Leeds Castle (plus touring London) with Malcolm

We've got a whole bunch of photos and stories from our recent trip to the Dordogne region of France and to the Andalusian region of Spain yet to come, but in the meantime a bit more meandering about the UK...it's Guy Fawkes' night here and it sounds like a war-zone with all of the private fireworks shows going off around the suburb. I stopped by one as I was out for a run, and while it was no Sydney NYE it was pretty incredible given it was going off in a garden in the middle of London - and even had some fireworks of a kind I'd never seen before (very sparkly - very cool)

The weekend before we left for the continent we did a little touring around the UK with Malcolm - Leeds Castle was our chosen road-trip, and would have to have the nicest grounds of any Castle we've visited in the UK. Somewhat surprisingly (at least on face value) it isn't in Leeds at all, but is in Kent (which is just as well as Leeds is half-way to Scotland, and Kent is an hour from London*)

* At least, if the trains are running, which they weren't on this particular weekend - but at least the countryside where the rail-replacement bus went was pretty...

I'm going to leave the photo to speak for itself, but suffice to say it is a gorgeous place to go on a sunny weekend - our biggest piece of advice is to leave a bunch of time to go through the maze...or at least be better at mazes than we were, as we didn't get through it despite our best efforts. We almost didn't get out, either!

Stephen and Malcolm at Leeds Castle

The other highlight of the weekend was our touring around London - we started at Borough market for lunch, and then kicked on down to Canary Wharf and on to Greenwich, where we picked up a copy of Settlers (one of the best board games ever) at what is possibly the coolest games store in London - a purchase which was to receive quite a workout on our travels.

From Greenwich we caught a riverboat along the Thames back toward the city, and as dusk fell we saw the city light up from the water - which was absolutely fantastic and gave completely new perspective to London (especially as we almost always cross it underground instead)

We caught up that night with Matt and Eliza and Jane and Ben in a tiny bar with a bunch of English and a Frenchman to watch the English beat the French in the World Cup semi-final. I do think though that the lone Frenchman had more passion than all of the English put together - quite the contrast, and I can empathise with him over the result...