We were once again cursed by the weather on our Cornwall trip – it rained every day until about 2 PM, after which time the sun did its best to break through the clouds (though it didn’t always succeed). Still, you have to take the good with the bad, so we did our best to see as much as we could!

On Wednesday, we headed out to Falmouth, which is on the southern part of the coast. The town itself was ok – nothing too spectacular, though we loved the little store called “Kit”, and had we have had more room in our suitcases, I suspect we would have gone a bit crazy with some purchases. But by far the highlight of the town was lunch at Risk Stein’s fish restaurant, where I had the best fish and chips that I think I’ve ever eaten.

The fish was sea bream, which has such a delicious flavour; not to mention that they use “beef drippings” (whatever that means) in their deep fryer, which gives a very “Sunday roast” flavour to the chips. It was just amazing!

In the afternoon, we headed to The Lizard, which is the southern-most point of the British mainland. We were lucky to have the best weather of the whole trip for the 40 minute walk out to the viewpoint and back!

The coastline was beautiful, and it was probably one of the nicest villages that we saw for the whole trip, simply because it was a bit quieter, and not quite so touristy.

We polished off our time in Cornwall with an early dinner at Senor Dick’s in Newquay. We managed to get to bed by 9:30 PM, which was a good thing, as the alarm was set for 4:45 AM to get an early start on the 5 hour drive back to London!

A few years back, Mom threatened us by saying: “Don’t bother coming home until you’ve seen St Ives”. And, I have to admit, that the number one reason we decided to spend our last days in England in Cornwall was simply to prevent Mom greeting us at the airport, only to send us right back again!

Once again, we had trouble finding a park – school holidays is not a good time to be in Cornwall – but finally we did, and we hiked down the hill to the beach. It was a lovely town, and walking through all the narrow streets and then emerging at a scenic viewpoint reminded me a lot of Corniglia.

We had planned our meals for the day quite badly, and somehow we managed to miss out on lunch. So come 4 PM, we found ourselves famished, and wandered into a little beachside restaurant called The Hub. We were desperately hoping that the kitchen wasn’t closed, and we were extremely pleased when our waitress assured us it wasn’t. The news just got better when I saw crab fettuccine on the menu, which I promptly ordered, and then thoroughly enjoyed!

“Thoroughly enjoyed” is actually an understatement; before it was served, I had said to Kristy, “This fettuccine had better be good; I feel like my whole life has led up to this moment, for me to eat this crab infused pasta”. Yes, it really was excellent, and yet so simple! I’ll be making that one when we get back to Australia. Anyone want to volunteer to come and try it?

Kristy had read about St Michael’s Mount in the Lonely Planet guide, and it sounded like something that was well worth a visit, so we ducked out to see it after the Minack Theatre. We were a little discouraged at first because parking was quite difficult – we tried two different carparks before finding one that would let us in – but finally we got a spot and headed out to the beach.

Basically, there’s two ways to get to St Michael’s Mount; the first, and by far the easiest, is by boat.

For the more adventurous souls though, there’s also the option of walking over – though this is obviously recommended only at low tide. There were loads of people attempting it while we were there, even though I suspect the tide was on its way in.

Unfortunately, this was as close as we could get to the castle, given the amount of time we had available. Had we have had more time up our sleeves, and perhaps more appropriate clothing on (Kristy was in jeans and a jumper, absolutely adoring the English summer weather!), I would have loved to wade over and check it out!

Overlooking Porthcurno bay in Penzance, the Minack Theatre is quite possibly the coolest thing that I have ever seen, ever! And I’m not even a theatre fan!

Basically, it’s an outdoor theatre built into the side of a rather steep hill, overlooking a rocky outcrop into the ocean. It was built largely by one woman – Rowena Cade – over the course of her life; she was still toiling away at it well into her 80s! This alone is an achievement in itself, but when you actually see the result of her handiwork, it redefines the word “impressive”.

