Still at Hadrian's Wall today. We stayed up fairly late last night, talking with a couple from London who were staying in the B&smp;B as well. The breakfast was very nice here, cereal and a hot breakfast. One of the things we learnt from the couple last night was that we should go to the Roman Museum, because it had a really nice fly-over of the wall on video. After that, they said, we should go to Vindolanda which is another ruin, but unlike yesterday's ruin, this one is still in the process of being excavated, and it's actually quite good.

So after breakfast, we headed to the Roman Museum, and watched the video. It actually was quite good: they had a CG fly-over of the Wall and the fort as it was in its heyday. Other than the video, however, there really wasn't all that much to see. Lots of old coins and things found in the excavations.

After that, we went to Vindolanda, which is still being excavated. This one was actually really good. There's this wall there that they've just uncovered. It's kind of leaning over, so you can see on one side (the side I've pictured here) that they've propped it up with supports. In the middle of the wall, they've actually rebuilt some of it so that it stands on it's own. I assume that they'll eventually do the same with the rest of the wall - but it just goes to show how much work goes into uncovering just one wall.

Also at Vindolanda, there was another museum. But this one had something that the Roman Musuem didn't have - it had actual letters written by real Romans that had been found on the site (along with translations from the original Latin, of course). The climate here allows for certain conditions to develop such that the parchments and slates that the Romans wrote on were able to be preserved - ink and all - so that we were able to read them and get a good insight into Roman life. The letters that were on display we all sorts of different things. There were letters asking for orders (and complaining about lack of beer for the troops), or a man pleading with "his magesty" for mercy - he was accused of a crime he didn't commit, or so he claimed. It was really good.

After Vindolanda, we had lunch at the café. Actually, before lunch my mum went back to the car to get my grandmother. She hadn't come down to the musuem because it was down a big hill. But once we got there, we found out that we could have driven down and parked there. So my mum went back up, but I waited for them to come back. Anyway, I waited and I waited, and no show. My phone didn't have any reception so I could call and ask where they were (I even tried going back up to the ruins to see if I had reception there). Anyway, an hour later I got sick of waiting, so I just bought my lunch. They finally showed up while I was eating - they had gotten lost looking for the way down! And when I say "lost", I mean really lost - what should have taken about 5 minutes to drive, took them 45 minutes!

After lunch, we went to these gardens, but I thought it was a bit boring (we have gardens in Australia!) so I just stayed in the car and read my book. Dinner we had at a pub down the road. It was very nice, huge serves as usual. After dinner, I played pool against my mum (thankefully, I won - I don't think I could have lived it down if I'd lost!) Ended up going to sleep around 9:30 or 10pm.

Woke up quite early this morning. We left the caravan park behind around 9am and headed towards Hadrian's Wall. We had quite a bit of time to get there, so we made a brief stop-over for lunch in the town of Gretna, which is actually just over the border in Scotland. So today was my first time in Scotland (even if only for a few hours at lunch time). Gretna is apparently famous for people getting married - mainly because Scottish law is rather more lax than English law regarding the age of concent, and people used to cross the border to get married when they were 16. I think the Scots liked to keep their law lax in order to annoy the Brits more than anything, though.

After lunch, we made the rest of the trip to Hadrian's Wall. It's not really a long drive (like any drive in the UK), and we got there around 2:30pm or so. We had booked our B&B room only a few hours before at a tourist desk along the motorway, so we decided to stop in and check the place out when we found it. It's actually a really nice place (maybe just because I'm used to cramped caravans in the caravan parks), and I got a room all to myself! It's got a nice shower, a little TV and facilities for making tea and coffee.

Oh, and speaking of coffee - yuck! The coffee here is pretty disgusting. I think I'm justgoing to stick to tea from now on. I was getting tired of the instant coffee mum brought with her thermos, so I thought I'd get some proper espresso when we stopped at the tourist place on the motorway. But I gotta say, it was some of the worst coffee I've ever drunk!

Anyway, once we'd checked out the B&B, we headed over to Hadrian's Wall, to take a bit of a look. The Wall itself was originally built by the Roman emporer Hadrian to keep the Scots out of England (which was then part of the Roman Empire). Apparently, it worked a little too well, because it also ended up keeping the Brits out of Scotland as well! But that was all almost 2,000 years ago and the Wall now is quite different. In most places, it's gone completely, and where you can see it, it's only a shadow of it's former self. When it was built, it was believed to stand 4.7 metres tall, and 3 metres thick. But as you can see now, it's barely head-high.

We actually went to the remains of a Roman outpost called Birdoswald, or Banna by the Romans. It was occupied for the entire 300 years the Wall was manned by the Romans, and after it was probably occupised by descendants of the Roman soldiers who had lived there. In the 1800s it was bought by an English gentleman who started escavating it, and who built a house on top of it. The house is now the visitor's centre where you can look at a display on the history of the fort and such.

