Where were we…
So last time we blogged, we were in Dublin for our last night. The next day, off to the ferry we went and boarded a fast ferry to cross the sea into Wales (Holyhead to be exact). Traveling by ferry is pretty damn good we’ve decided. It’s very smooth, it’s very quick (1h45 to get from Dublin to Holyhead), only have to be there 15mins early prior to leaving if you’re traveling by foot and no security check or anything stupid like that. And it’s cheap – 70€ for both of us! Plus it’s huge and very under-used, so you can really spread out or walk around, go out on the observation deck, grab a proper breakfast like we did… liked it.
We picked up our car from Holyhead, a very new Ford Fiesta diesel. Pretty good car I have to say. It was only 60€ for the day including dropping it back to London (ie different position), so for the both of us it worked out pretty well.
Holyhead is on the Isle of Anglesey, a small island off the north-west coast of Wales. It’s also where Prince William has been stationed during his military days for the past however many years and where he and Kate have shacked up recently. We sadly didn’t see them, although we did see a number of military helicopter training sessions off the coast – we like to think Prince Willy was in one of them.
Wales is bloody beautiful. We started to go a slower way to London, but decided against it but not after we visited a quaint little town, got some traveling snacks and marvelled at the South Australian wines this small shop had. Peter Lehmann, Jacob’s Creek, Penfolds to name a few! Very cool to see. Photo coming… I can definitely see why a lot of the English go there for a holiday – very slow & relaxing place and beautiful. Plenty of beaches too and we actually had sunshine – unheard of!
After quite a lot of driving, we hit the English border and bypassed Manchester City then Birmingham then slowly crawled down the M1 where they appear to be in constant upgrade mode. Finally it sped up again before hitting the outskirts of London. Sadly, Hertz didn’t have any GPS available so we bought a 3G sim card for my iPhone so we could at least try and navigate. Without turn-by-turn, it wasn’t easy and with so many 1-way streets in London, it’s a flat-out nightmare. We took a few wrong turns or missed a couple as where Google Maps said we were we weren’t quite, but we made it! Our hats go off to the London cabbies – how they do it is beyond me.
The hotel is in West Kensington – a bit of a way out of London but also quite fancy. We had a very nice meal to end the day just near our hotel and collapsed into bed after a pretty strenuous day, but pretty cool considering we travelled between 3 countries using different modes of transport.
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