Croeso i Gymru

Hi everyone! We've been on the road for a month already and are now in Wales after another full week. Full of rain to begin with ☂☂. Having chosen Great Britain as a destination this was to be expected, maybe even more so because we were so lucky at the beginning of our journey! But for the past ten days or so the days pretty much all look alike; we have all types of weather and all seasons in a day. So, we never go out without our raincoat even if the sun is shining, we keep taking layers on and off  and if it's raining, we also don't forget our sunglasses because we know the sun will be back 😎. 

But so, so weather is also a good opportunity to visit cities, and it so happens that Glasgow was right on our route. We spent 24h there and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The city is very different than Edinburgh, more modern with a young spirit thanks to its 2 universities, and also less touristic but just enough as there are very interesting things to see such as some nice street art:

The Botanic Gardens (which is free) where we did a guided tour (also free) and learned all kinds of interesting things on local and foreign plants:

And Glasgow University, one of the oldest in Europe:

The day after I took the bike out for the first time in almost 2 months 😱,  it was about time!! We met a guy who was traveling on his bike at Loch Loon Campground where we were staying. He had cycled from Scotland all the way to Alicante in Spain!! Seems he was a good go-to person to get some advice on a nice ride in the area which he seemd to know pretty well so, let's go then! 

Well, I do think that it was a nice ride but, in the rain, and fog it was less scenic and the puncture I got 5km from the meeting point we had agreed on with Jérôme didn't help either... I still managed to do about 50km but needless to say it wasn't the best ride of my life 😞. But the sun came back out again and we spent a wonderful and quiet last evening in Scotland by the waterfront.

Bad weather is also a good time to drive some distance🚙. So it's back to England with a first stop at Hadrian's wall, a wall built by the Romans in the 3rd century in an attempt to "control" the borders of the huge Roman Empire. Well, we have to say that in France we are really spoiled with Roman remains and it's true that what we saw is not much compared to the Pont du Gard, but we were still impressed thinking about the size of the Roman Empire at its peak. That, if our journey takes us all the way to Turkey, we still won't have covered all the territory conquered by Cesar... 

Not much today remains of the 110km long and 4,50m high wall that went from coast to coast. Looks like Trump doesn't have very novel ideas 😏.

2nd stop in the Lake District National Park which, as the name says, is a park with some lakes😅. A very pretty area that most certainly would have deserved us spending more time to explore but again, we adapted to the weather.

So we hit the road and drove through the very dense Liverpool/Manchester area to go out and explore Northern Wales where we are already twisting our mouths trying to pronounce the names of places. Let's just say there aren't many vowels in there😧. We'll tell you next time how we managed.

Gwelwch chi yn fuan 😊.

Jérôme & Sophie

Map and photos here: https://sodeslau.travelmap.net

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