It started raining around 4pm, so we decided to head back to the B&B and just took it easy for the rest of the afternoon. We had dinner at the B&B, which was £15 for a two course meal. A bit more expensive than the pubs we were used to, but very nice all the same. It was called "beef olives", and I was a bit worried when I'd heard the word "olives" but in fact, there were no olives in it at all. I think it's just called that because it resembles stuffed olives - the beef is wrapped around stuffing and held in place with tooth picks - actually, very nice!

Having the room to myself tonight was really good, because I was able to watch TV on my own before going to bed, so I stayed up a little later than I had been. Tomorrow we'll be going to more forts and stuff (I think) along Hadrian's Wall, so it's probably going to be pretty relaxing. The day after we plan to go all the way to Edinburough, which will be quite a drive (at least, compared to the drives we've had so far), so it might be a bit more tiring.

Woke up a bit later today. After a good Scottish breakfast of poridge, I went for a bit of a walk around the caravan park. The view here is amazing! The English seem to have this thing about builing caravan parks in the most inaccessible places. The last one was on top of this big hill, and the wind would howl wround the caravan at night, driving the rain into the side. This one is built on the side of a mountain - quite literally! The caravans are precariously balanced on these terraces and the road between them must be at least a 1-in-3 gradient. It does offer an amazing view, however, down into the valley. And up the mountain you can see there's still the usual evidence of human habitation - even though the paddock is overrun with bracken, it's bounded by a dry-stone wall.

We went to Windemeyer lake today. There are so many people here it's not funny. I mean, this is supposed to be going into the off season - I'd hate to see it during the peak season! We drove around for ages trying to find a park. Eventually we stopped at a small park for lunch. It was quite nice, and there were all these berry bushes around, so we had to stop and have a few before lunch. I had another sandwich for lunch. For something so cheap (only 99p for a sandwich), they're so delicious!

After lunch, we went to the lake proper and went for a bit of a boat ride. It was £11.50 for the ride, but I wasn't there when my mum bought the ticket (I was putting the parking ticket in the car) so I didn't hear exactly what we'd bought for our £11.50. My mum thought all we had bought was the boat ride - which was about 30 minutes each way, so not too bad for the price. But when I looked at the brouchure, I noticed that the £11.50 ride included a train ride in the steam train at the other end of the lake. If I hadn't been there, they'd have just stayed on the boat and gone back without even seeing that train!

The train ride was pretty cool. I got to see then watering the train at the end of the ride, then the engine came down to the other end and attached to the end of the carriages. The carriages themselves were a bit, well, "rustic", but quite charming nonetheless. The ride didn't last all the long, but we got to see all the big houses down the river at the end of Lake Windemeyer.

Speaking of the houses, they were enormous. I don't know who would live in them - they all seemed rather isolated (well, isolated for this area - no other houses for a kilometer in each direction), but there's obviously a lot of money involve. They all had beautifully manicured lawns down to the water, and they all had more than one yacht parked in water. And, like everything in Brittain, they were all quite old. The trees in the yard looked positively ancient. Tall; very magestic.

By the time the boat-ride took us back to where we started, it was after 4:30 so we definately got the most from our £11.50. We got driven back to the car park by a cute little road train.

We got back to the caravan park around 5:30. I drove this time, and I gotta say, I don't really enjoy driving on the country roads here. It's nothing like country roads in Australia. In Australia, I much prefer the country roads to the city roads, simply because there are so few cars. But here, you won't go a single minute without seeing a car coming the other way, even on the road to our caravan park, which is a dead end at the other end! And the roads are so narrow that when you meet another car, one of you has to pull right over so the other car can safely pass. It's very annoying!

For dinner tonight, we went to another pub near the caravan park. This pub is right down the road near the dead end. It's very much in the middle of nowhere, but there were tonnes of people! You even had to pay for parking!! The food was quite nice (you got a huge serve, just like at the other pubs I've eaten at), and the atmosphere is very... authentic. Very... rustic. My mum and grandmother were complaining (as usual) and the people ("you wouldn't want to complain about the food!" - the cook had bright red hair, spiked up - he looked like he just moved here from London, actually). For just £6, I got a huge sausage and chips (I love English chips!), and I only just finished it.

Another early night tonight, but I blame all the stuff we did today, more than the jet lag. I think by the end of the month, I'm going to need another holiday just to get over it all!

I woke up around 7am today. I guess I'm still getting used to UK time, not to mention that I'd slept about 14 hours! Had breakfast (just cornflakes, toast and a couple of delicious chocolates), then went for a bit of a walk. It's quite cold in the morning. Looking down at the town of Haworth, it's a typical example of the architecture of most country towns I've seen so far. All the houses are made of the same stone, and all of a similar style. As you can see, it's an interesting effect. The other thing about the English country-side is that whatever direction you look, you can see examples of human habitation: dry-rock walls, houses, sheds, monuments.