Pictures don’t really do it justice; you need to see it for yourself! Honestly, it’s amazing, and at only £3.50 each to visit (not to mention that it’s the only place in Cornwell where we haven’t been charged for parking) it scores extremely well on Julian’s admission price:interest ratio.

For our final four days in the UK, and our final road trip in Gazpacho, we left London on Monday morning and headed out to Cornwall – the south-western most county of England. We’re staying here until Thursday, when we’ll zoom back to London to drop off the car to it’s new owner, before making our way to Heathrow for our final departure!

The drive out here is long – in the region of five hours – so we took a number of breaks along the way. When we saw signs to Cheddar, we knew that Sister Susan would never forgive us if we didn’t stop to pay homage to the birthplace of her beloved cheese, so we made a quick detour to check out it.

The area’s main drawcard is in fact not a bunch of cheesey attractions (see what I did there?), but instead the gorge, and the caves where it’s thought that the cheese was originally made. But at £17.50 a pop for a tour of the caves (“The ticket is valid for 10 years!” says the ticket lady), and with two-and-a-half more hours of driving ahead of us, we gave them a skip.

We finally arrived in Newquay at around 5 PM. Kristy had read about a funky cafe called Cafe Irie which apparently made a delicious afternoon tea, and even though it was a bit late in the day for it, we decided to give it a whirl anyway. Funky, it most certainly was!

Their food was excellent; Kristy especially can verify this, as she received two servings of pancakes instead of the two pancakes that she thought she had ordered. That’ll pay her for being indecisive with her toppings! Funniest of all though, the waitress didn’t even bat an eyelid at how much food it was – she must have thought Kristy was taking the whole “eating for two” thing very literally!

This turned out to be more than enough food to see us through the evening, so after a very quick walk around the town, we checked in to our hotel and had ourselves an early night.

We based ourselves in Killarney for day three, as there’s loads to do in that part of the country. First up was a visit to Ross Castle.

Turns out there’s not much to do at Ross Castle, unless you’re willing to shell out cash for a tour of the lake. Willing we were not, so we instead headed down to check out the Torc Waterfall. We all agreed that it was very waterfally.

Another big drawcard of the area is Gap of Dunloe. We were told that it’s “near impossible” to drive through the Gap, and were instead encouraged to rent some horses (for the girls) and a cart (for Philip and us). Of course, this all turns out to be a huge myth – it didn’t look any more precarious than the rest of the driving we’d done – but the Irish lad who drove our cart was quite entertaining, and well worth the cash – though I hope for his sake, he invests some of it on some underarm deodorant. Poo-ey!

Persistent rain on day four ruined our plans to drive the Ring of Beara, so we took an early turn-off and headed back to Blarney to visit it’s famous castle. My expectations were very high after the glowing review it got from Julian, however I suspect they visited on a day that it wasn’t pouring with rain.

The Cookes were particularly amused at the lack of safety equipment fitted to the castle; instead, they merely blow off any potential lawsuits with a blanket warning along the lines of: “Old castles pose an inherent risk to visitors”. I suspect that the climb to the top of the castle (where the Blarney Stone awaits your tender loving kiss), up multiple sets of slippery, narrow stairs would definitely fall into the “inherently risk” category; but when in Rome Ireland…

(Note the rain on my jacket!)

Despite Trip Advisor’s claim that this is the most unhygienic tourist attraction in the world, Dani, Philip and I all puckered up for the challenge – though I was somewhat comforted by the bottle of antibacterial surface spray that the attendant had sitting next to him, even if it was only for show. I dunno if my speech is, like, more eloquent now and stuff, but I definitely reckon that it’s done us wonders, ay!

View the Ireland photo gallery on Picasa or on Facebook.

We had a big day of driving ahead of us for day two in Ireland, so we made an early start at the crack of dawn – which according to Sam and Dani is around 10am. We drove along the beautiful coastline down to Kilrush, where we caught the ferry across the river Shannon. As it turns out, that was the first time the Cookes had been on a car ferry!

