Weekend Peugeot-ventures

The Era of British Roadtrips has begun. With hundreds of miles of UK highway stretching out from Birmingham in all directions and our new car sitting on the street just a key turn from ignition, it’s going to be hard to stay inside writing blog posts on weekends. Hundreds of towns, hedgerows, hamlets, cities, bridges, and castles are out there waiting for us, and we can’t disappoint.

We began our auto travels a few weekends back when our friend Anthony (or Mitri, as he's better known) from Pitt came to England for work and spent an extra weekend hanging out with us. Though people here are a bit down on it, we’ve wanted to visit nearby Nottingham since we arrived. Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, the Sheriff; we figured Disney had pretty accurately shown what the place is like and expected to be greeted by friendly, lovable talking animals when we parked and heading into town.

The Robin Hood angle was pretty disappointing; no animals AND turns out there is no real record of him actually existing and most historians doubt he did, but Nottingham was still really cool. We visited the world's oldest pub, from 1189AD, called Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, so named because of the trip Richard "the Lion-hearted" took in the 3rd Crusade at this time. It is built on the front face of a cliff, with Nottingham castle built into the cliff above, and has multiple, winding rooms carved into the stone, so it has a sort of cave/pub feel. It was really impressive.

Maybe it's because Nottingham is not a big tourist destination, but we've never had so many people hear our accents and want to talk with us! First we spent 2 hours in a pub with these two local guys talking about England and the US, and a lot about the election (EVERYONE here wants to talk about the election). Their main observation about the US was that you can get a bag of chips so big you can dive in and just eat your way out. We didn’t mention how pathetically small we’ve always found their chip bags here.

In Ye Olde Trip we ended up talking to a group of 20 Welsh nationalists full of revolutionary fervor out for a bachelor party ('stag do' as they're called here) and through this learned a lot about Wales. These guys did NOT like England, and all spoke Welsh as their first language, which is pretty cool. We were joking about how it would have been smart to snap a picture with them to document the time we had a pint with the future leaders of the Glorious Welsh Revolution. One question we never managed to ask was why they came so far into England if they didn’t like the English?

Since Nottingham just occupied our Saturday, we rounded the weekend off with a Sunday trip to the Black Country Living Museum, which documents life in the first industrial settlement in the world, just west of Birmingham where industrial iron-making was invented. The area was called the black country because clouds of soot and smoke blackened the sky. They told us it was “black by day and glowed red by night.” Many think JR Tolkien based Mordor in the Lord of the Rings on this area. We had a great time seeing the old cottages and mines with some of our friends from here - the captions of the pictures really say it all! Check out pictures of our journey back in time.

Yanks in the UK Official Road Trip Tracker - measuring our farthest road trip to date: