Carlisle and Scotland, UK

This blog post includes the short trips that we took around Northern UK (Carlisle, Hadrian's Wall, Loch Ness, Edinburgh) and a weekend side trip to Paris when Mei's parents came to visit at the tail-end of a three week European holiday.
The majority of their trip was filled with a coach tour around the big ticket cities of Europe. They then swapped the professional tour guide for our 'services' as we showed them our favourite places around London - the sights that had caused us to fall in love with being in the UK.



Arriving in London
Flying into London from Kuala Lumpur leaves you with a decent amount of jet-lag, although our parents were seasoned travellers and had spent most of the time sleeping. We had our usual mini-cab driver pick them up from the airport and we had organised for them to stay at a hotel that was centrally located near Blackfriars Bridge.

Their first dinner in London was at the Art Nouveau decorated Nicholson's pub - The Blackfriar. The menu contained traditional British fare of pies, pints and sausages and mash. Afterwards, we handed over the London 'visitor' pack of pre-loaded oyster cards, union jack umbrellas (left over props from our wedding), many tourist maps and UK SIM cards. We had also organised tickets for the Hop-on-Hop off bus and instructions for watching the Changing of the Guards Ceremony the next day. All the pre-planning kept our visitors well occupied for Day 2 and over a very large tasty pizza at Zizzi's in Bankside they replayed to us the detail of their sightseeing adventures.

Mum and Dad

Exploring London
Mum and Dad found complete joy in being able to explore London independently. By Day 3 that had located their European tour departure point near Waterloo station. However they did comment that the 'reception centre' did not live up to their expectations as it reminded them of a bus shelter with a couple of internet terminals. Later that day they visited Buckingham Palace and saw the collection of jewels on show for the Diamond Jubilee. We all met up for dinner at the Baltic, the venue of our wedding reception. We introduced them to hearty Polish food, including Mei's favourite dish - beef tartare. After dinner, we talked through the logistics of our weekend trip - a train based journey from London-Leeds-Carlisle-Edinburgh over four days.

Weekend Touring
Before this weekend trip, Mei had surveyed her colleagues to get a feel for the tourist attractions of Leeds. The feedback bluntly stated that there was little point leaving the train station. In the end we didn't, but that was more because we had complete flexibility in the onward train travel (we had bought an open ticket) and our London-Leeds train was well timed with the next available train for the Settle to Carlisle line. Wikipedia had boasted this to be the most scenic railway in England. However, in hindsight, taking a long (approximately 4 hour) train journey first thing in the morning and hoping to enjoy the scenery was probably too optimistic. Neither coffee nor snickers bars were able to prevent a morning nap. The rolling English countryside of the Yorkshire Dales soon lulled us to sleep. We did wake up in time to see Ais Gill - the highest point (1169ft) reached by mainland trains in England.

The rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales

Carlisle
On arrival in Carlisle, our first impressions were the similarities it had to regional English cities - York, Norwich, Canterbury. It had a historical side too, being the Roman settlement of Luguvalium. The location of the city was a key point in the defensive (Hadrian's) Wall that protected the civilized (Roman) south from the unknown savage native Britons in the north during the 1st century AD. However in modern times, Carlisle is overrun by chain restaurant/cafes, with our dinner being less than traditional at Nandos.

A feathered friend enjoying the sunshine

Carlisle Cathedral

Carlisle Castle

Hadrian's Wall
The next day, we continued to support the multinational corporations by starting our day with a quality family breakfast at McDonalds. We walked to the bus stop to catch the AD122 Hadrian's Wall tourist bus that took us directly to the two main historical sites: Vindolanda (a Roman Army auxiliary fort) and the Roman Army Museum.

The gates of the old town and bus stop for the AD122 bus

Vindolanda
Vindolanda is an enormous site that is still being excavated and provides detailed insight into daily life on a Roman fort (including dinner party invitations and soldiers complaining about rations) as a result of thousands of tablets containing Latin correspondence being found and transcribed.

Welcome sign for Vindolanda

Reconstruction of a Roman fountain

Vindolanda Fort as it looked like in the 1st century AD

Vindolanda fort now

Vindolanda bathed in sunlight

Standing in the former Roman soldier quarters

Vindolanda shop

Reconstruction of Roman shops and temples

Roman Army Museum
The Roman Army Museum contains more historical reconstructions including the 3D film Edge of Empire that demonstrates how large the fortifications were along the wall during ancient times. We found the information boards about the constructs of the Roman army to be very interesting. The structure of the army was explained including the breakdown of centurions and conscripts from all over the Roman Empire; and also how 25 years of service could earn a soldier retirement and the greatest prize of all - Roman citizenship.

