the quaint town sea cottages

The sunrise view of the castle from our hotel window

Another hotel room sunrise view

I had the delicious salmon tikka kabobs, they were amazing!

More charming little houses

Here is the sunset view over the castle. There was a lovely sun shower that came through, and the sun setting on the castle, followed by a massive rainbow that John was able to capture with the other camera, so I’ll have to add some of his photos into the blog once home. We had the most romantic time in Bamburgh!

The York City Wall Walks. This is one of the city wall towers. Those narrow slots are for archers to shoot arrows through.

We’re not sure what this is ruins of, but it was gorgeous and part of the gardens.

Some areas of the City Wall walk have these railings, others are completely open and it can be a bit frightening when you get to the really narrow spots, especially when groups of people are coming at you and there’s not a lot of room to pass!

Another tower

I should have taken a photo of the Red Tower, but here’s the info about it

A really cool stone inlay. The full photo of it was a little boring looking and hard to make out anything, so I decided to take a close up of some of the details

The narrow stairways of the City Wall walk, and there are lots of ups and downs!

A really creepy enclosure that looked darker than this while we were inside, and two massive gated doors

Another one of those gorgeous arches with one of these cool wire art installations that were placed all around the gardens

This is the cute little insignia inlays into the sidewalks to indicate where the CityWall walk goes

Funky little thing that looked like it was some kind of well or spring

A street with a bunch of lovely colorful umbrellas 

The rowers out on the water as we went for our morning wander

More of the wall

More stairs!!

Travel Day Inverness to Bamburgh!

Neither of us slept well last night. I’ve been up since 2:30 or so, and we had to be up at 5 to make sure we got packed up and checked out. I’m not fond of these quick one night stays and turnovers because it just feels like all we are doing is packing, unpacking, checking in and out, jumping on and off trains, not really enjoying sights or relaxing, so I really wanted to limit them. 

But it’s also pretty miserable having a train day that takes an entire day, so we decided to stay in York a night to break up the trek from Bamburgh to London. And Bamburgh is a bit off the beaten path and a three-leg journey to reach via public transport, but we really wanted to see it, so you just sometimes have to make those compromises. I’m excited but also just really, really tired. I haven’t slept nearly as well as we did in Edinburgh, even with fairly posh digs! Our AirBnB in Inverness these past two nights was incredible! Like a flat we would love to buy for retirement or something! 

Later…Though it was a hard morning, the trip was absolutely worth it! We rode the 6:45am Scotrail train to Berwick-Upon-Tweed (a cute little town) then hopped the bus to Bamburgh. We made it here around 1pm, just in time to drop our bags at the hotel while they readied our room, and we walked the few minutes to the highlight of this part of our trip, Bamburgh Castle! Right as we paid our admission, they said a guided tour was starting in 10 minutes, so we jumped in on that. It was fantastic, and apparently they just started offering the guided tours only on Fridays, so we got so lucky! 

It’s really one of the most quaint towns we’ve stayed in so far, and we could see this very easily as a retirement village for us. The castle owners make it a more historical and for the community kind of thing, so they’ve got public croquet in the grounds, they offer the state rooms for rent(though not for cheap) and it’s a wedding venue!