Crossing the border ~

After a few lovely hours on the last stretch of English Motor way, we made it to the border. Neither of us had been to Scotland before, so this part was pretty cool. We got out, took a few pictures, got back in as soon as we were done taking said pictures as it was freeeeeeezing cold. Like, wayyyyy-to-cold-for-June-kind-of-cold. Anyway, my TravelBuddy decided to take a little video, of just the landscape and end with the Scottish flag. The song that's playing in the background, and the timing was a complete coincidence, but it cracked us up nonetheless. 

(If you didn't know, Scotland is super cold, like 80% of the year)

We had decided to take the scenic route to our hotel that we were staying at in Edinburgh, and boy that was the right choice. I can't seem to find any pictures, which is a shame because the sun was about an hour away from setting, and bouncing off the sea at just the right angles. It was beautiful. And I guess a good lesson in life, if you have the time, take the scenic route. It's usually worth it. 

We made it to Edinburgh a short while after crossing the border, and honed in on our hotel. Now, we've since discussed that we'd do it the other way round, should we do a trip like this again. But we ended up staying at the nicest hotel of the trip (The Scotsman), in Edinburgh which was close to the start of our trip. If we were to do this again, we might save the best till last. But hey, you live and you learn. 

When I say the nicest of the trip, I mean the nicest hotel I've ever stayed in. The place is absolutely stunning, the room was stunning, the views were breathtaking, we had our own turret for goodness sake. Anyway, I'm not going to do it justice, so here are some pictures/dribble material. 

(This is our turret I was talking about) 

The view from our turret (haha) 

 The Edinburgh streets, around the corner from our hotel.

We decided to use the city as our home base, and travel to the landmarks in the surrounding areas. Edinburgh made it to the top of my favourite cities list. 

Road trip PART 2!!!!

So after we'd gotten ourselves reacquainted, said our goodbyes to the ever so charming Weymouth, we set out for the motorway (moan and grumble implied). The beauty of experiencing a trip like this with a non-British, is that you get to hear a different perspective on your home Island. Things that are everyday normalities and things you've seen so many times they're almost invisible, become magical, and things that are only seen in films or read in books. Like a red bus, for example. I mean just writing that makes me laugh, but it was fun to put myself in the 'foreign tourist' category. Whereas before, I'd always travelled Merry Old England in a local, but branching out 50 mins down the motorway kind of way. Either way, it made me appreciate, and see the beauty of the English countryside in a new light. I also got to be the passenger, and that meant that I had no excuse but to take in the scenery (and also take snaps at my tour guide/road trip associate/fellow travellers' request.

That iconic, English country side I was talking about. Oh and a red telephone box to go along with 'British' things. 

A few hours after leaving my little slice of childhood, we made it to York. Now, again with the 'taking things for granted' sort of thing. I'm 100% guilty of doing this, and it might have taken this trip to snap me out of that mindset. The United Kingdom has a lot of history. Along with whole lot of amazing, soul inspiring, stunningly beautiful buildings, preserved to the finest degree. Now I'm not saying that I was ignorant to this, but again with the outside perspective, it's pretty cool, when you really think about it. Anyway, York was just as beautiful as we thought it was going to be. 

 The York Minster is phenomenal, and was also under reconstruction during our visit, which made taking pictures somewhat difficult from certain angles, but as you can see there was still plenty of un-scaffolded-areas to admire at take snaps of.   

Cliffords tower, just a random building on a hill smack bang in the middle of York. The only remains of the York castle still standing. 

After staying in York for one night, and viewing the sights for the majority of the day, we set off on our merry way to the Scottish border!!!!! On the way, however, we were supposed to make a stop off at Stonehenge, missed the turning, saw it from about 600 yards away, decided there was way too much traffic, carried on, laughing at the fact that we were totally okay with missing Stonehenge because of traffic. What a pair of uncultured heathens we are. 

Road Trip of the century, PART 1.

