When our friend Sophie invited us to visit for her murder mystery birthday celebration, we said yes without a doubt. We met Sophie on the other side of the world about 3 weeks into our Megamoon on the amazing island that is, Magnetic Island (blog – https://dowelltravel.blog/2016/10/13/magnetic-island/). We met a wonderful group of people on the ferry over and continued to have the best couple of days exploring the island. We’re still in touch with everyone we met there and that part of trip still remains a massive highlight. We couldn’t wait to see Sophie again despite the fact that it was a 6 hour drive to York from Plymouth.

We stopped over at my parents the night before, to break up the trip, and arrived in York by lunchtime on the Saturday. Sophie was busy preparing for her party so we headed into the city centre to explore. We wanted to walk in along the River Ouse, but there had been some recent flooding, which stopped us quite quickly.

We walked past York Castle and headed straight to our first stop, Betty’s tea room.

Whenever we visit my parents they like to whip out the Betty’s tea bags, after their visit to the Harrogate Betty’s tea room. I’ve always thought the tea was delicious and couldn’t wait to treat ourselves to high tea. Betty’s tea room is quite the institution, with the first tea room opening in Harrogate in 1919 by a Swiss baker, moving to England to master his craft. The York branch opened in 1936 designed after the Queen Mary ocean liner. The tea room hasn’t changed much since and with it’s grand piano, vintage decor and amazingly friendly waitresses and waiters you really do feel like you’ve been transported back to the 1930’s.

With our bellies full we walked to our next stop, the Jorvik Viking Museum. Jorvik is the old norse name for the city of York and the museum provides visitors with an opportunity to explore York during the Viking age. The exhibition takes you on a ‘ride’ through dioramas showcasing life-sized models of Viking citizens going about their daily activities. You experience the sights and smells of the time and despite feeling a little ‘disney’ it’s a great experience and we learnt a lot. The museum has recently had an influx of funding due to severe flooding in York in 2015, which caused the museum to closedown for a while. The whole place feels very modern and very well put together. Definitely worth a visit.

On our way to our next stop we took a walk along the city walls. York has more miles of intact city walls than any other city in England and they provided us with a vantage point to view the Minster in the distance.

We arrived at our last stop of the day, the National Railway Museum. Having grown up in Swindon, the home of Great Western Railway, it’s hard to escape the history of the railways. The STEAM museum in Swindon provides a great overview to GWR and I have visited a couple of times over the years. I expected the National Railway Museum to be similar, which it was. We moved through the museum and enjoyed looking at Royal carriages throughout the ages, as well as seeing more modern trains, such as the Eurostar, a Japanese bullet train and the world’s fastest steam locomotive, the Mallard, which clocked in at 125.88 miles per hour in 1938. It really is a great museum and I can recommend it to anyone in the area as a brilliant way to learn more about our country’s locomotive history.

We walked back to Sophie’s house ready and excited for the evening’s birthday festivities.

Simon and I were very excited to catchup with Sophie and despite not having seen each other for nearly a year, it was like no time had past at all. We met Sophie’s friend Cat, who was as lovely as Sophie, and started our transformation into our characters for the evening. We’d never taken part in a murder mystery evening, but was excited to become our alter egos, Edith and Hughes Le Grandbutte. Another guest was showing up later who was our daughter (a little strange). Despite us not solving the murder, we had a lot of fun playing the game, drinking, laughing and eating some very delicious chilli. Let me introduce you to Edith and Hughes…

The next morning was when our trip to York took a bit of a turn. If you’ve read a lot of my blogs, you’ll know that we love to go on free walking tours as often as we can. Usually free walking tours are led by locals or students and provide you with an insight into a city that they love. We’ve never been on a walking tour that we haven’t enjoyed. Until York. Unfortunately this is also the only free walking tour we’ve ever taken in the UK, but rest assured this won’t stop us trying others.

The tour was led by an older gentleman and the first thing he said to us was ‘this tour is advertised as 2 hours, but I’ve never done it in less than 3.5’. This was the first sign. We stuck with the tour for about an hour and a half despite being absolutely frozen. It was below freezing and we hardly moved at all during the tour, only covering about 500m in that time. Our second sign that this wasn’t the tour for us. It got to the point where we had to leave, something we’ve never done before. We had a 6 hour drive ahead of us and still hadn’t made it to the Minster or Shambles. The Gent knew his stuff, he knew more about York than I imagine anyone else knows. This was the main problem as he wanted to tell us everything. I applaud him for his knowledge and also for his commitment to the free walking tours, but this one just wasn’t for us. We politely explained our situation and left the tour.

