Celebrating the holidays and hogmanay COMPLETED 2/25 - Page 34 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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That was a lovely sunset and a great dinner as well...especially yours! That was weird about the GPS as the cold winter may be driving it a bit batty! Probably even more so in the states with our winter this year!
Good grief, could you imagine that if you had a GPS that refused to function once it hit a certain temperature? There would be certain parts of the States where it wouldn't have been functioning for weeks!
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I can't believe I forgot about your just begun adventure in WDW and The Dream! I'm over 30 pages behind! May take another six months for me to catch up on it! So just take it down a notch, enjoy your holiday a bit and let me catch up and take in your newest ongoing adventure!
No worries - hopefully you'll all be caught up soon enough.
This was a really nice break, not the same as being in WDW for Christmas, which was the original plan, but enjoyable all the same. We really lucked out with the weather. I can’t believe that out of the nine days we were gone, we only had rain on one day, and only saw a little bit of snow, and nothing that affected our plans or our travel in any way whatsoever, which was a relief.
Despite the fact that we were away for eight nights, we only actually paid for one of those, and that was the very last night. With three nights at my parents, and three nights with Hazel and Graeme ( again guys for putting us up! ), that only left two nights to pay for, and I was fortunate enough to have a Welcome Rewards night from Hotels.com (love their loyalty scheme! ) that I used to pay for our night in Glasgow.
I have to be honest, if it wasn’t for all of that, I doubt we would’ve done this. It’s disappointing that it’s so expensive to holiday in our own country, but that’s the sad truth. At least if you’re staying with people, you can either eat in or get a takeaway, as we did one night. Otherwise, you’re looking at around £40 ($64) for a couple for most meals. Now you see why we go abroad so often, and why we don’t think Disney prices are that extreme….
We got to enjoy some wonderful days out, and of those, I think Chester Zoo was a real highlight, and I can see why my parents love going there. Equally, I absolutely loved both Stirling Castle (and the wonderful light of the sun had a lot to do with that) and the Royal Yacht Britannia. There was just so much to see and do on both that you felt your visit there was really worthwhile. Another highlight for me was enjoying the pancakes and scones at the Old Course Hotel in St. Andrews. It’s something we don’t often get the chance to do, as usually we’re rushing around, and it was so nice to just sit there and enjoy a beautiful hotel on what was the worst day weather wise of our entire trip. I can see why this has already become a tradition for Hazel and Graeme to do on New Year’s Day.
On that note, thank you so much to Hazel for the invite to stay at theirs and share new year with them. Ok, so we didn’t actually make it as far as midnight out that night, but you know what? It didn’t matter at all. We had a fantastic meal (good choice, even I do say so myself! ) with great company and got to experience Hogmanay in Scotland, which was the whole point, so we were happy.
I found a map that showed 37 counties of England online, and that’s probably about right. Although they don’t all end in “shire”, most of them do, so they’re called shire counties, but there are other counties not included in this list, like Greater Manchester, Greater London and the West Midlands (Birmingham), so this isn’t an exhaustive list. However, to give you an idea of how far we travelled, out of those 37 counties, on our travels on this trip, we went through the following counties:
Kent
Essex
Hertfordshire
Bedfordshire
Northamptonshire
Leicestershire
Shropshire
Staffordshire
Cheshire
Lancashire
Cumbria
Northumberland (new to me this trip)
Durham (new to me this trip)
Yorkshire
Nottinghamshire
Lincolnshire
Rutland (new this trip – note: I’ve travelled this way before many years ago, but this county only recently came back into existence. Don’t ask – it’s a long story…)
Cambridgeshire
I’ve now travelled through every of the shire counties in England with the exception of Herefordshire, near the Welsh border, so one day I’m going to have to head there to complete the clean sweep!
Now there are apparently 30 counties in Scotland, but of those 12 apply to Glasgow and Edinburgh, so we’ll take those as one each, as London above is taken as one. That takes us down to 20 counties in Scotland. How many of those did we go through?
Dumfries and Galloway
Edinburgh
Fife
Glasgow
Perth and Kinross
South Lanarkshire
Ok, so we need to do some more work on visiting more of Scotland, and after they voted to remain part of the UK, I did say that we’d make an effort to do just that. I’d like to get back to the Edinburgh area, as there are still some things I’d like to do – namely drive up Arthur’s Seat to see the view from there and the Falkirk Wheel, neither of which we managed on this trip. I noticed on our travels that there are some National Trust properties in that area, so that would make for a nice weekend sometime. We’ll see how things work out.
I’d also like to make it up to the upper ends of Scotland, as I’ve also wanted to visit Loch Ness to have a chat with Nessie and I’ve heard it’s a beautiful part of the world as well, so I hope more trips north of the border are in our future.
In total, we drove more than 1,100 miles during this trip, so kudos to Mark for doing all that driving and thanks to you for reading along with it. I hope you enjoyed reading all about it as much as we enjoyed actually taking the trip.
Thanks for sharing your trip with us. I enjoying reading about it and seeing all the beautiful places you went to. You guys really covered a lot of ground.
Liz
A wonderful trip! Interesting how many counties you traveled through. Of course, it helps that the UK is smaller than Texas! I look forward to more of your explorations of Northern Scotland and maybe Herefordshire.
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Thanks for taking me along on another one of your great TRs! I enjoyed it so much and can't believe the amount of territory you and Mark covered with the driving!
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October 6, 2017-Enjoying an amazing dinner at Victoria & Albert's with PP's Dot and Drew
My TR from my most recent trip is now underway. Includes: Universal Studios Florida, Disney World and Sea World Orlando Trifecta TR -Updated December 10th! TR is now COMPLETED!
Celebrating the holidays and hogmanay COMPLETED 2/25
I'm on a mission to catch up on Globetrotting TRs that I missed, and I realized that I started this one but never finished it ! So I've put that to right. What a wonderful trip! I think that the Royal Yacht Britannia was my favorite part. I'd love to see that! Thanks for a fantastic TR!
I'm on a mission to catch up on Globetrotting TRs that I missed, and I realized that I started this one but never finished it ! So I've put that to right. What a wonderful trip! I think that the Royal Yacht Britannia was my favorite part. I'd love to see that! Thanks for a fantastic TR!
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That was weird about the GPS as the cold winter may be driving it a bit batty! 
Probably even more so in the states with our winter this year! 
I'm over 30 pages behind! 
So just take it down a notch, enjoy your holiday a bit and let me catch up and take in your newest ongoing adventure! 
Like
Thank
Pixie Dust
again guys for putting us up! 
) that I used to pay for our night in Glasgow. 
We had a fantastic meal (good choice, even I do say so myself! 
) with great company and got to experience Hogmanay in Scotland, which was the whole point, so we were happy. 
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