UK Trip- The First Installment

Welcome to the first official recap of my trip to the UK, (and as I recently discovered, does not include most of Ireland, which I did also visit!) I thought that I'd just go through what we did each day of the tour and post a few pictures, all in four different posts over the course of the next few weeks! So here goes:

For our trip my family decided to go with a tour group because it was our first time there. Although we didn't know who was going to be on the tour, or what age bracket it would consist of (I was the youngest person there,) I'm really glad we did. It was an awesome opportunity to meet some really great people, including a 75 year old couple who summer in an RV in Mexico and are currently backpacking across Europe. Pretty amazing, I know. Anyway, the tour was ten days long, however we felt as though that wasn't long enough, so we flew up two days early, and rented a flat for about five days after the tour had ended (more on the flat later.) So when I posted a few weeks ago about falling in love with London, that was during our time on our own before the tour had started. In hindsight, I am really glad we had two days on our own because we got a chance to figure out what we wanted to do on the backend that the tour didn't include.

So the first place we went to with the group was Cambridge University! While I could never get in there, I'm glad I went because the school is gorgeous. Every building you see has these beautiful, ornate, gothic carvings that you hardly see in America, if ever. Then we went to two small cities called York and Durham, which were just as amazing. We walked around these great big churches and whilst walking through the towns, I actually felt like I was in Harry Potter. The buildings are all sticking out into the alleys full of cobblestone streets and the houses are pretty much leaning on top of each other because they're so old. It was in awe at how seemingly every single thing we walked by had some sort of historical significance.

Bridge near the entrance to Cambridge

Beautiful buildings in York

It was then that we ventured up north to my new favorite place, Scotland. Putting aside the ridiculous looking kilts and the fact that their national animal is a Unicorn; Scotland is just an amazing place. I loved it from the second I stepped off the bus and then promptly ran back on for my jacket because it was like 50 degrees in the middle of July. I honestly can't put into words how much I loved it because it would take too long, so I'll just carry on with the end of this post. Our first stop in Scotland was the home of Sir Walter Scott, a world renowned (now dead) writer who was given the title of Baronet when he recovered the Crown Jewels in Edinburgh Castle. This guy was incredible. He was obsessed with collecting things, and wanted his mansion to look just like a medieval castle so in every hallway, every stretch of wall had some odd artifact on it. It was awesome. We then drove to our hotel and crashed for the evening because we had some pretty amazing things to do the next day in Scotland!

To be continued...

xoxo