England was great! Will Germany be better?

On our way down to the next stop (Billericay), we had a few hours to spend in Edinburgh and decided to spend it climbing Arthur’s Seat- one of the beautiful hills in town that was also used as a filming location for The Chariots of Fire :) We had read somewhere that it would take a couple of hours to climb, but then heard somewhere else that it would take less than an hour. We decided to bank on the latter estimate and headed out to find the base of the mountain. Trekking around town with our backpacks on felt like Cardiff all over again- but we pressed on. After a few wrong turns (how hard can it be to find the bottom of a mountain? You’d be surprised), we came upon the trail and decided with the limited time and the apparent intensity of the hike that the first time estimate was probably more correct. It was disappointing, but the hill is now on our “To go back to” list!

Our next stop was Billericay, home to another family friend of Chelsea's and wonderful host! She welcomed us with open arms and wonderful food, which we enjoyed thoroughly. Our first tea time with her included an amazing dessert she referred to as Millionaire’s Tart.

The rest of our time with her that afternoon and the following day consisted mainly of homework and more wonderful food. Fish and Chips for dinner the following night made our trip to England complete in the food department :) She gave us a short tour of the city center (aka downtown), whose most important landmark is the building in which the original Mayflower pilgrims gathered before departing the country.

The next day was our last day in London and we enjoyed it by hitting one of the sites we didn’t get to on our first round through the city: the Sherlock Holmes museum!

It was really cool but also slightly confusing to be in such a realistic environment creating all surrounding completely fictitious characters! We saw his pipes, his fiddle, a bust of the man himself and his and Watson's rooms.

Following the museum, we tried to find the Churchill's Cabinet War and after getting the typical vague English directions from a few people, we finally found it. But alas, it was to no avail because we only had 45 minutes before our goal time to leave and the museum was more than we wanted to pay. I (Chelsea) was pretty disappointed, because I remembered going there with my parents on one of our previous two trips to London and loving it! But, yet another thing for our list to come back to. At this point, we headed back to our friend's flat that we had stayed with before our Scotland excursion. She was kind enough to keep our luggage while we were up there so we didn't have to lug it around with us. And she was letting us stay with her one more night before we headed out to meet our AMBEX group in Munich! We got the key to her flat from the neighbor and went in to start packing up the UK in our suitcases :)   

A Bed and Breakfast is nice… an apartment is better :)

Thanks to Michelle at the Edinburgh train station, we had the huge blessing of having our own apartment for the five days we were in Stirling. She called a couple of places looking for an affordable hotel or Bed and Breakfast room for us and found that most things were booked up. One business she called though, was eager to keep our business even though they didn’t have any room available, so they offered us an apartment for the same price as the single room would have been. We talked them into including breakfast and we had a deal!

This turned out to be the perfect apartment for us. We each had our own rooms and bathrooms

a living room big enough for both of us to spread out in

The view from our window

and even a full beautiful IKEA kitchen which made me (Chelsea) very very happy :)

Once we got settled in, we decided to take full advantage of our model kitchen and buy our own food to cook for lunches and dinners. Enter Tesco! This place made it possible (along with a bit of creativity and ingenuity on our part of course ;)) for us to make 5 lunches and dinners for both of us for 16 pounds total. That’s about $25.50. Of course we were light eaters that week, but it didn’t matter. It worked out perfectly too, because Jeanette likes cooking more than I do, and I don’t mind cleaning up. So she fed us and I cleaned up after us and we were both happy :)

The next day, we had to check out the awesome looking castle on the hill- Stirling Castle. Our landlord-for-the-week, Andrew, told us the government just spent something like 6 million pounds renovating the castle and that it was definitely worth a visit. 13 pounds ($20) and a couple of hours later, we couldn’t have disagreed more. Yes, you read that correctly! We were pretty disappointed at exactly how renovated it was. New paint, new wood shutters, a sherbet orange building, the prince’s nursery with pergo wood floors. I mean really? Shouldn’t historical renovations keep the historical part intact, or is that too much to ask? Needless to say, we wouldn’t exactly recommend it. Unless you plan on waiting a couple hundred years when it might actually look “old” again.

The only good part about this castle was the view.

Stirling day three was Sunday, so we paid a visit to Stirling Baptist Church which we had walked past the day before. The outside was a typical old chapel (typical for UK, of course not typical for the US) but inside was a modern church, complete with a band. We even knew a few of the songs, which was nice. But at the end we got the biggest surprise when it turned out the guy sitting in front of us was from Kansas just coming through on a biking trip of Europe!

After church and before getting into our homework, we decided to hike up to the William Wallace Monument we’d been seeing from our living room window the past few days. Forty-five minutes later we had ascended the hill that the monument is situated on. We walked into the gift shop/ticket office and found out it was 6 pounds to go up to the monument.

Being on a bit of a tighter budget and after spending 13 pounds at Stirling we were not in a mood to pay that amount for something we weren't sure we wanted to see. So instead we had a lovely, free walk back down to our apartment. Once there we filled out our day with some homework.

Day four in Stirling turned into a full on study session. We decided that it would be a good day to lay low and get some much needed work done. By the end of the day we were kind of sick of sitting and decided we needed to get out. We set out for a walk along the river our window overlooked. What we came across though was 10 pin bowling!

We decided that nothing could be better than to go bowling in Scotland. So we did. : ) Chelsea did awesomely. And I (Jeanette) didn't. But it was fun anyways.

Our last day in Scotland was by far the best! We didn't really have plans for this day so the night before we randomly chose one of the castles I (Jeanette) had found before we left for this grand adventure. It turned out to be one of the best randomly chosen adventures ever. We took our train trip to the lovely seaside town of Stonehaven and were in love with it right away. It was about a 2 mile hike from the train station to the castle ruins, and it may have been the most beautiful walk we've ever taken! Our first "task" was walking along the boardwalk and putting our hands in the North Sea.

The boardwalk led us to an old bay, where the trail began and took us up the road to an amazing trail that went parallel to the coast between fields of wheat overlooking rocky inlets.

We were floating in the air with happiness! It was the most beautiful scenery ever! The castle came into view after about a half hour and left us breathless. We had seen photos of the rocky jutting peninsula the ruins stood on before we came on the trip, but things like these are always better in person (real life?) than in photos. This was no exception.

We got to the path down to the castle but didn't know where we were supposed to pay the entrance fee. So we made a slight unsuccessful excursion to find that. After asking a few people who didn't know either, we went down the narrow path to the castle. It was a very long set of stairs down the side of one mountain and then up to the entrance of the ruins. Very good for defense not so great for sieges. But amazing surroundings either way! We found out the entrance fee is paid inside the castle and was only 5 pounds!!! Talk about 5 pounds well spent.

Dunnottar Castle renovations.  : )

The ruins were the perfect combination of a broken down castle and enough bones left to be able to see what used to be there. We ate our sack lunch while wandering around the castle; loving the freedom given to see the castle as it is now, missing floors and ceilings, while still keeping you safe from falling through said missing floors and ceilings. After wandering around for a couple of hours, we couldn’t resist heading down to the beach to soak in the amazingness. It was full (literally!) of sea shells and rocks in between cliffs right in the shadow of the ruins up on the hill.

After gathering a pocketful of shells, we hid for awhile in a cave from a down pour of rain (As our English mum told us (from her mother), “if you can’t see the mountains, it’s raining. If you can see them, then it’s going to!”) before heading back to the train station to head back for our last night in our apartment. 


-Chelsea and Jeanette