Scottish Sheep

There are lots of sheep in Scotland and they are really nice, they have long wool and they are varying degrees of black and white. The stone fences seen here are in many parts of the UK including this one in Scotland on the North East coast, they look great. As it is Spring over here there are heaps of little lambs and they are so cute with their black faces and speckled legs, we noticed that most ewes seemed to have twins as well. The poor lambs were all cuddling up to their mother and/or each other this week or were sheltering behind the stone fences though as it was still fairly cold up here, only 10 degrees or so. But I am loving the cold weather!!!

Loch Ness and The Loch Ness Monster!!!

Well of course we felt obliged to do the cruise of Lochness to try and see the Lochness Monster and surprise, surprise we didn't see it!! What a good myth that one was for the tourist trade around Lochness, as there is not much else there to see, although we did cruise right past Urquart Castle which is on the shores of Lochness. Lochness itself is a really long thin Loch, it is 24 miles long but not very wide and in parts it is 200 metres deep, so we didn't go for a swim as I think it would have been fairly cold!! And because the hills around the Loch are nutrient poor because they are mainly bare, rocky hills just with heather growing on them, there are not very many fish in the Loch and because of all the water (which doesn't even get used for anything!!) the fish are hard to catch! But we went to the Nessie Shop and we can at least say we have tried to find the Lochness Monster now!!

Scottish Countryside

As you can see there is some beautiful countryside around scotland and we have seen a lot of it in just a week. The loch's were just beautiful, with their still water and the reflections of the mountains around them.

The Cairngorm Mountains

Only 10 miles from our resort were the Cairngorm Mountains, we were actually staying in the Cairngorm National Park. David and I drove up the mountain and then we caught the funicular railway which took us 2 miles up to the summit, where there were heaps of people snow boarding and skiing. It was the first time I had been to the snow in 21 years and it hasn't got any warmer!!! But it was great to have a walk around, the wind was cold and we watched all the people snow boarding and skiing past the restaurant. We sat inside then and had a nice hot cup of coffee before making our way back down the mountain on the funicular railway again. The funicular railway has two carriages which hold quite a lot of people, the two carriages act as counter balances, so one goes up as the other goes down. And in true Scottish style, someone had there dog up on the summit, the poor dog was skinny and looked very cold, the lady actually brought him right into the restaurant where we were sitting, but was told to take him outside!!! They really do take their dogs everywhere over here!

Our Day trip to John O Groats

On Sunday David and I decided to drive to the very most Northern Part of the UK, to a place called John O Groats. From John O Groats, you can take a car ferry to places like: Belgium, Iceland and the various other smaller islands like the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. The drive up was 235 kms from Aviemore and the scenery varied quite a lot. I think I was expecting Scotland to be much more forested, but actually quite a lot of it is big bald looking hills covered in brown heather. On the drive up north we passed some very rugged scenic coastline when our road followed very close to the coast and it was really nice, there were paddocks of sheep and highland cattle grazing on green paddocks with huge cliffs down to the blue sea. We arrived at John O Groats at lunch time and there really isn't anything there much except for a few little shops, including an amazing souvenir shop that we thought would be a nightmare to do a stocktake in!! Anyway there was a public toilet there with a turnstile to go through where you had to pay 20 pence to use. There was an old lady sitting in an office in between the mens and the womens toilet and her job was to give customers change if you didn't have the correct 20p for the toilets!!! We only saw about a dozen or so people there for the whole time we were visiting and I thought this poor old lady must have had THE MOST boring job in the world!!! I don't think the local councils in Australia would employ someone for that job. A sign post at John O Groats said it was something like 11,212 miles to Canberra! We saw a car ferry come and go but apart from that and looking at the souvenir shops and taking the photo of us at the end of the UK there really wasn't anything to do. So we turned around and drove home, it was a nice drive saw a few oil wells out in the sea and a couple of wind turbines way out to see as well and a couple of castles perched on the coastline as well.