We could see dolphins swimming in the channel from the deck of the ferry – however it was nothing like the seaworld dolphins swimming in a pool, as pictured on the Shannon ferry website. I feel our journey was misrepresented!

On our way towards the Dingle Peninsula, on a particularly precarious stretch of road called Conner Pass, we passed two fairly harmless looking hitch-hikers, each carrying huge backpacks. I’ve never been tempted to pick up hitch-hikers before, but for some reason, we found ourselves discussing it between us at length. Too much length as it turns out, because by the time we decided against it, we were at least 1km down the road anyway.

We consoled ourselves that not picking them up was the probably the right decision, as we didn’t want to give the wrong impression (i.e. hitch-hiking is cool!) to the young Cooke ladies in the car right behind ours. However, only moments later when we stopped for some photos at a particularly scenic spot, we got a rousing from Natalie for making the wrong decision and not picking the poor backpackers up! Boy did we call that situation wrong!

Still, our stop was for the view – and it was particularly scenic, despite the rousing.

Anyway, the universe must have heard all the yelling, because about half-an-hour later, two more hitch-hikers presented themselves to us. And they turned out to be lovely! An older (mid-sixties, maybe) couple from the French/Swiss border, who had spent a good portion of their lives hiking around in Europe. They had a decent knowledge of the area, and they pointed out all the good spots for us to take photos – of which there turned out to be many! It’s a very scenic drive!

One of the sites that our hitch-hiker friends pointed out to us was a collection of “beehive houses” dating back to 2,000 B.C.! It was €2 each to go in, which also scored us an informational sheet about the historic site. I ended up splashing out an extra €2 to cover Samantha’s entry fee, and in return I insisted on the unofficial audio tour (i.e. I made her read the sheet aloud for us all). Best €2 I spent for the whole trip.

We finished off our tour of the very scenic Dingle peninsula, made a quick stop for a chip buttie for Kristy, and then drove to our hotel in Killarney (which turned out to be awesome!). We were glad to have had such amazing weather for the drive, as we knew that Ireland was not known for its sunny skies!

Our holiday in Ireland technically started late on Wednesday night last week, but I wouldn’t count our stay in the Cork airport Travelodge hotel as one of the highlights of our trip. No, things really kicked off on Thursday morning, when Philip and I picked up our respective sets of wheels, before we all headed off to Doolin to see the Cliffs of Moher.

The drive took around three hours, which put us in Doolin square on lunch time. Only seconds after complaining to Kristy that all of the good parking spots were being taken up by a Paddywagon Tour bus did we realise that cousin Kylie was on a Paddywagon tour of Ireland at that very moment! And only a few seconds after that, who did we happen to run in to? Yep, cousin Kylie, with her friend from Australia – Prim!

There’s an outside chance this photo wasn’t taken on location; there’s an even more outside chance that that’s not even Prim in the photo. But hey, when you forget to take a photo in the moment, you have to improvise… and the blonde one on the left is definitely Kylie.

First up on our activity roster was a boat cruise along the Cliffs of Moher. We selected a tour operator on the very specific criteria of having availability shortly after the time that we turned up; not to mention their amazing internet site (judging by the standards of 1998). Truth be told, we were a little early, so we waited it out in the car, and hoped that the rain would pass before we hopped on the boat (which it thankfully did).

Though the rain passed, the wind didn’t, and it made our trip out to the cliffs extremely rough. I’ve never been on a boat which rocked up and down so much – it was honestly like being on a roller coaster. People squealed! Stomaches dropped! Natalie fed the fish! It was totally awesome (though I think Natalie disagreed).

All of this, simply to get a close up view of the cliffs. Rather than go into a load of detail about the landscape (which I actually don’t know anything about), I’ll leave it at, “the view was lovely”.

