6 People 6 Months

Sorry that these post are rather out of date! We have been travelling long distances most days to get to where we wanted to be so haven't had much time to stop in libraries along the way. But we found some internet where we are parked up tonight - in a wind swept corner on the Isle of Skye, though this story is about when we were still in England. Keep looking out for a new post about Scotland soon! The Lake District The farm on which I grew up in Nelson is named Rivington, and our ancestors originally came out of England in the 1840’s on one of the boats to the newly purchased land where my parents still live today. On our way up to Scotland we found we were in the vicinity to visit what we assume must be the Rivington of England that our farm was named after. It was a small little village consisting mostly of farmland, but with some very grand buildings, including a manor and a Pike, (a large conical monument on top of a mountain) a church, cafe, some gorgeous old sto...

View across Brockhampton Estate After some time in the bigger cities we found that we all could do with a bit of country air, and looked forwards to finding some winderness and smaller towns to enjoy. Stratford On Avon was our first stop after Oxford, and we liked the picturesque town (though of course this was rather touristy) but we enjoyed trying to imagine Shakespeare starting out his days in that same place and then retiring there next to the old church. We visited an interactive museum inside a 16th century house where we tried on clothes and lay on a bed like the Tudors would have had, and peered into rooms which the local quack doctor was trying to dole out medicine, and smelled the smells of the pub and the plague of those times. The following day we needed to get some laundry done, and found a laundrette in a sweet little town called Bromyard - just my kind of village - which was a narrow, bunting clad street crammed with shops leaning onto the street, the b...

It was a stormy and thundery night when we left the dock from Calais to England. The heat wave had finally broken and a strong northerly wind was blowing from the sea. But it was good to see the rain even though we had to cross the channel while it hammered and blustered around us. But lucky for us we don't live in the medieval times as our crossing was in a warm and stable boat where not a single spray of water touched us. And the morning dawned clear and sunny in Dover where we enjoyed for the first time in ages a nippy breeze as we walked down the boulevard in Folkston. Looking over to Dover from Folkston By the afternoon we were in Canterbury enjoying the English architecture and history, not to mention all the signs and notice boards that we could all read in English, the cute little charity shops, english books for the literature starved girls (we found a complete set of C.S Lewis' Narnia and 9 books by our favourite author Michael Morpurgo at the op shop!),...

The famous Kinderdijk windmills   We've been a bit delayed in our going to the UK. Poupe had a hard time getting a Warrant of Fitness last week. We were all packed to go from Klaske's house with the beds all put away and linen washed, when at the last minute we heard from the garage that they couldn't fix the final problem. So Poupe was booked in with a specialist but not till this week Wednesday. So we found ourselves with another week roasting in Holland up our sleeves which was a nice surprise. Some photos Klaske took of our time at her place. We stayed another night with Klaske - which was very kind of her seeing as she was just about to get her house back! And then we went to Rotterdam again - the city Josh grew up in. We biked around the city and met up with Josh's Mum Debbie for a picnic in the big park in the middle of the city - a little version of New York's Central Park. It was Josh's playground as a boy, so was lovely to be there ...

Along the canals in Gouda Ah Holland. So lovely to be back here! It's still just as lovely as when we left it in spring, though a little browner. I'm really enjoying the architecture, the bike paths, the grand trees lining almost every road, the thatched roofs, the steeples of the churches and the language all over again. Coming through Belgium and France I had been feeling that I was ready to go home now - that I had seen just about as much as I could take in, and life in the camper was beginning to become a strain. But now that we've been resting up in Holland with our lovely friends Daniel, Glencora and Klaske which feels like a nice slice of home, I'm feeling refreshed enough to move on to the next stage of our journey - 6 weeks in the UK. The town hall of Gouda. Check out the platform on the left  that was used for public executions. D: But first, let me tell you about our week here in the Netherlands. We arrived the Den Bosch on Friday and we met Da...