Little Moreton Hall

On the way to the canal boat Gerda took us to visit a really old house owned by the National Trust called Little Moreton Hall in Cheshire. It was a magnificent Tudor style timber-framed manor house which has changed little in over 500 years!! It had a moat all the way around it and an old orchard it also had a historic knot garden, which I think means lots of little box hedges in a pattern because that it what it was!! There was a grass covered mound in the garden which has been created from the dirt they dug up to create the moat, this was used to check out who was coming up the road!! They were a suspicious and not very friendly lot in the olden days!! The actual house that has been standing all those years has no foundations and the slate roof tiles weight 200 tons!! As you can see from the photos it looked like "The Little Crooked House" from the outside, the staircase to the second and third floors was very narrow and to tell you the truth I was quite happy to come back down to ground level as it felt a bit wonky up there, although the guide assured us it was safe! It even had a toilet, which was really just a hole from the upper floor down through to the moat, so I am guessing swimming or fishing in the moat wouldn't have been a good option!! It had some elaborately carved timber and painted internal walls and patterned glass windows. And as you can see in one of the photos the builder actually carved his name, and the year he built the additions outside above the windows, a good bit of free advertising!!! Above the kitchen and looking out into one of the big rooms was a loft where the minstrels would have been put to entertain the people below with their music!

re the Blog

Have had a bit of trouble uploading photos due to the speed of the internet over here, hopefully I will get some more uploaded soon. Stay posted!!!

Edinburgh

Left: outside the War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle
Below: Looking down over the city of Edinburgh from the Castle Walls

Last Friday morning we caught the train from Derby to Edinburgh which was a four and a half hour train journey. It was a nice trip, good train, very fast and lovely scenery along the way, some really nice rugged coast line as we got up nearer to Edinburgh. We checked into the Edinburgh Lodge which we were pleasantly surprised to find looked as good as on the internet! And as the day was cold we were pleased also to find that it was lovely and warm!!! On Saturday we caught the mandatory On/Off bus which we have decided is the best way to have an informed look around the cities (and they all seem to have them). That way we get the commentary on all the sites and we don't have to try and find all the individual highlights on our own in a city we haven't been before. Edinburgh is a very big city and has heaps of statues, monuments and the usual array of historic buildings we have come to expect on our trip around the UK. We saw the house where Robert Louis Stevenson grew up in Edinburgh, the Queens residence in Edinburgh, the lovely old Royal Lane and of course Edinburgh Castle which is fairly well fair in the middle of the city on this great big hill of rock! It is very big inside the walls and had a great military museum with some terrific displays of memorabilia. It also houses the Scottish Royal Jewels, which weren't a patch on the ones in the Tower of London. Anyway it was great to see it, certainly the biggest castle we have seen to date, and we've seen a few!! After we had done a few hours of sightseeing, we picked up our hire cars and Jenny and Joll went off south east to Stranrear where the Jolly's originally came from and then onto the Isle of Skye where Jenny's fathers family came from for a few days. David and I headed north up through Perth and onto Aviemore where we had booked at the Dalfaber Golf and Country Club. It was a lovely drive over a couple of spectacular bridges leaving Edinburgh and then through the lovely green countryside.

