The Adventures of R+1 and The Princess

Thanks for your patience readers (and Mum!). We've been moving fast and travelling a lot of an evening due to the fact that it doesn't get dark here at the moment till about 10pm. We've been using blogging time to keep moving - sorry. You last heard from us in the lovely Tollymore Forest. We used this as a bit of a base to explore as much as we could of  Northern Ireland. One of the nicest trips was up one side of County Down along the Mourne Mountains and then down the coast on the other. We went to see Castle Espie Wetlands Centre on Strangford Loch, which is one of the primo wetlands for birds in the UK. The Brits love their dogs and their birds. There's huge numbers of  'twitchers' here (I think it's an alliterative play on 'bird watchers'). They have some great programs for conservation both here and in Europe trying to save the wetland environments from evil developers, pollution, over hunting and other forms of destruction. Here's a ...

Not back in Oz of course. Just back on the ethernet. We've been lucky and found the best camping ground in the whole of the British Isles. Tollymore Forest Park. Remember that name. Where the Mountains of Mourne come down to the sea. At Newcastle of all places. County Down, Northern Ireland. The best showers. You don't have to put any more money in or keep pressing the fershlugginer button to keep it going. Hot and strong. The (Northern) Irish could teach the Poms and the Scots a thing or two about showers. It's pretty weird, but no matter what time of the morning I go to have my shower, I have never seen another guy. There's endless numbers of the fairer sex travelling to and fro for their morning ablutions... Anyway, this place is great. The old seat of the Magennis' it's now a national park, and has some of the most beautiful forest we've seen yet. The Irish patriot John Parnell used to come here for his meditations. Some fantastic views and rides t...

Did I just say that you have to be careful about Google Maps on your iPhone? Coming into Glasgow on the motorway, dear readers, I was accused by The Princess of taking a wrong turn. Pointing out that I had been going straight ahead for a very long time now and would have thought I would have remembered turning off, she pointed to the Google Maps in her hand and said something to the effect that I was very much mistaken, as we were 'floating across the map' 'not on any of the lines'. I tried to drive back onto her map, but the traffic in the right hand lane started to object, and we happened to be 70 feet off the ground. The only answer was to get off and find reality again, so I did. Here is a picture of the new reality. Welcome to Glaschu... Turns out Google Maps hasn't yet incorporated the new motorway into Glasgow that was opened over a year ago. This was to cause us some more navigation problems in the future as it's now the backbone of intra-Glesghu tr...

It's been five days since our last post and we're sitting in our comfy little campervan high up on Herding Hill Farm in Haltwhistle, Northumberland. We're just a couple of miles from Hadrians Wall. Despite forecast rain, we bravely headed off on a 'gruelling' (the Princess' words) 30km ride yesterday up 'hill and down dale, more up than down' (her words again...) thru the moor to Housestead Roman Fort. Very picturesque, made even more so by the RAF Tornados flying VERY low level up and down the valley. The Brits are getting their sheep battle ready for special missions in Afghanistan... The Roman army used to send their soldiers here too for training against the Picts. It's that sort of a place. Here is a view of the road out to the wall... and the wall itself...   The day before, we had been in the old Roman-walled city of Chester. Chester is the only city in Britain still to have it's wall intact and surrounding the old city. It...

Finally we have a campsite which has 3G! We don't realise how good our communications are in Australia. One of the most common sights here is people walking down the road waving their mobiles about in some sort of Druidic rite to catch their lost connection! From New Forest we hit the road Westward. Linda's maternal line comes from Somerset, and more specifically a little town called South Petherton. A beautiful little town that's built almost entirely out of the same stone - 'Hamstone' which is mined just outside the town. We managed to get hold of a little history booklet on the town from the pub and went on one of the walks. Here is a photo of South Petherton Central... We met Wally Monkton's mate at the Brewer's Arms and learned how good draught cider can be. Also how bad the Scrumpy always is. They had an amazing tv screen nearly as big as the back wall and I watched Mark Webber get beat.   From here we continued on our cider way to Exmoor, vi...