Okay, so I'm not going to gush out a bunch of sappy, sickeningly sweet details, because, as much as I love them, and would happily scream them through a megaphone, no one truly cares. It's a sad reality, but your average Joe really doesn't care too much about the intricacies of your relationship status. Unless you're of some sort of social status, in which case, everyone and their dog cares. But since I'm not, I'll keep those to myself. However! I was in a long term relationship, and for the sake of some context, I was residing in the merry land of England, while he was in the US OF A. 

Soooooo, skip forward a few steps, and we're planning a road trip to Scotland. Many travel guide PDF's reviewed later, we have a daytoday plan and route that we're to embark on June/July of 2014, lasting 3 weeks. We started however, no where near Scotland. We joined forces in Reading, and made our way down to the sunny (ha, yeah right) bottom coast of England, to Weymouth, my favourite place in the whole world. Much to our surprise, it was actually sunny!! (For a non-native English person, this is highly hit/miss, a good 340 days out of a year.) If you've ever been to any sea-side town/village in England, Weymouth pretty much ticks all the boxes. Ample fish and chip shops, an unnecessary amount of ice cream stands, the necessary herd of donkeys (which seem to hate their job more than the average McDonald's worker), an overly priced arcade (except for the bog standard 2p machines (a token child nearby with a face like a slapped arse because they just fed their last £1 into said 2p machine without any return and mom/dad/nan said no more)), a maybe slightly neglected pier, and an overall jolly and/or miserable atmosphere due to the unexpected sunshine, neglected to put sun cream in the bag and everyone's bright red, red raw from sand and exhausted. Whichever way you spin a sea-side holiday, they're awesome, I did one nearly every year growing up, and 9 times out of 10, it was in Weymouth. Which is why we started our super awesome road trip right there. Also, since it's at the bottom of England, we thought it would be pretty cool to say we travelled all the way from the bottom coast of England, passed the most northern part of England, and into the Highlands of the mystic hills and the rolling moars of Scotland. 

The sights of Weymouth (and Portland, a little almost island off the coast of Weymouth)  never fail me... 

The Light was hitting it at just the right angles, Huge rock, just off the side of Portland Bill, which is near to the lighthouse of Portland. 

Apparently some crazy cats try and climb this mofo. I have never tried, in the 20 years I've been going to this place. No thank you haha. 

We stayed in the Weymouth area for about 3 nights, it definately lived up to my expectations (as it always does.)

Sooooo that was the first little branch of our Scottland (not yet), road trip of summer 2014!!!! 
(I've decided to chunk these up and only do a few at a time)

Well, well, well.....

So apparently my determined attempt to start a blog going dwindled and failed. As a 17 year old girl in College, let's just say that I wasn't the most organised with my time. After having a butcher through some Pintrest pages, and a few blog posts, I suddenly remembered that I myself had a blog hidden somewhere, in the depth of the internet. After much deliberation, I found it best that I delete my incredibly boring first posts, and write a new 'first post'. Hopefully I don't end with number 4 this time. I've followed a few blogs over the years, and various Youtubers, and always thought to myself 'Maybe I could write a blog, y'know, even though I could never write in a paperback diary for more than 3 consecutive days.' Clearly that was still an issue for me in 2011, as a 17 year old trying desperately to find interesting things to blog about. 

However, as a somewhat travelled 20 (almost 21) year old, I have decided that reading back on blog posts from this period of my life would be fascinating in years to come. I've had a pretty amazing year and a half, and I guess a bit of back logging is in order. I've been on some awesome trips since summer of 2014, and for the sake of documenting, I'm totally cool with sharing these on here, as opposed to searching through the dreaded Facebook Timeline photos. I feel like the majority of us 'slaves' to social media tend to share snippets of amazing, memorable events, and then let them get buried by meaningless shared cat videos, rarely giving them a second thought. I'm a total social media fiend, however I noticed this downside of sharing our lives through the means of social media. Especially since we rarely have a physical copy of photos, or a scrap book, that we get out and share with friends and family over a bottle of wine, and reminisce. Like I said, I love sharing photos on social media, especially since I don't live near the majority of my family, so it's nice to bridge the gap, and feel part of their lives still. I guess what I mean to say, is that I want to make a concious effort to not be a mindlessly sharing sheep (or Millenial as the judgy ones call us).



So, here's to my second, first ever blog post!!!