Our week on the Canal Boat

We have just finished our week cruising the canals around Derbyshire. We arrived last Friday and David and Joll had a lesson on how to drive the boat and how to work all the bits and pieces that kept it going. It was 64 ft long and 8ft wide and had a lounge and kitchen up the front with a good stove/oven/grill as well as a fridge and all the necessary cooking things like saucepans etc. It also had three double bedrooms (well skinny double beds!!) a bathroom/toilet and another separate toilet and a long thin passage down one side (and I mean thin!!). It was a really fun week, very relaxing, especially for Jenny and I as we didn't do any of the driving!!! There is a whole canal boat world out there we didn't know about!!! The marina that we left from had heaps of boats moored there, and we were to see many, many more whilst we spent our week cruising the canals. Many people actually live permanently on them, some were really flash, others old tubs, all were named and some had very decorative painting on them, lots of them had planters of flowering plants, some had herbs growing in pots too. And I think the majority of them had dogs!!! They obviously love dogs over here, they take them everywhere, on trains and to the pub, we noticed some of the pubs had signs saying dogs welcome, just sit them on the floor not the furniture!!! One night we were having tea in a pub on the canal at Fradley Junction and the pub owner came downstairs, through the lounge with his two dogs, one was a labrador and the other a huge Irish Wolfhound, who then went back upstairs with a packet of MM's in his mouth which apparently he opens himself and eats!! There are over 3000 miles of interconnecting canals that go all around England, so no wonder some people live permanently on the canal boats cruising the countryside. Most of the people we met were very friendly and would say g'day as we passed each other, the canals are only about 10 feet wide so you couldn't really pretend you didn't see whoever was passing by. Part of canal boat cruising though is passing through locks, we had to navigate through a varying number of loch, around 20 each way. The first lock was a bit scary, but after that we got the hang of it, we were quite expedient at it, thee locks varied in depth from 3ft to up to 12ft, but really only took about 5 minutes to get through them, depending on whether the water was at the right level for the direction we were heading. We saw heaps of birds, and as it is spring, we saw lots of ducks with ducklings and swans nesting right on the edge of the canal, also saw some baby goslings. We saw lovely countryside, farms and rolling hills in the distance, cows, sheep, rabbits and one day a big grey squirrel. I was a bit excited to see the squirrel, he was sitting up looking at us just near the canal and, I rushed to get my camera open and got a lovely shot of a squirrel's tail in the distance!!! We are not sure how many miles we did over the course of the week, the top speed is only 4 miles per hour, but it seemed like a long distance. We were supposed to keep the motor going for 6 hours per day to charge the batteries and ensure we had hot water and lights etc so we did cruise for quite a while, then find a good spot to moor, have a snooze, a read or a wander around the town before tea. We stopped every night at a different place, either just along the canal in the countryside or in a village. The villages were so cute, typical of what I expected, they all love their flowers and there are heaps of pots of flowering plants in their gardens, in window boxes and in big pots around the streets. The villages were fairly small and didn't have many shops, just a couple of pubs, so we generally went there for tea each night. The food is good and quite cheap at the pubs, but they all seem to serve the same vegies: carrots and peas!!! The boys did a great job of steering the boat through the sometimes very narrow canals, it wasn't an easy job as the boat was very long and sometimes the wind would blow it off course also, we had one episode where another canal boat went past us too fast and we got caught in his wake and made the boat head for the canal bank and the trees, there was a family of ducks with ducklings just there and they certainly scattered up the bank to safety very quickly!!! But we all agreed it was a great way to spend a week, a new experience for us all.

David's Visit to Lloyds of London

Whilst we were in London, David arranged to go to work one day!! He had some work to do for WFI at the Aon Benfield office and then he was taken to the famous Lloyds of London, where he met with the reinsurers. He was very excited (as an insurance person) to visit Lloyds and couldn't believe the security and history of the place! After he had done his work, he went to the local pub for a few pints with the boys! That night the CEO of OAMPS UK, David Barrett and his wife Helen took us out for dinner. We went to a restaurant not far from where we were staying called "La Petite Maison " It was a french restaurant and it was really busy (it was right next door to Clarridges where Gordon Ramsay has one of his restaurants). I had an entree of grilled aubergine with parmesan cheese and prawns and for main I had a sea bass fillet cooked in a salt crust, it was unbelieveable food, so nice, the entree was just the best thing I had ever had! It was good to have a night out with someone who lives in London and to hear all about their life living in such a big busy city.

The Canal Boat

This is our canal boat when we moored at Alrewas which was a really lovely little village, we went to the pub three times for meals and we were almost locals by the time we left, one day we went there for lunch and there was nobody in the street, we commented on how quiet it was, we then opened the door to the pub and it was absolutely packed, the whole town must have been there, there was a walking group who had just come back from a long walk, a 40th birthday, and a room full of old ladies celebrating something! And it was mid week, we couldn't get a table and had to go for a walk and come back later!!!

Our Canal Boat Visitor!!

When we just arrived at one of our stopover villages on our canal boat called Alewares we looked up at our canal boat door and there was a ginger cat who looked just like our Charlie boy at home looking in the window at us. He could get his little paw inside the front metal door and open it and he just wandered in and made himself at home!! As Joll and David are not cat lovers, they tossed him out the front door (in a nice way!!), but the back door of the canal boat was open so the next minute he was back in!!! David and Joll were off doing something and Jenny and I were having a rest and a read in the lounge area, so he came back in and settled in on the couch next to Jenny in the sun and had a snooze!! We later realised that he lived on the canal boat that was parked next door, we saw him in there, no wonder he knew how to get about so confidently on a canal boat!!

