British Isles Trip

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<p>This summer, my husband and I will celebrate our 30 th anniversary. He is interested in going to Wales and we want to travel around other areas as well. We will probably take about two weeks. We both are healthy.</p>

<p>Years ago, we went to Edinburgh, London, and through a bit of the English countryside.</p>

<p>Where should we go? Any suggestions on what we should not miss?</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

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<p>I’m British, so I like to think that I can help! </p>

<p>But to narrow it down a bit first -
What do you enjoy doing with your spare time?
Rural or urban areas?
Modern or historic sites?
Is hiking attractive to you at all?
Are you on a budget?
Shakespeare?
Roman history?
Palaces?
Shopping?
Seaside?
Film sets? If you’ve been watching Downton Abbey, then you can go and visit Highclere Castle (Berkshire) where it was filmed; Harry Potter is another that springs to mind and there are HP film sets across the country.
Do you prefer to stick to places that tourists frequent, or would you like to get off the beaten track a little? </p>

<p>If you’re going to explore Wales properly, then you are very much going to need to rent a car; I presume this is an option, but if not then please say so! Don’t forget to budget for the cost of petrol - the average price for a <em>litre</em> of unleaded petrol is £1.32, which is $8 per US gallon. Make sure you rent something small and fuel efficient! </p>

<p>And when you say British Isles, are you including Northern Ireland and the Republic, or are you sticking to England, Wales and Scotland (Great Britain)?</p>

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<p>Happy anniversary! That’s terrific. Enjoy your trip. </p>

<p>I loved Wales - wonderful place. I really liked York a lot. Spend an hour or two walking the city walls, tour the cathedral, amble through the Shambles. I’d recommend it.</p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

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<p>Not that you brought it up, but if you <em>are</em> in York , we liked this place.
[url=&lt;a href=“http://jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk%5DJorvik%5B/url”&gt;http://jorvik-viking-centre.co.uk]Jorvik[/url</a>]
Our friend who is from the area kept correcting us and calling them “Danish settlers”, saying that Vikings was a prejudicial term…</p>

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<p>Go see - </p>

<p>York - nice medieval center
Hadrian’s wall in northern England
Conwy, Wales - it’s a nice little town surrounded by a castle wall. This is at the northern end of Wales. You can start driving through Wales from that point.
Explore Scotland - bring a jacket because summer there is like winter in some other places</p>

<p>If you don’t plan on going to London on this trip you might want to consider flying into Manchester, England since it right up there next to Wales and Scotland (and York, Hadrian’s wall).</p>

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<p>Thank you all.</p>

<p>We are fairly open to ideas, boomting. We are just starting to plan, but after a quick look tonight, perhaps we will spend a week in Wales and Southern England and then go to Ireland for a week, perhaps taking one of the ferries. </p>

<p>We also have friends in London, so we may want to link up with them. I would not say we have no budget, but money is not a huge factor. We do not usually blow money to stay at high end hotels, but we might to stay a night or two in a castle ( we did that is Germany with the friends who now live in London).</p>

<p>We like to get a feel for the country with some tourist things tossed in. Thanks again.</p>

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<p>Well, since you’re not heading toward the north, I assume you’ll be landing in London. Have you been to Bath? That’s one of my favorite cities. In fact, if you’ve been to London before and don’t want to spend time in London this trip, you could get off the plane, take a train from the airport to the train station, one hour to Bath, and stay there your first night plus the next day. It has the added benefit that it would be cheaper than staying overnight in London your first day.</p>

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<p>Agree about Hadrian’s wall and Bath</p>

<p>Sounds like you have been to Edinburgh. I did enjoy Inverness and Glasgow. I have always wanted to get to the isle of Skye and others</p>

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<p>crizello, we LOVED Skye. It’s barren and wild, and the people speak to each other in what sounds like a mixture of Gaelic and Norse. But it’s truly beautiful and a fascinating place.</p>

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<p>I have been to Edinburgh twice, but did enjoy it. On Pinterest I have seen some great looking places in Scotland though I have not looked at a map to see where they are. We could do Scotland instead of Ireland.</p>

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<p>I want to go back to Skye - only had two nights there. Wonderful hiking. I love Scotland and have been twice for two weeks each time. If you want Scottish suggestions I have plenty of them!</p>

<p>But for a trip that includes Wales, I might not go up that far.</p>

<p>I’d go to Tintern Abbey with my copy of Wordsworth. I’d go to Bath having reread a bunch of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. I’d go to Oxford having reread Gaudy Night. While I was at Oxford I’d go to Blenheim which was where Winston Churchill was born and has a gorgeous garden designed by Capability Brown.</p>

<p>And for places I’ve never been I’d love to see Dartmoor and Cornwall.</p>

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<p>I suggest you look into Iceland Air if you can fly from the places in North America they depart, my DD gives it major points for excellent service.</p>

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<p>If it’s the height of summer and you want to do Wales, go to Cornwall and Devon. They are beautiful.</p>

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<p>We enjoyed the Cottswolds, where they filmed some of Doctor Dolittle. It was very quaint and there was a formation like Stonehenge, but you could get right up to it (no fence). We stayed at a B&B in Bath. It was very relaxing and rustic. We were there over March/April. We enjoyed some sunshine too! The train from London to Bath was quite efficient.</p>

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<p>Cliffs of Dover
Snowdonia National Park
Tenby</p>

<p>Definitely go to some music festivals and/or performances if possible.</p>

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<p>I grew up in South Wales :)</p>

<p>In the south, visit Cardiff Castle, the National Museum of Wales, the Museum of Welsh Life, Castell Coch (aka the Red Castle), the Brecon Beacons, Caerphilly Castle. If you head to West Wales (which is truly, truly beautiful), visit St David’s and go walking in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.</p>

<p>Anglesey in North Wales is also lovely, but very quiet. Colwyn Bay is nice too.</p>

<p>I now live in Southern England so I have ideas about that too :wink: The New Forest is lovely - it was a former royal hunting ground and there are free-roaming ponies, donkeys, pigs, deer and cows who wander around the villages. Also Oxford, Bath, Brighton, Winchester…</p>

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<p>Right, I’m going to chuck a few ideas at you!

