Welcome!

This blog is the diary of the two-week trip to England and Scotland (plus 20 minutes in Wales) taken by Sue Anne, Bruce, Aimée, and Steve in October 2008. We spent the first week traveling around southern Scotland and northern England, and then we set ourselves up for the second week in a 400 year old cottage in Ledbury in the west of England and took day trips from there. It was Aimée and Steve’s first time in the UK, so they ducked out for a couple of days to go see London, while Sue Anne and Bruce stayed back in the West Country where we had lived for three years back in the early 1980s.

We wrote this a day at a time, typically in the evening after a day’s adventure (though we didn’t get around to documenting the last few days till after we had returned home). We often didn’t have good access to the Internet or found ourselves otherwise occupied, so we were pretty much limited to posting just text on our blog. But now that we’ve returned home we’ve had the time to include lots of pictures, explanatory links, and a series of pen and ink sketches and water colors that Sue Anne created along the way.

The daily blog was a great way of letting the folks back home know where we were and what we were doing, and it captured our impressions as they existed at the moment. But since the format of blogs tends to be oriented toward current information, it’s now a bit awkward to follow our trip in the normal chronological order. So here are a couple of ways you can navigate the trip in the order in which we took it:

Click here to go back to February, when we first started to plan the trip.

or if you want to get right into it:

Click here to go straight to October 4th when we got on the plane.

At the bottom of each page thereafter, you’ll see links for Newer Post and Older Post. Keep clicking Newer Post and you’ll work your way day by day through the whole trip and a loooong post-trip summary of our impressions, and finally you’ll end up back here. Or you could do it backwards by just continuing down from where you are now.

The Links section off to the right will take you to a map of our entire itinerary and a few other sites that might be of interest.

You can click any of our pictures to see a full-sized version in a new window. If some of the pictures in the blog look dark, it’s because of the way they were compressed to fit. The detail will show through if you look at them full-sized. The pictures with the controls at the bottom are videos. Click the Triangle icon to play them. They probably require a recent version of Flash to work correctly. And make sure your speakers are turned on.

We hope you enjoyed traveling with us. We’re not sure where or when the next trip will be, but you can be sure that we’ll be blogging it. Stay tuned!