We headed off for our adventure in the car starting in Royal Tunbridge Wells where we had been invited by a Kiwi loving couchhost to attend a local music festival. The first day was cold and rainy but the music was good as was the company. We stayed the night with Joelle and her family, she rides a Suz 650, a real petrolhead at heart!
From RTW we swung over to the coast and a village called Rye which is just the most picturesque wee place. Our first night in the car we slept at the beach near Rye in a carpark, there was a motorhome there too but a man came and told them to leave - he didn't see us there in the car...
We travelled across the bottom of England from Kent through to Cornwall and on the way visited numerous English Heritage sites (we joined for a year and have free entry). One of the best was in a village called Battle where the 1066 battle between King Harold of England and William the Conqueror was fought. We fluked arriving on a bank holiday and the whole town was out in olde day gear and with old games etc in the streets. Kent was on his sticks and when we went around the EH Abbey they gave him a mobility scooter to zoom around on, cool.
Of course we visited Stonehenge then passed through Devon and crossed the Dartmoor Forest and we slept out there a night on the moor, no forest now. Cornwall was magic, the weather was lovely but the wind quite cool. Each day we drove throughout the countryside and spent time visiting castles and ruins. We also went to the Eden Project which was very interesting.
We visited Lizard Point the most southern point of England and also Lands End which is just a tourist crazy place now. Down one side and up the other, up to Tintagel to visit the place where the King Arthur myth began and through the Exmoor Forest and across to Bath and Avebury, a very interesting place similar to Stonehenge but older still.
The countryside everywhere is so amazingly green and fresh and the patchwork fields ringed with hedgerows are a lovely sight. You couldn't get much more of a contrast than there is between being in USA and here. Here everything is very compact and narrow, the roads, the houses etc where the USA is all about space. Also of course we miss the ease of shopping of there, here it is much more expensive and not so easy to find things.