We beelined straight to a cafe to warm up, and then walked around the Minster and the Shambles (which has 4, yes you read that right, Harry Potter shops, due to the fact that it looks a little like Diagon Alley).

We headed back to Soph and Cat’s house for another catchup before hitting the road. In 26 hours we saw a lot of York, we learnt a lot and we had a brilliant reunion with a wonderful person. It taught us that a weekend actually provides a decent amount of time to explore and solidified our aim to explore more of our own country.

104 days of our year are weekend days. Don’t waste them.

Simon and I spent New Years Eve 2017 in Sydney. We knew it’d be a challenge to beat that, so as soon as tickets to London NYE 2018 went on sale we jumped on them. A few years ago it was decided to ticket the area around the London Eye to reduce problems on the night and £10 a ticket, we thought, was very reasonable.

We had been staying with my parents, since a very enjoyable Christmas in Yorkshire, and on the 30th December we took the short train ride to London Paddington. We were very kindly being hosted by Julia and Dave during our stay and as it’d been a while since we’d spent time together, we were really looking forward to it. After meeting up with Julia and dropping some of our luggage at their house, we headed back into the big smoke to visit a museum that Simon had been wanted to visit for a while. The Imperial War Museum.

I have to say… I wasn’t convinced and not particularly looking forward to it, but being a caring and considerate wife we started to make our way there. One stop in on the underground and the train broke down. Great! Maybe this was an omen. We decided to wait it out and went for some lunch. Fortunately, 40 minutes later and we were back on the underground and the rest of the journey went smoothly.

We spent about an hour and half walking around the Imperial War Museum and because of the sheer size of the place we had to be quite select in the exhibits we wanted to see. We found the first exhibit about Peace and Security 1945 – 2015 pretty confusing to navigate around, the second about Secret War far more interesting, but quite repetitive and the third, about the Holocaust was so well put together. I really wish we’d spent 90% of our time in this exhibit as the way the history ,of this shocking event, was told was just captivating. It’s exhibits like these that make me wish we were closer to London, as every time we had a spare hour we could explore another small part of one of the many museums London has to offer.

Our next stop was a very quick wander around Harrods. It’s become a bit of a tradition to explore the labyrinths that Harrods have to offer every time we visit London. I know it’s become more of a tourist trap in recent decades, but I can’t help but enjoy every visit I make there, especially to the food court.

As the sun set we made our way over to Hyde Park to meet Julia and Dave. Every December I see endless Facebook posts about Winter Wonderland, but I’ve never been. Simon had been once before but couldn’t really remember it and was equally as excited. We had a wonderful couple of hours devouring Bratwursts, drinking Mulled Wine and riding the legendary Munich Looping. Munich Looping is the largest travelling rollercoaster featuring five loop the loops that generate g-forces of up to 5.2Gs. The same that is experienced by a F1 driver. I have to say, I could definitely feel those G’s afterwards and was dizzy for a little while. It was amazing fun though and gave Simon a little adrenaline boost that he wasn’t expecting.

After our time at Winter Wonderland we headed out to explore the best Christmas lights that London had to offer. We walked over to Carnaby Street, Leiceister Square and Covent Garden. I absolutely adore Covent Garden and the energy of the place. If I lived in London I could imagine this being the place where I’d meet friends for coffees, drinks and probably not a lot of shopping as it’s expensive.

After a lovely sleep at Julia and Dave’s, Simon and I headed off to grab some breakfast. Julia and Dave went out for a 10km run, those crazy healthy people! We ended up eating breakfast at Balans Soho Society at the Stratford Centre. I don’t take a lot of photos of food, but please drool at our breakfast below.

We spent the next hour, or so, walking around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. We were really enjoyed spending time exploring less touristy parts of London on this trip.

Our next stop was the Tate Modern. I hadn’t been to the Tate Modern since a year 10 art trip with school and felt it was time to have another explore. On the way we got off the underground at St Paul’s Cathedral and walked across the, Harry Potter made famous, Millennium Bridge. We bought some caramelised roasted nuts, which we enjoyed on the way.

We spent about an hour and a half walking around the Tate Modern. I have to say that was enough as a lot of the art takes quite a lot of brain power to make sense of. On our way around we saw an exhibit made of potato sacks, art made from cous cous, some pieces by Picasso, Salvador Dali and Andy Warhol, and one of our favourites was a tower made of radios all tuned into different stations.

