28 day in England and Wales

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed reading your report. I would like to add however that your experience of lasagne is far from typical. You don't need to eat in an Italian restaurant in the UK in order to eat a proper lasagne, I can't imagine what the 'chef' in that place was thinking but rest assured, the rest of us know what a real lasagne consists of even if it isn't completely authentic.

As for The New Forest, I agree, it's a fantastic place. I trade at a market there once a month and I love the drive through it. The horses you mentioned are wild ponies and are a protected species. I'm surprised you didn't encounter the many cattle and pigs that are let loose to graze on the acorns at that time of year although they can be a hazard particularly at night.

Glad you enjoyed Winchester, it's one of my favourite cities and I've had the pleasure of policing it for several years. I often enjoyed eating my packed lunch beneath King Arthur's Round Table on those occasions I was at the adjacent court, it certainly beats eating your sandwiches sat in front of a computer at a desk!

Hopefully you'll be back for more, there are plenty more castles for you to enjoy. It's a shame you didn't get to visit Arundel but you're right, the traffic between Portsmouth and Southampton can be atrocious, particularly on a Friday.

Thanks for posting this, the link works fine. What a wonderful trip. I've been to many of the places you visited, and appreciated the detail and descriptions you provided. We stayed at Badger's Wood in Keswick and liked it a lot.

Too bad you didn't decide to just buy a GPS in England. Seems like it would have cost a lot less, and you'd have an asset for future driving. You could have bought and loaded a US map when you got home. We used one in the UK that came with our car as a promotion (though Auto Europe) and never had a problem with it. Since then, we've bought one here and added a Europe map for use there. Easy enough to transport across the ocean.

We also like to combine a cruise with a longer land trip. It beats jet lag in one direction, and provides a nice rest if you take it homeward. A few years ago we cruised from Dover to Shetland to Iceland to Newfoundland to Nova Scotia on NCL, one of our favorite cruises. Next spring we'll do another transatlantic.

Thanks again for sharing your memories, and thanks to Cruise Critic for making that link possible. I don't think it would be possible to link a post on this board into Cruise Critic, I haven't been able to share posts here outside the board.