Wales

We spent an afternoon in Chester walking along the walls that surround the city centre and then having lunch in town.

Main street in Chester

Cathedral in Chester

Walls in Chester

 We drove to Ann's house (Ann is my Nans best friend) and stayed with her for a night. Ann lives in Buckley which is just over the border in Wales. She took us out for dinner at a pub up in the hills and told us stories about her and Nan growing up in Buckley. The next day Ann showed us where my Nan used to live (two houses, one which is now a carpet store) along with other places Nan used to go to. We were also lucky enough to see one of Nans old boyfriends and even managed to take a sneaky photo! We met Ann's daughter, Tracey, who took our photo because her son wanted to see what 'real' Australians looked like. I think he would have been a bit disappointed in our lack of board-shorts, akubras and bluies.

Me & Ann out the front of Nan's old house

After leaving Ann and Tracey we drove further into Wales to Penmaenmawr (don't worry we dont know how to pronounce it either). This is where Ewens Grandad grew up before moving to Australia. It was a sleepy little town with several closed shops. we had some lunch and a walk around the town taking lots of photos.

The main street of Penmaenmawr

Ewen at Penmaenmawr beach

We walked down to the beach and then decided to drive to Conwy to have a look at the castle there. The castle was pretty amazing, it was still in relatively good condition considering how old it is (Ewen thinks it was built in the 1200s). It no longer has a roof but most of the walls were still in good condition and their were about 8 (maybe more) towers you could climb to get views out over the ocean and also to get a birds eye view of the rest of the castle.

Conwy Castle

We stayed in a B&B in Conwy which the information centre found for us. Had a delicious fish & chip dinner and then the next morning had a walk around the town and along the water looking at the boats and the seagulls. The seagulls are massive here, at least 3 times the size of Australian seagulls. they are also clever, they were flying with mussels in their mouths and then dropping them on the concrete to smash the shells before swooping down and eating the insides of the mussels.

A street in Conwy

We drove to Manchester and met James at Hatters Hostel at about 1pm and then while the boys went to the soccer i went to a Vintage Fair which was pretty good, although not as big as i had thought it would be. i only got one thing, a ginormous ring which i will probably only ever wear once but its very pretty and i couldn't resist! We couldn't find any accommodation in Manchester for that night so we decided to drive back to London a day early and dropped off the car at Luton Airport. by the time we got back to Simon & Nell's it was after midnight and we were wrecked.
The Scotland road trip was a lot of fun and we saw some amazing places, the highlights for me were definitely Oban and seeing the snow on our drive from Inverness to Spittle on Glenshee.