Thursday, November 10, 2011

Eiffle Tower

From Edinburgh to Coventry to London to Paris.  It's been crazy to say the least.  Where to start? Well I met up with a friend of mine from Colorado that is working for a Football club in England called Coventry FC.  Coventry is a small city just on the outside of Birmingham.  Big Mike showed me a great time in Coventry and I even got to see a football match when Coventry City took on South Hampton.  South Hampton is on the top of the Championship division and scores a lot of goals.  Coventry ended up losing 4-2, but the atmosphere of the game was absolutely awesome. 

From Coventry it was off to Paris, France to hang out with some friends that I had studied abroad with in London in 2007.  I decided hey I'll just take the night bus there.  Crazy idea!  Imagine this, 10 hours of sitting in a greyhound style bus completely packed with people.  In my mind I was thinking why in the world was I taking the night bus to France instead of spending the extra cash and taking the train.  Whatever, I was already on the bus and I've just go to enjoy this experience.  A few hours into the bus ride, a drunk man who had smuggled whiskey onto the train was super drunk and becoming obnoxious to many of the passengers on the bus.  Long story short, a fight almost broke out 3 feet from me and I was absolutely terrified.  Thank god nothing happened I made it to Paris at 8:11am.

Here we are Paris! I was meeting up with a girl that I was couchsurfing with later in the day so I grabbed a coffee at a mom and pop coffee shop, whipped out the ukulele and rocked away.  From there made I went to the beautiful Eiffel tower.  Paris is amazing the stereotype of the people being jerks isn't true at all from what I've seen.  Just a few more days here and then it's off to Barcelona.



 

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Scottish Kilt and Rental Car


After enjoying an awesome time in London for a few weeks I decided to head up to Edinburgh, Scotland and learn a little bit about my Scottish heritage and do some re-enacting of William Wallace of Braveheart.  I took a 10 hour bus ride to Edinburgh where I stayed for a few days and explored the capital of Scotland.  I didn't realize how rich the Scottish history was until I was there.  Had no idea that J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books there and had no idea that Alexander Graham Bell was from Scotland.  I guess I should have payed better attention in school.

After Edinburgh I wanted to explore the Highlands of Scotland.  I was debating on wether or not to just do a typical 3 day tour of the Highlands, take a day trip, or just rent a car and drive around on the wrong side of the road and explore the Highlands the way they are suppose to be explored.  I went with the last option to rent a car and drive manically through the scottish roads.  I posted a flier up in the hostel in Edinburgh to see if anyone was interested in tagging along to make the journey nothing short of epic!!  A New Zealander decided to tag along and split the cost of the adventure.  We picked up our rental car from "EuropCar" from the Alamo Car Rental Representative "Donald".  Donald was the man and hooked us up with a sweet ride for a good deal.  After pulling out of the rental car lot the fears of driving on the left side of the road finally set in, but after a few turns we were all good and ready to hit the road.  We drove 5 hours up to a town call "Inverness" located by Lochness which is home to the Lochness Monster Nessie.  We tried to catch her, but unfortunately we came up unsuccessful.

That being said the drive through the Highland is absolutely amazing.  That is really all I can say.  So you should go do them :)

Catch the web-series on Monday night @ 7:30pm EST hope everyone is doing great!