We sailed up close to that spiky rock cropping out on its lonesome (on the right in the photo above), and then sat there for a few moments to enjoy the photo opportunity. It was covered in loads of birds of various types – the ones that stood around like penguins reminded me very much of penguins. There were puffins about the area too, though I can’t see any of them in this photo.

Our sail back to land was somewhat smoother, and I think most people were relieved to step off the boat.

Our hotel was only a little way up the road, and after checking in, Kristy spent a good 45 minutes rigorously testing that the bed was adequate for a full night’s sleep. After she emerged to report her findings, we all headed to McGanns Pub for dinner and some traditional Irish music. Admittedly I didn’t jump up and entertain the crowd with my Australian/Jamaican rendition of an Irish jig, though this is mainly due to there not being enough space for an impromptu dancefloor. That, and I didn’t want to steal too much focus off the band.

It was very late by the time we were done, and we were all quiet tired, so back to the hotel we trolleyed, to double check Kristy’s findings from earlier in the day. I’m pleased to say that her testing was excellent, and her results were accurate – we all slept very soundly!

Berlin is totally gay! Well, that’s not strictly true, it’s not totally gay, but it is the third largest gay city in the world, behind (heh heh) San Francisco and Sydney. Somehow we managed to visit on the weekend of the annual gay pride walk, and suffice to say, there were some interesting characters about!

Queerness aside, I have to say that of all the places that we’ve ever been to, nowhere makes me wish I’d have paid more attention in Modern History class than Berlin. The amount of history crammed into the one city is nothing short of spectacular, and we did our best to learn as much of it as possible while we were there. To this effect, we signed up for a walking tour on Saturday afternoon, which was led by a rather upbeat young Swede named David. He reminded me a bit of John B, but Kristy didn’t really agree.

He was rather passionate about Berlin, and consequently he made for a really great guide. And the tour itself – though clearly well worn, based on the number of other groups that we bumped in to – was excellent, and I’d highly recommend it to any visitor. Truth be told, we tried to get ourselves onto a Segway tour, but it was booked out!

We covered loads of historic sights in our four hour walk, and David taught us loads of things about the city. I particularly liked the outdoor exhibition about the Berlin wall which he showed us (near Checkpoint Charlie); so much so that we came back on Sunday so we could read it all in detail. To commemorate the wall, two rows of cobbled stones have been laid along the path of the outer wall, and it was cool to see it weaving around throughout the city. What a different place it must have been.

Admittedly, our guided walk made us double up on a few of the sites, since we had spent the morning exploring on our own. On our flight over, I had read that the glass dome on top of the Reichstag was best visited either first thing in the morning, or last thing in the evening, in order to try and avoid the crowds. We heeded this advice and went along shortly after they opened at 8 AM, and even then we were greeted by a fairly lengthy line.

After about 10 minutes, a large tour group was let through in front of us, and we were stopped right in front of the next security barrier. Upon seeing that Kristy was pregnant (and perhaps with a bit of emphasis by Kristy rubbing her stomach) the security boy took pity of us and sent us straight in via a secret side entrance! Score!

The walk up and down the giant dome provided us with a great view over the city, and the accompanying audio guide did a pretty good job of pointing out some of the city’s sights. Best of all – it was entirely free!

The Brandenburg Gate and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are both close to the Reichstag, so we paid them both a visit too.

The Hotel Adlon is also fairly close to The Reichstag, but it wasn’t until the conclusion of our guided tour that we learned of its significance. It turns out that loads of famous people have stayed there over the years, but perhaps none more famously than Michael Jackson, who proudly showed off his baby to the world by dangling it over the balcony!

One thing I particularly like about visiting Germany is the food, and, Berlin was no exception to this. On the beverages front, Kristy fell in love with apfelschorle; however I stuck to the safety of beer – bless those Germans and their purity law! We also enjoyed many fine meals, including bacon knuckle with sauerkraut, pork schnitzel, currywurst (pork sausage in tomato and curry sauce), and Zürigschnätzlets (veal in a creamy mushroom sauce). Yum!

