Pampering and roadtripping

It is November and both the summer and the fall whisked away. It is getting cold and Scotland is not as pleasant as it could be. Good thing we have a visitor though! Michelle is here and she is pampering and spoiling us like mad!


So far, we have completed a fantastic roadtrip from Scotland all the way down to Wales and back, all in just 4 days. We started off here in Edinburgh with a rented Peugeot and our first stop was Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. That is a place we have had on our list of things to see for a while, and it was very impressive!


We also stopped at a random, but absolutely gorgeous church and snapped a few photos and danced in a graveyard. Hrmm. The next stop was a chippy-lunch in the car (and a new word got invented: Car-staurant) in a little town called Brompton before continuing to our first overnight stay: Blackpool!

It was an experience, alright! Blackpool is a holiday resort for the Brits, and it is like traveling back in time for 20-30 years and it was all about neon, drinking and gambling, but not Vegas style. Blackpool was a dirty place with lots of stag parties and kids running around everywhere. Responsible adults like we are, we stayed away from the main drag and checked out an Irish pub instead and a live band called ”One Hand Clapping” or something like that.

It had been a long day’s drive, so we went to bed in our respective (pink) rooms in the pink B&B we had found earlier in the day.

Oh, and did I mention that “Canadian Idol-Michelle” made an appearance in the hotel bar earlier that night? Video-evidence will follow…


The next morning we drove off to Windsor to have tea with the queen, but first we stopped in Oxford to have a look around and made it to Alice in Wonderland’s shop, and the famous Christ Church. What an amazing town!



We got to Windsor in the evening and treated ourselves to a good nights sleep in a Premier Inn hotel. Windsor was a very nice town also, and the castle was just astonishing! Of course we did the whole tour with audio-guide and everything, but the queen was nowhere to be seen. Rude! I am happy to say we managed to videotape the Queen’s Guards, the Beefeaters, shouting “Make way for the Queen’s Guards!” when someone stood in their way. Not every day you get to experience that!

After Windsor, we hopped in the car again and drove to our next destination on the list, Stonehenge. Other names for the same place according to Michelle are: Stonehedge and Hedgehog. We got there just before closing, put it truly was a magical place! Thousands of years of history and no one knows for sure what actually went on there. Definitely worth a visit!



We continued to Salisbury, a medieval town with a famous cathedral, and found a Pizza Hut where we had lunch and checked out another cathedral before swiftly moving on to Swansea in Wales, where Shaena managed to haggle with a hotel and get us a bargain prize on our rooms. Well done!

The reason why we went to Swansea in the first place was to switch over Shaena’s driving license from a Canadian to a British one, so early in the morning we headed over to the DVLA to get it done. We found the place, Shaena hopped in the photo booth to get a new photo for her new driving license, and so the bureaucracy rollercoaster was on its way!

From previous experience we know that dealing with governments is not the easiest thing in the world, but it all worked out in the end.





After the DVLA, we decided to check out Gower outside of Swansea and an old castle and a beach. Said and done, we found the castle, spoke to Terry the farmer and had lunch at a hotel by the beach.


Time to go home. We decided to marathon-drive all the way back to Edinburgh to save us from having to pay for another hotel night, so we drove in shifts all the way back.

By midnight we were home, safe and sound. All in all, this was an amazing roadtrip and we got to tick another few cool places of our list.

Amazing how far you can get with a GPS, a car game for kids 6 years+ a driver, a co-pilot/navigator and a dinner-lady in the back seat! :)