Welcome sign at the Roman Army Museum

An auxiliary soldier

Roman London
Our interest in both Roman sites had grown after visiting a number of Roman era remains in the City of London (Londinium) including the site of Leadenhall Market (former Roman Basilica), Bury St next to the Gherkin (grave of a Roman girl) and the Roman wall near Barbican; as well as movies like Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011) that focus on the disappearance of the 9th Legion that marched from York into Scotland and were never seen again.

Hadrian's wall on top of the rocky hill

Sitting on the remains of Hadrian's Wall

Roman statue found in the UK

Roman statue that used to decorate
a noble man's house in Britannia

Edinburgh

After a full day exploring Roman Britain, we caught a high speed train to Edinburgh. We checked into the Premier Inn on Princes Street - a very convenient location in the centre of town. We ate dinner at the restaurant of the King James Hotel, where we accidentally left our Taste Card with the cashier but received it back in the post a few days later. Thumbs up for customer service.

Rabbies Tour - Loch Ness and Scottish Highlands
The next day, we caught a shuttle bus for a full day tour of Loch Ness, Glencoe and the Highlands - a short video below outlines the scenery.

The tour guide was very knowledgeable and entertaining, providing us with a lot of interesting facts about history and geography. Thankfully the tour company (Rabbies) has a full copy of the itinerary on the website, and therefore in summary the places we visited were:
* Stirling Castle
* National William Wallace monument
* Dramatic Rannoch Moor scenery around the Highlands
* Glencoe - where the massacre of the Macdonald clan was carried out by the Campbells, and changed the Highlands forever.
* Ben Nevis - Britain's highest mountain
* Caledonian Canal
* Fort Augustus on the shore of Loch Ness
* Macbeth country in the forests of Perthshire

Stirling Castle

The castle from a Monty Python movie

Looking for Nessie

Still haven't found Nessie

The variable Scottish weather - sunshine

Plenty of rainbows

Some heavy cloud cover

Near Glencoe

Where did the sun go?

After we arrived back in Edinburgh, we were confronted with a creepy drunk person at the souvenir shop that grabbed Dad and pretended to be a spy. The shop keepers asked if we wanted to call the police however the man moved on without further incident. After that drama we decided to eat inside the hotel restaurant instead of walking around the streets at night. 

Edinburgh Castle

The next day, we headed for Edinburgh Castle to watch the 1pm cannon salute. Afterwards, we headed back to the hotel, picked up our bags and took the shuttle bus to the airport for a quick flight back to London.

At Edinburgh Castle

Overlooking the city centre

Mons Meg, made in 1449 and weighs 180kg

Inside the Great Hall

Family photo overlooking Edinburgh

Return to London
Three weeks later and after their tour, Mum and Dad returned to London with many interesting stories of beer tasting, yodelling and a romantic trip on a gondola in Venice. They stayed at the Think Apartments with a great location in Zone 1 near the Thames. Their London experiences continued with theater trip to watch the Lion King, visits to the National History Museum, British Museum, Harrods and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Royal Greenwich
When the weekend arrived, we took them further south to Greenwich Market to eat the roast beef and yorkshire pudding with melted cheese (one of our favourite dishes in London) and did a quick photo stop at the Royal Observatory - home of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and Cutty Sark (a restored tea clipper).

Walking around Greenwich Park

Paris Overnight
The next day, we took the Eurostar to Paris (our 4th trip and Mei's parents 2nd visit in a week), where we walked from the Bastille area where our serviced apartment was located, past Notre Dame and up the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe to watch the crazy but amusing traffic. The walk back to the hotel was via the Louvre to see it lit up at night. Dinner was eaten in the tourist area of St Germain, where we had eaten roast pork a few months earlier and the restaurant offered good value and friendly service.

Jardin des Tuileries

Watching traffic at the Arc

Place de la Concorde, home of the guillotine

Basilica of Sacre Coeur
The next day, we took the metro to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur to take in the view from Montmartre.

Sacre Coer

Rue Cler
After a few happy snaps, we headed further west to the food street of Rue Cler - the area that we had stayed on our first trip to Paris. On seating ourselves at Cafe Central, we watched an unfortunate pigeon lose its head courtesy of a passing motorbike. The food was good value and quality was as we remembered it from the previous visit.

Foie gras

Steak tartare

Heading Home
Later that day, we took the Eurostar back to London and faced a solid delay of almost 2 hours. Mum and Dad then spent a night packing their bags for the last 24 hours in London. In the morning, we headed for Oxford Street to pick up a few souvenirs, headed to Spitalfields for pastry before the last leg home to pick up luggage and meet up with Olie on the Piccadilly Line for the drop off at Heathrow where we said our farewells at the long line of the security queue.

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