Visiting the UK, Part I - Heading South West
OK, here we go: Just left Maidenhead, Berkshire to go for a two week holiday tour of the UK (Marielle and I will stay on the same island, e.g. no Ireland this time around). After over three years living in this beautiful country, it is time to go and to see more than London and the Reading area. So far, we’ve headed south and west and are now in Cornwall.
Beautiful sunshine, weather forecast indicating no reason for this to change, it’s time to hit the road and visit this great country. Based on my calculations, we should drive over 3500 km over the next two weeks. I’ve set the GPS to avoid all highways and won’t listen to the voice anyway. UK: Here we come!
Heading South-west, I told the GPS to get us to Bournemouth. It’s really nice not to listen to the SatNav voice, but still know that it is there and you have a vague idea of how far you still have to go. Getting lost on our way, we stopped in a beautiful small town called Dummer.
We then continued our way to Bournemouth. Beautiful palm-trees there… almost felt like the south of France. Continuing our way South West, we drove by Weymouth to head towards Fortuneswell on the Isle of Portland. The only problem there was that it was really difficult to find a Bed and Breakfast to stay over night. We finally found a very nice place near Weymouth.
Day two of out tour. We decide to continue towards Cornwall. On our way there, and turning left or right whenever I wanted, we took some very small roads (they are both ways, which is fun when someone is coming from the opposite side).
Getting professionally lost (as much as you can get lost when you have a GPS telling you where to go), we found a very nice town called Beer (yes, I know, like the drink, but for a Swiss who comes from a country where a town is called Bière, that’s not big news). I can only recommend you get lost the same way as we did if you are in the South West of England… just don’t ask me how I go there, I don’t remember 
We then stopped in Torquay (Cornwall is really far from Maidenhead once you try to get there…)
For our second night, we have settled in a very nice B&B near Bodmin in … yes… Cornwall! Not so far is supposed to be the Eden Project. Sadly enough, when we arrived there, it was already closed and we where not able to even see it from the outside.
We are now almost ready to head North towards Wales and then Scotland, to finally come back on the east-coast of Great Britain. More to come in a future blog entry.
One last thing. I’ll be uploading a few more photos from our trip to my web site…
This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 11:11 EDT and is filed under travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 15th, 2006 at 20:09 EST
[...] Gerard’s Blog A little bit about everything, a lot about nothing « Visiting the UK, Part I - Heading South West Visiting the UK, Part III - Scotland » [...]
July 21st, 2007 at 0:32 EDT
[...] Yesterday, I went to an Ontario Park called “Murphys Point”, about 150km South-West of Ottawa. Beautiful place. Having visited the UK last year, I was surprised by the similarity of the landscape in Ontario, Canada and some regions of the UK such as the Lake District or Southern Scotland. A hint, one has more hills and mountains than the other… I’ll let you be the judge [...]