From North Wales to Bath & Stonehenge

Long time, no read.  First of all, sorry for the lack of updates in the past few weeks.  I've been busy here at the manor with schoolwork and haven't done much traveling since North Wales.  The weekend after North Wales was the Lake District trip.  I opted out of that one, but everyone that went had an adventurous time!  Instead, I hung around the manor with friends, and we had another movie day.  Having chill days like that let you catch up on your rest, even though you'd rather be traveling. 
The next Friday, October 24, was the Oxford day trip.  You can watch that vlog here. I went to Christ Church college where they filmed some of the first scenes for the first Harry Potter movie.

We got some delicious cookies at a local place called Ben's Cookies.

And we hung out with some dinosaurs and shrunken heads at the Natural History Museum and the Pitt Rivers Anthropological Museum.

The next day, Lauren and I went with the Baths, our British family from the Meet-a-Family Experience, to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life in Lincoln. It was really cool to see how people were living in Lincolnshire during the Victorian period, which coincided with our current British Studies lectures.  We got afternoon tea in a little village at a place called Tea in the Woods. That night, they had bought pumpkins for us to carve for Halloween.  I think mine turned out really scary! It was a really nice day!

Fast forward to Halloween, and I'm leaving on coach at eight in the morning for the four hour journey to the south.  We arrived in Bath around noon and visited the Roman Bath museum, and that was really interesting. 

After visiting the museum and getting a cup of tea and some delicious homemade scones, we got back on the bus, so we could be dropped off at our hostel.  The hostel was a hike, to say the least, from the center of town, so we went and had food a little Italian and decided to take a taxi back up the hill.

Bath was so beautiful with all of the leaves changing.

On Saturday, we visited Wells Cathedral, which was very impressive.  We also visited the town of Glastonbury and the Glastonbury Abbey.

When we got back to Bath, we decided to do a little shopping.  I may have bought a singing Christmas sweater (jumper) at Primark.  Sara and I bought Krispy Kreme donuts for Sunday morning since the breakfast at the hostel was gross. For dinner, we went to a resturaunt that we had been to in Scotland called Garfunkel's.  We took a cab back to the hostel and talked before going to sleep.

This morning, we slept in and got on the bus to travel to Stonehenge.  When we first parked, I couldn't see it anywhere, and I was starting to wonder if they have lied to us about Stonehenge our whole lives. However, we had to take a shuttle bus a few miles up a hill to get to it.  It was incredible to see in person, and I took some cheesy selfies with it.  It was cool to think that people somehow built that 3,000 years before Christ!

All in all, this weekend was a good one, and I never have to stay in a hostel ever again!  Hope everyone enjoyed my blog and vlog for this weekend.  I'll see you next weekend on me and Rachel's roomie adventure to Cheshire, England.

Byeeeeeee!

Love,
Alexandria

Beautiful and Crazy Weekend in Ireland

Happy Monday everyone!

This past weekend, I traveled to Ireland.  This trip was a roller coaster, but it was so beautiful.  I saw the most beautiful things that I have ever seen.

The crazy long weekend started with a British Studies exam at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, which I'm hoping I did well on.  My friends and I also had a little stress relieving get together and ordered food from a local place.  Our coach for Holyhead, Wales left the manor at 8 p.m.  We arrived at the ferry port at around 12:30 a.m.  We sat in the floor and waited to board the ferry at 1:30 a.m.  So, needless to say, Wednesday was a very long day. We arrived in Dublin at 6 a.m. after being on the ferry for three hours.

We arrived at our unimpressive hostel (more on that later), changed, and went to Starbucks down the street for breakfast.

We had bought train tickets to go to a small town in the Midlands of Ireland that was about an hour away from Dublin.  The train ride was so pretty and the town of Mullingar was so cute and way better than Dublin (which we didn't like).

We ate at a little place called Rusty Spoon, and I ate a great panini and delicious chips!

After walking around a bit in Mullingar, we had catch our train back to Dublin.  We when got back to Dublin, we checked in to the hostel, so we could see our room.  To keep it simple, our room was awful.  If you want to see it, watch my vlog here.

That night, we found a Lush, which is a store with all homemade cosmetics, so it was super cool!  Then, we went to a restaurant called Flanagan's and tried Guinness (it was gross).

Friday morning, we met in the lobby of the hostel (which was ironically called Paddy's Palace; believe me it was no palace) at 8:30.  We got on the Paddywagon, which had wifi!

Friday was a beautiful day, and my opinion of Ireland quickly changed when I saw all of the wonderful things in the country. It was so green!

We went to the Cliffs of Moher, which was absolutely incredible! Pictures and videos cannot portray how amazing it is to look out at that.

We then stayed the night in Galway, a beautiful little seaside town.  I really wish we could've seen more of Galway in the daytime and walked along the coast.

Saturday, we also started the morning early, but it was the most beautiful morning and afternoon.  We drove through an area called Connemara, and it was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.

We stopped at Kylemore Abbey, and I decided that I want to live in a place that looks just like that. Everything we were seeing looked like it was out of a magazine or something, but you were standing there.  I don't know how to put into words the beauty of that country.

One of the highlights was seeing an amazing rainbow in Connemara. It was so neat that we saw a rainbow in Ireland.

Here are some more pictures from Connemara.

Sunday, it was time to head back to Harlaxton.  We had driven back to Dublin and stayed in Paddy's awful hostel. We got on the bus at 6:45 and drove to the ferry port.  The views coming into the port in Holyhead were so cool.

We then stopped in the town with the longest name.  I'm not going to try and type it out, it's too long.  Haha! We ate at a local place and had a traditional Sunday roast while watching the previous night's episode of X Factor.

On our horribly long journey back to the manor, we drove through a part of England called Cheshire, and it was so beautiful.  Me and my roommate, Rachel, are actually planning a roomie's weekend to Cheshire in November.

 
Overall, the weekend was  beautiful with a few rough patches.  I want to go back and see more of Ireland because I feel like I only saw a small part of it (I just probably won't go back to Dublin).

Until North Wales this weekend, goodbye!

Love always,

Alexandria