Great Scot!

I have a love/hate relationship with the Internet over here.   Using google and my phone gps have basically saved my life on numerous occasions, but when the Internet isn't working how I want when I want I want to throw it off the highest mountain in Europe and watch it smash into 7000 tiny pieces. That's why I haven't posted in a few days, because as soon as I began heading north of London en route to Scotland my phone had been more temptemental than my sister.

But despite that, I am pretty glad to be out of London city. It's a beautiful place with a lot of interesting people and sights, but after a few days the crammed streets begin to drain the life out of you. I don't think I could live there.

So early Saturday morning we began our journey north to Scotland, stopping on the way to visit Stratford upon Avon which is where Shakespeare lived and his house is still in tact and now an expensive tourist attraction. We also stopped briefly in York, which was a pretty nice town before heading to Leeds for the night. I wouldn't live in Leeds if you payed me. It looked, felt like and apparently is a pretty unsafe city and despite our hotel being in a nice area, walking a block in any direction was enough to feel like you were in the dodgy area of town. 

The next day we headed north again and entered the highlands of England and began to see some spectacular mountains.  This was a day of highlights and lowlights. The highlights included some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen, most notably around lake Wyndemere. I could definitely live around there. And the lowlights included leaving my backpack at the train station then spending $50Aud on a taxi to go back and get it, followed by leaving my phone at a table at Burger King in a mall. And to top the bad news off was news from dad that my last surviving pet fish that's been with me for 2 years didn't last 2 weeks in the merciless care of dad.

We stayed in Glasgow which is the biggest city it Scotland last night and will do so again tonight before heading to Ireland tomorrow. Glasgow isn't anything super special but today we visited Edinburgh, which I think is a much nicer city and would have liked some more time in. There's a castle hanging off the side of the cliff but after a driving tour of the whole city and walking through the malls in the new city we didn't even make it to the old city including the castle. Some of the buildings in Edinburgh date back over 1000 years and there's even a pub est. In 1581.

In other news....

Saw the most expensive bottle of whiskey of the trip so far today, $22,500 for what must be a fine drop.

Forgot to mention that while I was in Italy I had an admission from an Italian national that the penalty call that led to Italy beating Australia in the 2006 soccer world up was not the right call.

Struggling to find a computer to upload a whole bunch of photos, so for now one photo a day will have to do!