Harrods

Jenny and I caught the underground to Harrods, it was so quick only a couple of stops away from our hotel. Jenny and I were just in heaven wandering around the food court which had every type of food imaginable. The food court was made up of several different rooms full of food, we couldn't believe what a great shop it was!! We could have wandered around there all day just looking at the food, we bought cupcakes and a couple of souvenirs and then had a look at the other different levels of Harrods. We saw a sable jacket that was only short and it was on sale, it was down from £48,000 to $27000, what a bargain!! They even had a school uniform shop section, it was a bit more upmarket than ours at Our Lady of Lourdes!! We also checked out the Lady Di and Dodi memorial in the basement and there is a life size statue of Dodi's old man as well.

More Chester Visit Photos

Just a few more photos of the streets of Chester where you can see the old Roman Wall that crosses between the shops in one of the main streeets.

Als the Cathedral including part of the marble mosaic mural

Visiting Chester

Whilst we were staying in Port Sunlight David and I walked to the Port Sunlight Railway Station which was only a few minutes walk through the beautiful village from Joe & Emily's house, from there we caught the train to Chester which was about 30 minutes away. Chester was an old Roman city and it still has a wall surrounding part of the city as you can see in the photo on the left. The wall was originally built about 1900 years ago and it is still a complete wall today, although they have had to do a few repairs throughout the years! We walked almost all the way around and it gives you a great view of the city both in and outside the walls, it follows the River Dee in parts and we also walked past the Chester Racecourse which was preparing for a race meeting a couple of days later. It was practically in the middle of the town, very handy for a big day at the races, the course and the grandstands looked magnificent. We visited the huge Anglican Cathedral in Chester, there were blokes digging in the front yard of the Cathedral, I thought they were putting in a new footpath but it turns out they were actually archeologists and they showed us some old tiles that they had just dug up! The Cathedral was so huge, shaped like a cross, it had these huge murals which must have been 5 or 6 metres high and may be 20 metres or more long, they were all made of marble and the tiles were tiny, it was just amazing. They also had on display a really small painting, maybe about 3" x 4" which was painted on a web made by caterpillars, it was very fine and the painting was very intricate and like most other things over here it was very old!! The Cathedral had a guided walk where we just wore these earphones and when you went near something of interest it started to tell us about it. When we had finished checking out the Cathedral we had lunch in the old Monks Refectory, which itself was a huge church like room complete with stain glass windows that would have been like you would see in any church and coats of arms on the ceiling, I can't believe all the trouble they went to in the olden days, hopefully some of the monks looked up and appreciated the efforts whilst they were eating their tea! The streets of Chester were filled with beautiful old shops, cobbled streets, narrow with no cars in a lot of them as well as some bigger department stores. David lost his green WFI beanie as we were wandering around, so someone in Chester will probably by now be doing some free advertising for Wesfarmers Federation Insurance. We thought Chester was a beautiful old city and well worth the visit.

Lady Lever Gallery

We visited the Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight which Lord Lever built and named after his wife (what a good man!!) As Port Sunlight is only a small village we didn't expect to see too much in the gallery, the gallery was Lord Levers personal collection of art and artefacts. The building itself was beautiful, huge ceilings and very ornate. (It can be seen in the photo on the right in the distance). There were huge rooms filled with original pieces of furniture from the 19th century, huge sculptures, paintings, just an amazing array of different things. There was a chinese punch bowl which was really large and looked liked a normal very decorated punch bowl from today and it was actually dated 50 years before Australia was discovered!!! To think someone over here was already partying and drinking punch and we hadn't even been discovered yet!!

There was a whole room set aside for Lord Lever's Wedgwood Collection which had heaps of different pieces including three of the last four remaining full fireplace surrounds left in the world!! There was pieces of roman glass from the first century and a collection of greek urns which were in excellent condition and one of them was dated 500 years BC!!! We intended having a look at the gallery then walking around the village but we were just in awe of the whole gallery and ended up spending most of the afternoon in there. And entry to the gallery was Free! Amazing.

