Garnet's Life Adventures

Kaylie & I left Luton at 8pm on Friday bound for Nottingham. The traffic was fine, but the service station was a bit crap - we were hungry & nothing but Costa was open so we grabbed a quick sandwich & continued on our way to the Holiday Inn. Woke up early on Saturday to find it was pouring rain (as had been forecasted) and we proceeded to spend about 1 hour driving in a circle around the city centre looking for the castle, only to find out it was closed once we eventually found it. We drove up to Sherwood Forest for a photo op, as you can guess it was pouring rain, so we didn't stay to hike around.

From there we drove through the peak district and the high peaks, which looked like rolling hills to Kaylie & me . . . yet the English call them high peaks. It was pretty just not as peakish as I was expecting having lived in the Adirondacks and the High Peaks for 4 years.

We spent the night in Manchester at a place called Victoria Cottage, which was NOT a cottage & to be honest I'm not even sure I would have called it a hotel - it was situated on a main street in a small mini shopping centre just next to the Chinese/fish & chips place - yes you read that correctly, you can get fish & chips at a Chinese restaurant now a days in the UK! The room was clean & warm, but there were no signs to mark the place & when we called the man said he'd be over in 5 minutes, which he did, and he showed us our room, gave us our keys & said he was off to visit with his grandchild & we could just leave the keys in the room when we left in the morning . . . so we did. As we were getting settled before getting dinner we heard a strange noise from the window - upon closer inspection a pigeon was settling in for the night. He made a lot of noise & Kaylie named him Ralph. We attempted to take photos of him, but that was harder than one might have thought since there were 2 layers of glass & one had not been cleaned in ages. All a bit strange, but it was a warm bed for the night so we have no complaints.

Sunday it wasn't raining but there was a nice layer of ice on the windshield & no ice scrapper to be found in the hire car, so we sat & let the car warm up for a bit before starting off on our trip back towards home. Along the way we stopped off at another castle & an abbey before arriving back into London at 7pm. All in all it was a great weekend get away road trip. Photos to follow!