2010/5/8-23 England & Scotland Road Trip

It was a 16D/14N road trip from Manchester to Liverpool across to Lake District and further up to Dumfries, Glasgow, Oban, Spean Bridge, Loch Ness and down to Stirling, Edinburgh, Jedburgh, Twice Brew, Newcastle and back to Manchester. 7 B&Bs, 2,000km+, 25 pints of beer, 25 bottles of reds and whites, 15+ spectacular castles and historic sites, 7 stunning hiking trails.... and a lot of fun!!!

Since I moved into my current role I have been extremely busy. Planning of this trip could only be done in a few weekends. Finding places to go was easy but places to stay not. We loves staying in country houses, farm houses and in the UK, these places are usually very small and thus easily get fully booked. May is the beginning of peak season so I did spent some time to look for best places to stay.

May 8, 2010, Saturday, Liverpool

We all took Emirates to fly from HK at 0:35am on May 8 Saturday. Hanging around in the Emirates airport for 3 hours and then further fly onto Manchester. The flights had been uneventfull except that they were all extremely full. The eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland were although relatively small for volcanic eruptions, caused enormous disruption to air travel across western and northern Europe over an initial period of six days in April 2010. Additional localised disruption continued into May 2010. Before we flown, we were keeping out fingers crossed for any serious disruption and luckily there wasn't. (However only after a day we arrived, Manchester Airport was closed for 1 night! Phew!) We arrived in Manchester at around 12:30noon and took our time with the officers at the Customs. They asked all kinds of questions you could think of. By the time we found ourselves at Budget's counter picking our car was almost 2pm! And it was so crowded! Ju and Liz were all at the church on that Saturday and we were supposed to call Ju after we arrived in Bootle, Liverpool. We picked up our black Peugeot and headed for Liverpool. Well before we could do that, Mr Alan Wong spent some time to play around the clutch as it was like no ordinary car and finally he's able to start the car probably at around 2:20pm and off we go! The drive to Ju's house in Bootle was around 50 minutes. We Ju and Liz were all in the church. We found her house very easily with my GPS however, they were still at the church which was suppose to be within walking distance. We were so hungry and tired and couldn't find the church on my GPS. We circled and circled and gave up. Ended up stopped at The Somefield, a supermarket and bought a few fast food and waited for Ju to meet us. We finally met Ju at around 3:30pm in front at her house. It felt so good to see old friends! We settled and ate all the fast food we bought from Somerfield :) and then we all so tech-savvy of course started to connect to the net. Somethings didn't work right and we had finally screwed Ju's home wifi!!!! Kevin & myself had tried to fix it while Milly & Alan were so sleepy that they just called it a day (for now) and that was around 5pm. Our tries were all in vain. Kevin gave up and was snoozing on the sofa. I was feeling sleepy but I guessed my hunger overcame it :) and eventually me and Ju & Kevin walked to the nearby supermarket ASDA. I didn't mention the temperature so far did I? It was so damn cold! I put on my leather jacket and I was shivering like crazy! We bougth a lot of stuff including next day's breakfast which were bagels, cheese, ham, soya milk... hmm yummy! And of course a lot of ready-to-eat fast food and pizzas and a few bottles of frizzy wine and reds. By the time we hit home (so cold!) Alan woke up and we ate all the food and drank the frizzy wine. Feeling so dizzy and I went to sleep at around midnight and I did not know what happened instantly!

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