I loved our time in Berlin, and our hotel was ideally situated thanks to a recommendation from Eva. Two days was barely enough to scratch the surface though; I think I’ll be putting it on to the list of places to visit again in the future!

View the Berlin gallery on Picasa.

For the second long weekend in May, our personal travel planner – Suzie – organised an extended long weekend in Lake Garda. We took the early flight from Gatwick to Milan on Friday morning (which meant waking up at 3:45 AM, w00t!), then drove for 2.5 hours or so, up to Riva Del Garda where we checked in to the Parc Hotel Flora for four nights.

Driving in Italy is not always the greatest fun. Italian drivers are rude, arrogant, love to speed, and they tailgate like nothing I’ve ever seen before. We tried to take a photo of how close they drive – this is the best one that we got. Bare in mind that at this point we were driving at around 130km/h (which is the speed limit on Italian highways):

On the plus side, it’s always a bit of a laugh to drive a left-hand-drive manual – changing gears with your right hand is downright weird when you’re not used to it!

As usual, the food in Italy was overall quite lovely, but our stand-out favourite place to eat – especially for Nick – was a restaurant called Al Volt. The concierge at our hotel had recommended it to us on our first evening, and it was so good that we ended up eating there again on our final evening. The food was deliciously prepared, the staff were friendly, but most impressive of all were the red wine glasses – each one was almost the size of a human head.

On Saturday morning, we rode the Mount Baldo cableway up to an altitude of 1,800m, and had a walk around the peaks. Unfortunately it was too overcast to get a view of the lake, but we did get a decent view of the start of the alps.

We also grabbed a cache while we were there, dropping off a travel bug that I’ve been holding on to for a few weeks. Suzie was the one who spotted it and dug it out from under the rocks – her first cache!

Nick, Suzie and I signed up for some downhill mountain biking on Sunday morning, but when we got to the rental store, we discovered that the other three people that were supposed to be joining us had piked due to the inclement weather. Usually they wouldn’t go up less than four starters but upon seeing how keen we were, they decided to make an exception. Originally we had signed up for a tour called The Skull but since it was our first time, and it was raining pretty heavily, our guide decided to take us on a slightly easier route.

It was so, so awesome! I was amazed at how much easier it is going over huge, rocky, staircase-like drops when the bike does absorbs most of the shock for you. I was well impressed by how solid they, and yet our guide told us that we were only riding the “cheap ones”, retailing for only $3,000! “Only”!

Lately, our luck with travel seems to be working against us, as wherever we go it rains! And for the first three days of our stay, this was exactly what we got – drizzly rain in the mornings, followed by overcast afternoons, then cool evenings. But our luck finally changed on Monday – the sun came out, the skies were a beautiful clear blue, and it was as warm as a freshly baked brownie!

We made the most of the sunshine by driving down to another town called Limone, where we rented a speed boat for four hours and did ourselves some touring. I can’t emphasis enough how much of a difference the sunshine made – it was like being in a totally different place! Of course, being sunsmart Australians, we did our very best to stay out of the direct sunlight.

We all had a go at driving the boat, and it was awesome fun. At full lock (and full speed of course), the boat turned so tightly that we almost thought it would tip! But try as we might (and of course, some of us tried harder than others… no names mentioned…), the boat stayed upright, which on reflection was probably a good thing.

Nick and I jumped overboard for a swim at one point, and it was freezing cold – we didn’t stay in for more than a minute! Not one to miss out, Suzie braved the water as well, but Kristy decided to give it a miss – she was the wisest of us all, I think!

Usually our vacations are non-stop from start to finish, as we try to cram in as much as we can into every day – so it was great to escape to Lake Garda and have Nick and Suzie show us how to holiday a somewhat more relaxed pace.

View the Lake Garda photo album on Picasa or Facebook.