Our Stay at Port Sunlight

We arrived at Liverpool station and were met by Joe and Emily McArdle, Joe is the brother of our friend Clare Parks in Brisbane and they were kindly having us stay with them for a couple of nights. After we had lunch Emily dropped us at the Port Sunlight Museum where we watched a video about the history of Port Sunlight. It is an unbelievable story about the Lever Brothers who on 3/3/1888 decided to build a village to house the workers who worked in their factory which produced the Sunlight Soap which is known around the world. Port Sunlight industrial village is said to be the finest and most complete example of early urban planning in the UK. William Lever was a man way ahead of his time, he believed that providing his staff (of which there were many thousand) with good accommodation, lots of green space, an education and a bit of culture, they would be happy at home and would work well in the factory. In a time when most people lived in slums in the area, he provided excellent housing, there were rules involved like, you could only live in the house as long as you remained working at the factory, and any children had to be educated. So he commissioned 30 diferent architects who entered a competition to design homes for his village, but he put in the fine print that all entries in the competition would then become his property. So when the competition was completed he then used all the different architects designs to build the village of Port Sunlight. He also built a school for the children, a church, and because he believed in educating his workers about the arts he build at theatre (which is still active today) and the prestigious Lady Lever Art Gallery which he filled with his personal collections of art. There is also a Lever Brothers War Memorial,the second largest in the country. He built a hall which is best known as the venue for Ringo Starr's first gig with the Beatles. He had a mens club and a girls club, sporting areas and a swimming pool as he believed in excercise to keep his workers fit and healthy. Wandering around the village it is just amazing to see all the different architectural styles, all the parks and gardens which are still maintained at a cost of £1 per year to the residents!!! And he used to take his whole factory staff away for trips to places like Venice, he would put them all on the train, he had built his own train line and port to export his product. William Lever was later knighted and became Lord Lever Hulme, he and his wife both have tombs next to each other outside the Christ Church opposite to where Emily and Joe live, the tombs are amazing, the have life size statues carved statues lying down on the top of the tombs which I assume look like themselves!!It is really quiet here and you can just wander around the village, there is a walking tour which Joe took us on last night after tea and told us all about the history of the place, it is so interesting and hard to believe that Lord Lever had the foresight to create such a place for his workers way backin 1888.

The London Underground

We did quite a few trips on the London Undergound, I couldn't believe how long the escalator was to go down from street level to the first platform and then at some of the stations there were escalators down again, it didn't pay to think about how far underground we were really!! But they are so fast and Jenny and I thought we were timing the trains perfectly as we didn't have to wait more than a minute each time we went to get on one, then we realised that there were just so many trains on each line that they actually must turn up every couple of minutes or so. When David and I were leaving London to catch a train to Euston station in the underground and then onto Liverpool, we were trying to get into Green Park Station about 9.00 am and it seemed like everyone else in London was trying to leave Green Park station!!! We had our suitcase with us and it was so hard to get through the crowd to get down to our platform!! The underground sure beats trying to get around on the buses on the crowded streets I think. One one of the trips on the underground there were a couple of people who had there dogs with them. Jenny and I sat down and the man next to me had one of those bull terrier looking dogs who looked very mean. Well the dog looked at Jenny and Jenny looked at the dog, the next minute the dog was over with its head on Jenny's knee peering up at Jenny for a pat!!! And I was thinking how much Angela (my sister) would hate it!!!!

Squirrels

We saw our first squirrels in St James Park, they are so cute and obviously get fed by the tourists as they came running out of the garden near where we were. They are much smaller than I imagined.

Buckingham Palace

Of course we visited Buckingham Palace along with a few thousand others!! We got there for the changing of the guards which was interesting, they really do carry on with a lot of fuss!!! But it was very colourful and the music was good as the boys marched past us, changed the guards and then marched back to where they came from. I think if I was running Buckingham Palace I would rip up all the red aspalt and sow a bit of lawn and some flowers in the Queens front yard it is a bit bare we thought. The St James gardens next door were very nice though.