UK Travels: Back in the Saddle

After a few weekends of rest, we’ve managed to get out exploring the UK a bit these past 2 weekends and will report briefly on our progress =). First, we joined 3 friends on a trip to the Brecon Beacons in southern Wales for a 10 mile “Waterfall hike” that was heavily hyped. It ended up being a really nice fall day and was probably one of the best walks we have done here. At one point the trail actually goes behind a waterfall, and the views from behind a sheet of water are really cool. It was perfectly laid out walk too, with a village pub right at the halfway point for some grub and a pint of ale. We posted some photos of the walk here.

Last weekend we borrowed our friend’s car again for a birthday trip for Lauren to the Cotswolds, a range of hills about an hour south of Birmingham. This region is called the Heart of England and is dotted with “cookie-tin villages”, as they call them here, which are so perfect they could go on some quaint biscuit box. We stayed one night in Broadway, which is supposedly one of the nicest towns in the area, but all of the places we visited looked like movie-sets for a quaint and charming English village. Even the names are charming…we visited Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Chipping Camden, and even drove through a place called Studley.

It was a pretty leisurely weekend of driving from town to town, checking out the shops and bakeries, and having morning, afternoon, and evening tea. It was an incredibly British birthday for Lauren, though we still stick out as pretty clear tourists with my sneakers and our American clothes. We should have come on horseback wearing a traditional plaid ridding hat and bonnet…if we managed to avoid speaking we might have been able to fool the locals. Oh well, we’re yanks in the UK and proud of it =). Here's some pics of that adventure in Britishness.