The next part of trip wasn’t the best. Getting from the Tate Modern to our next stop, the Rainforest Cafe, wasn’t particularly easy on New Years Eve due to road blocks and just the sheer number of people. We decided to walk. Bad decision. About half way in it started to pour and we had to jump into a Costa to dry off. Bear in mind we were going to be out for the fireworks late and were now quite concerned it was going to rain the whole time. Fortunately, the rain stopped and we made it over to the Rainforest Cafe with plenty of time to spare for our reservation. Enough time to enjoy a drink in a pub and to watch people go a little crazy over a game of football (which I will never understand).

Growing up I absolutely loved going to the Rainforest cafe with my parents. Simon had never been so we thought we’d make it our stop for New Years Eve dinner. The food was really good, but we ordered way too much of it, and unfortunately, the appeal of the place had worn off a little bit with age. I don’t think we’ll be visiting again until we potentially have some children to take with us.

The time had come to make our way to Westminster Bridge to find a good spot for the fireworks. There were so many people on the roads and it took us asking three guards to find our way to the bridge, but we got through security pretty easily and found an excellent spot on a barrier right next to Elizabeth Tower, more commonly known as Big Ben.

We had a long wait, about 3 and a half hours in the freezing cold, but it was completely and totally worth it. Having watched the London NYE fireworks before on the TV, we weren’t expecting much, but we were completely proven wrong as the whole display was unbelievable. Big Ben was going to perform this night, despite going through a period of repair, and at midnight we heard the 12 bong countdown, setting the scene perfectly. We had the most amazing view of the London Eye and could hear the perfectly synced music all around us. Simon and I watched in awe, as I’m sure many of you also did at home. It was without a doubt the most impressive firework display we had ever seen (and we’ve seen a lot). I have to say… London completely blew Sydney out of the water.  If you haven’t had a chance to watch the London NYE 2018 fireworks take a look here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EJMIdK1_g

Surprisingly, we made it back to Julia and Dave’s house quite easily once we walked for about 30 minutes away from the chaos around the Thames. It had been a wonderful day, but we were ready for bed.

The next morning we had a leisurely breakfast at the Wetherspoon’s near to Julia and Dave’s before we all headed to Piccadilly Circus to try and catch a glimpse of the New Years Day Parade.  We got there a little late and struggled to get a good view without perching on a wall, but really enjoyed the atmosphere and what we could see.

Unfortunately, the time had come to to head to Paddington so that we could start our journey home. We had one last treat before our train and that was a coffee with John and his husband Ben. It was really lovely to catch up with John and meet Ben before embracing reality. Christmas had been so wonderful and this trip had been the icing on the cake.

When we visit Simon’s family in Yorkshire we try and find some time to explore the local area. During a trip in October we visited Bolsover Castle. Apologies that this is a little reminiscent rather than time accurate.

Bolsover is a Stuart era castle set in the beautiful countryside of Derbyshire. The castle was originally founded in the 11th century by one of William the Conquerer’s Knights. It was left to ruin from the 14th century and work began on the grounds again in 1612 by Sir Charles Cavendish. The castle has been in the care of English Heritage since 1984 and provided an excellent local tourist attraction that none of us had been to before.

Our tour started in the Riding House. William, Charles Cavendish’s son, trained horses for dressage. The Riding House at Bolsover is one of the oldest in the country to remain intact.

Our next stop was to the Terrace Range. The Terrace Range was built by William Cavendish in the 1630’s. His aim was to build banqueting halls fit for royalty. As we walked around we could see the site of the old kitchens and it was easy to imagine what these ruins used to look like in their glory days. It was also a great spot for a bit of photography.

After walking around outside for long enough, it was pretty chilly, we entered the main attraction the Little Castle Keep. On first glance, the Little Castle looks like a Keep fit for providing protection during times of war, but on closer inspection it wasn’t really fit for purpose at all. A couple of problems, to name only a few, was that the windows were large and would have been easy targets and that the doors were easily accessible on ground level. It would appear as though the Little Castle was really built as an elaborate family house rather than a Keep.

We had a lovely time walking around looking at all the elaborate furnishings and listening to the audio guide. I won’t lie, history is not my favourite pastime, but I find as long as I just look and take it in, rather than try and remember it all, I can enjoy an explore around an old English site.

One of my favourite parts, of our time at Bolsover, was the wall walk around the Fountain Gardens.

We had a lovely day and will definitely aim to visit more local attractions whilst visiting Wiltshire and Yorkshire in the future. A benefit of Bolsover is that there’s a Wetherspoons next door. A perfect place to finish our trip.