A new adventure Lies just around the bend...............................................................
So I told everyone that I'd be updated a lot as my adventure grows.
My bad.
So. Great Britain. Let me tell you the tale of the bus pass.
We left luton in the morning to get a good start on the day. We went to London with some Hungary-friends (don't worry, we fed them) and saw the sights in Camden.
Camden has streets lined with shops of all sorts. There are several huge market places where people independently sell whatever they can. There's one memorable store called CyberDog which specializes in rave gear. It's like MadMax meets Matrix on acid with black lights. It's nuts.
We also looked for, and found, the elusive Gherkin building. I can honestly say I wasn't ready for it. There's nothing one can possibly do to mentally prepare themselves for the Gherkin. Nothing.
We started from Victoria Bus Station the next morning after a night hosteling in Camden. We bused all the way up to Edinburgh, which took us till 8 o'clock that night. We confusedly found a hostel after most things were closed and buckle
d
down for some Karaoke. We then explored the town a bit, and even found a castle.
The next morning we efficiently planned and executed the decisive missing of our bus southwards, and were stranded in Edinburgh. So we walked our feet off in full backpacker gear.
Some of the walking we did was more upward than normal. Thus we discovered Holyrood Crag.
We decided to take the late bus out of Edinburgh that night, as we're poor and didn't want to pay for another night at a hostel. Besides, bus stations are nice, right? Wrong Mitch. Wrong again. Oh so very, very wrong.
It wasn't the busing itself that was the problem, but the stops and switches. We ended up staying for a couple of hours in the middle of the night in Manchester.This bus station in the middle of the night is just convenient place for the wholesome folk of midnight Manchester to
rid
e out whatever they happen to ha
ve consumed earlier in the evening.
After catching a few random buses, we found ourselves in Cardiff. It's a pretty cool spot, albeit starved for tourists. They've put a lot of work and funding into making their tourist industry as friendly as possible. The Welsh are wonderful people. We even got to go inside this castle as, unlike Edinburgh, the guards had no submachine guns.
We camped that night in Cardiff.
The next morning we awoke cold, but refreshed to a breakfast of mustard sandwiches, grapefruit and beer (the breakfast of champions) and were on our way. Turns out very few buses go anywhere from Cardiff except London. Off we were again to Victoria Station.
Since it was late by the time we got to London, in the interest of economic shortcomings, we spent the night in Luton. A shower and a hot meal later, we were back on the road.
We found ourselves in Liverpool that night, where we enjoyed the hospitality of the Embassie Hostel and discovered some questionable beer. I had the Hobgoblin, Adam drank the Old Peculiar and we shared the Bishop's Finger.
Liverpool hosts largest Anglican cathedral in the world. It was first designed as planned as the largest cathedral in Europe. Funding fell through, and they built instead this still imposing structure. We saw an exhibition at the Liverpool museum with the original model on display. It
would have dwarfed God. (Counter
productive?)
So the buses were full leaving Liverpool, so we opted to stay the night again, and left in the morning. We were set on going to Bath, but the connection at Victoria Station ended up being booked up. We found ourselves in Canterbury later that evening. There was a few minutes, as we stood between two buses waiting for the Ok from both/either, when we could have ended up on either side of the country.
We found another really hip hostel just outside the town proper. We walked around at night again for a little while and found the Cathedral that cost like 7 pounds in the day to approach-but we got in for free at night. We toured Canterbury in the morning and left for Josh's that afternoon, where we've been (more or less) ever since.
Tomorrow we're all biking to Oxford, and hopefully on to Stonehenge. We have to be back for the 17th, to catch our flight to Vilnius, Lithuania. But that's another story.
Also, here's Josh in a bubble. I could explain, but I probably won't.
Cheers
Oxford. Well, When last you heard the plan was to bike down to Stonehenge and back in just a few days. The impracticality of this set in in slowly, but surely. Since we were in the midst of facilitating the borrowing bicycles anyway, we decided that a bike trip somewhere would be good. We opted to go just as far Oxford.
There are some interesting sights we saw along the way. Just outside a town called Whipsnade, we found ourselves biking past a wild life park. We first noticed something strange about the high concentration of kangaroos in this area.....
There is also an abundance of painfully quaint houses along the way.
When we stopped for the night, we decided that it might be a good idea to essentially camp on the side of the road, just out of sight. While we looked for a place, we stumbled across the coolest tree. It was an old fallen willow, who'd been covered with ivy. This is where we slept.
On the way back, just outside the town of Aylesbury, There are these neat old ruins, held up by scaffolding. We stopped and at granola bars in the castle.
