A visit with Dracula and Robin Hood

For the May Bank Holiday we decided to spend some more time exploring the UK. This time we spent the long weekend in York, and its surrounding area.

We left London straight after work so arrived in York fairly late in the evening. The train was packed, so I'm glad we booked our tickets early and reserved seats. There was a huge rush for the train when the platform was announced, but I was ready to fight anyone who tried to steal our seats! Luckily the journey was without incident..

The plan for Saturday was to catch an early bus across the moors to Whitby. Whitby is a seaside town famous for its fish and chips, and its connection to Dracula and Captain Cook.

The bus ride was long and went through several lovely small towns in the Yorkshire countryside. The highlights were the Top Secret Air Base in the middle of the moors, and the Goathland Railway Station, where Heartbeat was filmed and which doubled for Hogsmeade Stations in the Harry Potter films (we were somewhat more impressed by this than the Heartbeat connection).

Basel and the Black Forest Capital

We'd decided to space our trip home out a bit. After our horrendous last day in Spain (4 hours on the bus, and straight on to a plane is not fun), we'd decided NEVER AGAIN!

So our first stop was Freiburg. The city was a dramatic change after we'd become so used to the quaint little villages throughout the rest of the Black Forest.

It didn't help that it was bucketing down with rain and freezing cold. We had left Schiltach after breakfast as we wanted to be able to take our time and wander round, which we were now regretting since it was sunny when we left Schiltach!

Once we made it into the centre of the city, we managed to find a lot of older buildings which went some way to easing us back into big city living...

Apologies

Sorry for the lack of updates recently. We are in the middle of applying for a Spousal Visa for Bradley and it's taking up pretty much all of our time. It's very stressful, and quite complicated with lots of paperwork.

Plus I'm in the middle of planning our upcoming trips to Austria, Croatia and New York so am feeling stretched pretty thin at the moment!

We hope to be able to finish our Germany trip details and also our York trip as soon as possible! But please bear with us in the meantime.

Hopping the border to France

On our third day in the Black Forest we headed out on a sunny morning to make the trip to the French city of Strasbourg.

It's only an hour away by train, and our Konus card covered our fare all the way to the town of Kehl, at which point we had to actually pay for a ticket = (

Strasbourg has over the years switched between being under both German and French control, and we were quite looking forward to seeing the clash of cultures.

Trying to hold back the excitement..