English Heritage Series: Framlingham Castle

Brian and I recently joined English Heritage that allows us to get into more than 400 historic sites around England for one yearly rate.  As you can imagine, there are some amazing historial castles, abbeys, houses, etc. here that date back hundreds of years (they always make everything in America look so new and young!).  While we're here this year, we want to take advantage of this history and tour England visiting these sites.

First on our list was Framlingham Castle which is about an hour away from us.  I have been reading a lot about the Henry VIII time period, and this is the castle where Queen Mary (Henry's daughter with Queen Catherine) fought to keep her place in the line of succession and take the throne after her brother died.  The castle was more like a fortress with walls toward the top that offered great views of the Suffolk countryside (Suffolk is the county we live in).

We enjoyed our day walking around the castle and learning about its history.  We especially enjoyed this particular day because as you can see in the pictures, we actually had sunshine!!!  It was the first sunny day we had had in quite a long time, so we definitely tried to make the most out of it!  After the castle, we went to a nearby pub for an afternoon tea, which has become our tradition on the weekends.  Overall, a great day experiencing English history!  Here's more pictures from the castle for you to enjoy.

Getting a UK Driving License - What a Pain!

So even though Brian and I have been driving in the UK since last year, we are just now in the process of getting our official UK licenses.  Technically, we're allowed to drive on our US licenses for up to a year, which is now rapidly approaching.  Even though we both feel confident on the roads, the tests to get your UK license are pretty intimidiating:

First, you have to get a provisional license.  We have filled out the forms, but we have to wait to officially submit them until we can mail in our passports.  We'll be without our passports for at least 10 days, so we had to plan it around our trips.  (P.S.: Why can't they have a way to do this without making you send in your passport?  I hate being without it, especially when living overseas!)

Second, you have to take a computer theory test where you answer questions about driving and then do a mock drive on the computer to see if you react quickly enough to potential hazards.

After that is complete, you have to take the official driving test.  We will have to do a 40-minute drive through Bury St. Edmunds with an instructor.  You can have multiple minor mistakes, but even one major mistake and you fail the test.  The test will include either parallel parking or a back-in parking job, both of which I personally am not very good at.  At least I'll be driving my tiny little car that gives me more room for error!

I took a driving lesson last week and seemed to do pretty well, so we are going to move forward with all of this and hope for the best.  Between friends and family visiting and us going home in April, we don't have time for any failing!  Wish us luck!  I will post updates.  =)

Driving on The Continent: France, Luxembourg, and Belgium

This was the first Christmas Brian and I have ever spent away from Florida and our families, so we decided to go ahead and travel somewhere instead of just staying home by ourselves.  As you can imagine, flights during this time were really expensive, so we opted to take a car ferry over to The Continent instead the day after Christmas.  We began our adventure from Dover, England, and took a 1 1/2-hour ferry ride across to Calais, France.  It was great seeing the White Cliffs of Dover and experiencing how close England is to the rest of Europe, although I discovered I do suffer from seasickness!!

Taking the car ferry is an interesting experience because when you board the ferry, you are driving on the left side of the road in England, but 1 1/2 hours later, you exit the ferry and have to drive on the right side.  It's so confusing driving a British car on American-like roads!  Luckily we made it through without any incidents.  =)

Once we arrived in France, we made our way to Luxembourg, with brief stops in Saint Quentin, France, and Florenville, Belgium.  In Luxembourg we found another Christmas market with more great food, including cheese fondue over bread in a little bowl for only 5 Euros - that definitely made our day!  The weather wasn't great though, and the roads were very icy from snow the previous week, but we still had a wonderful time. 

After Luxembourg, we drove into Belgium to visit Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges.  Driving in the large city of Brussels was one of the scariest experiences of my life, and overall we found we didn't love the city.  What we're discovering is that the major cities around the world all kind of have the same feel.  We much prefer the smaller towns where you get a real feel of a country's culture.  After only a day in Brussels, we made our way to the rest of Belgium.  We really enjoyed the towns of Ghent and Bruges, but once again, the weather was absolutely miserable so we really didn't see their true beauty.  We will have to go back when it's not freezing and raining!

The funniest story (now that we look back) on this whole experience was that our hotel in Bruges didn't have our reservation so they had to put us at another hotel.  With all of the travel we do, we figured something like this would happen at some point.  We ended up at this small restaurant/hotel where we were the only guests.  We were outside of Bruges in the small town of Jabbeke that seriously did not have a single open restaurant.  We finally drove around for a while and ended up at a buffet restaurant.  The next night we ended up getting a pizza from a stand on the side of the road in the town because we didn't want to drive anywhere on the icy roads.  It was definitely quite the adventure!

So what we learned from this trip is that a lot of the smaller areas of Europe close during this time and the weather can be quite miserable (especially for Floridians who are used to sunny Christmases!).  Next year, if we travel around this time, we will be heading south!  =)

Here are a few pictures we took on our trip.  Hope you enjoy!

Weihnachten in Germany

This post is way overdue, but we're hoping people are still in the holiday spirit enough to enjoy it.  =)  Right after our trip to the States for Thanksgiving, we ventured over to Germany again for the Christmas markets (or Weihnachtmarkts).  If you've never been to a Christmas market in Europe, especially in Germany, you must go at some point in your life!  The atmosphere in these markets is amazing - there are wonderful little stalls in the middle of the towns that feature arts and crafts, delicious German food, and of course the Gluhwein and hot apple cider.  They were so perfect and surreal that once again, we felt like we were back at Epcot in Orlando.  =)

We visited numerous Christmas markets along the Romantic Road and Castle Road through Bavaria, Germany.  Probably the biggest one was in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a great medieval town that is so picturesque you can't believe it.  At two of the towns, we got our official Weinachtsmarkt cups.  It took us a while to figure this out, but basically you can either bring your own mug or purchase one for your Gluhwein (it's cheaper obviously if you bring your own mug).  What's neat though is that each town had designed its very own mug so you got a very nice souvenir for less than 2 Euros. 

After the Christmas markets, we made our way to southern Germany to see Neuschwanstein, the castle that the Cinderella castle at Disney World is based off of.  I  have wanted to visit this castle since I was a little girl, so I was worried that it wouldn't live up to my expectations, but it definitely did!  It was really neat because the first time I saw it, it was pitch black outside and the castle was all lit up.  You couldn't even see the mountains around it, so it just looked like a big beautiful castle out of nowhere.  We did the official tour the following day and then made our way back home to England.

Our trip was so amazing that we are definitely planning on doing something similar next year.  Let us know if you want to join!  Here are some pictures from our trip to entice you...  ;)

Christmas Card Outtakes

Since we got Lilo, we have wanted to make sure that she was included in our family Christmas cards.  Last year we were blessed to have our wonderful friend and photographer Erin take our photo.  This year, however, we were on our own in England.  We had to rely on a time-delayed continuous shot and hope for a decent picture with all of us looking into a camera.  It definitely was NOT easy working with a dog - we can't even imagine what it will be like when we are trying to get a card with a dog AND kids!!!  Here is the picture we ended up with:

We thought it would be funny to show you the outtakes though and the chaos that ensued as we tried to get our perfect Christmas card photo.  Every time I hit the button for the time-delay and ran over to where Brian and Lilo were, Lilo wanted to turn around and not face the camera.  *sigh*  The initial idea was to get a shot of us with a London red telephone booth, but we ended up having to kneel down to keep Lilo in the shot.  Oh well, at least we have a funny story!  Hope you enjoy!  =)