We drove today to Ambleside in the Lakes District of England. Ambleside is on the northern end of Lake Windemeyer, which is (I believe) the largest of the lakes in the Lakes District. It's a very beautiful area, like most of the country around here, there's plenty of stone walls and buildings and the grass is an amazing shade of dark green - so much longer and greener than the country in Australia. The animals are also much more numerous. You can abviously get a lot more "wear" out of the land here than you can back home.

We stopped for lunch in a park about halfway between Haworth and Windemeyer. I had a really nice Chicken Tikka sandwich - the English are famous for their sandwiches, and it's well-earned in my opinion! We arrived at the next caravan park, about 6 miles out of Ambleside, around 3pm. The caravan park owner isn't the friendlist person I've ever met but he wasn't outright rude. My mum and my grandmother counldn't help pointing out all the deficiencies in the caravan, though. The small bathroom, the tiny shower (it's too small and it's in like a bathtub thing that makes it impossible for my grandmother to get into), not to mention that there's no bed linned (we had to hire sheets for £1.75 each), no tea & coffee, no towels (not even a tea towel), no dishwashing liquid, etc. I'm a little more laid-back, and point out that we may as well buy all that stuff anyway because you never know what the next place we're going to will have.

After we got here, we had to go to the shops, and then to the pub for dinner. I drove the car for the first time then (it's a Ford Mondeo - not bad, the engine is a little under-powered and the clutch is very sticky. The gears are nice and close together, though). The roads around the country are very smooth and very nice. I haven't seen a single dirt road yet.

The food at the pub was absolutely amazing. I was told before I came here that food is quite expensive, but so far I haven't seen it. I guess if you spend all your time converting between pounds and Aussie dollars, then maybe it does work out to be more expensive, but I haven't really been doing that. I had 1/2 a roast chicken for only £8.95, and you also got a lot of chips (chips here are so much better than Australian chips!). My mum had an "atlantic salad" which was mostly salmon and prawns and some salad and stuff. It was only £7.95, but you got heaps. Salmon is apparently really cheap here, certainly much cheaper than Australia!

Anyway, I ended up going to sleep around 9pm. Still a little earlier than what I'm used to, but I think I'm almost over the jet-lag now.

I arrived in London on the 16th, at 6 in the morning. The next time I fly, if I'm not going to London, I think I'll either just fly to London and catch a train where ever it is I'm going, or I'll fly with an airline that flies direct. It was a bit of a waste of time waiting in London airport for 2 hours for a 30 minute flight to Manchester. On the other hand, the plane wasn't a QANTAS plane, and there were only 10 of us on the flight, so they gave us this small plane where all the seats were business-class seats! Very roomy, and the food they served was 10 times better than QANTAS food (a real English breakfast, eggs, bacon, sausages: delicious!).

When I arrived in Manchester, I couldn't remember the name of the place we were staying so when the Immegration guy asked, I had to call mum and find out. Anyway, I think he might have been a bit suspicious that I didn't know, so he gave me the third degree with all the questions: "How long are you staying?" "Is it just for a holiday?" "Are you meeting your mother here?" "How long has she been here?" "Did she come from Sydney as well?" "Will you be leaving the UK?" "Do you have family living here?" etc, etc. Once I got through that, though, I was home free.

I waiting outside from mum for about 45 minutes before she finally arrived (I learnt later that she and my grandmother got lost quite often driving around back streets...). But they eventually got there, and after a bit of trouble paying for parking (I asked whether you were supposed to pay for parking before going back to the car and mum said, "uh, I don't know...". So I went and paid before we left).

We didn't have much trouble getting from the airport to my cousin Kristy's house (actually, she's the wife of my cousin. Actually, I don't think he's actually my cousin: he's the son of my mum's cousin, so I don't know what that makes us). She's very nice, and very pregnant with her second child (her first born is a charming little lad). We didn't stay long, because my mum was a bit worried about the trouble we'd have trying to get back to the caravan park where we were staying the night.

Though we made it OK. Trying to get lunch at 2:30pm is a real difficulty here. I don't know if it's the UK in general, or just the country towns (country towns in Australia all close down in the afternoon, too, so that could be it) but nobody - nobody - serves lunch after 2pm! It's actually quite amusing walking into the pubs and seeing all the locals look up from their drinks to eye you off. The bar men and women are friendly enough, telling us that sorry, we've missed lunch but maybe we could try the supermarket or one of the "cafés" down the road. Well, I don't know if the definition of café is different here than Australia, but we didn't find any. Instead we found a pie/cake shop and bought some sausage rolls and pasty's to eat.

We got back to the caravan park around 3:30pm, and I layed down on the couch and promptly went to sleep. I think it was the flight finally catching up to me. I didn't get up for dinner, and eventually just moved from the couch to my bed and slept the night in my clothes.