  • Offa’s Dyke - a long hiking path which lies along the ancient (as in, 8th century) Welsh / English border
  • Brecon Beacons - again, hiking in Wales, there are wild ponies around too which are always nice to see! Snowdonia is a good alternative
  • The larger towns of South Wales, with the exception of Cardiff (if you’ve watched the cult TV programme Doctor Who, then that’s where much of it is filmed), are to be avoided like the plague unless you want to see lots of towns where the coal mines shut and other industry never replaced it. Having said that, the Big Pit museum is quite an enjoyable museum of mining in S Wales, and you can go into the mines themselves
  • There are many different places in which you can do this, but Midland Gliding Club (Welsh / English border, near Church Stretton) offer one-off gliding (sailplane) lessons in a really beautiful part of the country for £95 [Midland</a> Gliding Club Trial Lessons at the Long Mynd](<a href=“http://www.longmynd.com/HTML_pages/trial_lessons_section.htm]Midland”>http://www.longmynd.com/HTML_pages/trial_lessons_section.htm)
  • the Staffordshire Hoard (the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found) is on display at several museums in the Midlands
  • Devon and Cornwall have some lovely beaches and are quite a traditional place for seaside holidays. There are lots of places that look very ‘quaint’ and traditional (Port Isaac springs to mind, although it is a little overrun with tourists). You could go and have a look at Tintagel, which has the castle where King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are meant to have met. There are also Exmoor and Dartmoor national parks.
  • the National Trust has lots of stately homes around the country which are open to visitors. Most of them make for a really enjoyable visit, but they aren’t worth making a super-long journey for unless you have a special reason, so I won’t mention specific ones
  • if you would like to combine a trip to a stately home with going on safari (!) then Longleat is a good bet. It’s basically a drive through safari with everything from elephants to lions (NB don’t take your hire car through the monkey enclosure! They have a penchant for ripping bits off people’s cars) along with a stately home
  • Oxford is nice, very picturesque, and fairly obviously there are the colleges. If you want to see the weird and wonderful, then I’d recommend a trip to the Pitt Rivers museum, which houses all sorts of archaeological and ethnological oddities (shrunken human heads from Papua New Guinea stick out in my mind).
  • Bath - the Roman Baths (yes, as in they’re 2000 years old!) and the Abbey. You could also have a look at Pulteney Bridge and Royal Crescent. There’s also a Jane Austen museum and an American museum(!). They whole place is full of lovely Georgian architecture.
  • Bristol is about 12 miles away from Bath. There’s the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the Matthew (replica of the ship used by Cabot to discover North America), the SS Great Britain (the world’s first iron ship, and when she was built she was by far the biggest ship in the world, now beautifully restored as a museum piece). Banksy, the guerilla artist is from Bristol, so you will find many of his works dotted around the city. If you want dinner, then Pieminister (St Nicholas Market / Stokes Croft) is a local institution for its gorgeous, traditional and unpretentious pie and mash offerings. If you go to the St Nick’s one, then the rest of the market is worth a wander too.
  • There’s a nice cycle path between Bristol and Bath, entirely off road and largely as it’s built on an old railway path. There’s the all-important cafe midway and if you don’t want to do the journey both ways, then you can get the train back (there are special compartments for bikes). There are several bike hire companies around [Hiring</a> a bike | Better By Bike](<a href=“http://www.betterbybike.info/hiring-a-bike]Hiring”>http://www.betterbybike.info/hiring-a-bike)
  • Stratford-upon-Avon - where Shakespeare was born; there’s plenty of Shakespeare related tourism
  • and clearly London, but I’ll leave your London-based friends to talk to you about that one. </p>

<p>I should mention that parking is often a nightmare in the middle of many towns and cities, so where you can you should use Park and Ride services or research multi-storey car parks before you get there. This is especially the case with Central London - the congestion has to be seen to be believed, and there’s an £8 (ish) congestion charge to drive into Central London. Use the Tube or Boris Bikes instead!) I’ve never been to Ireland, so I won’t talk about something that I don’t know about! However, if you’re getting the ferry and will be going to North Wales anyway, then the ferries do go from Liverpool, which is very close to the Welsh border. If you like the Beatles, then they’re from LIverpool (and so, inevitably, they’ve cashed in on that…) </p>

<p>At some point, when you are driving through the countryside and are nowhere near another tourist, stop off for lunch at a pub. The food is usually unpretentiously traditional and British, and should be served with a pint of traditional beer (ale).</p>

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<p>HImom, which B&B did you stay in? We’re thinking of taking about 4 days’ mini vacation and staying only in Bath this May. (When I say “we”, I don’t mean my H. I’m ditching him and going with another friend who has also ready Austen and Heyer!)</p>

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<p>Went to work today. Thanks for all the ideas. I have to start taking some notes. Loved the tip about the safari. We did a drive through in Ontario some years ago and the baboons were pretty aggressive. I do love the safari drives though and that is something you might not find on your own.</p>

<p>Keep the ideas coming.</p>

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<p>

How can you live in Manchester and never visited Ireland? You’re so close!
(I haven’t been to Ireland either, even though I flew into Manchester - but it was because we didn’t have enough time after the Northern England/Wales/Scotland stuff we visited).</p>

<p>That’s a nice list you gave.</p>