Trip Day 1&2 - Pittsburgh to York

The first two days of our U.K. trip with no sleep combined to make one day. One very, very long day. We woke up in the morning and headed off to the Pittsburgh airport where we boarded our Southwest airlines flight to Philadelphia!



Generally I don’t say anything negative on my blog. I tend to follow the rule that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. So I won’t say a thing about the Philadelphia airport.

Kudos to Southwest for being a great airline. Even on the relatively short flight from Pittsburgh to Philly they make it enjoyable with friendly staff and pilots who tell jokes.

After a short layover in the town of fantastic cheesesteaks (although you can't get any of the good ones at the airport!) we boarded our British Airways flight to Heathrow in England.



BA has also proved to be a great airline with good customer service. Typically I can’t stand long flights. This time I was armed with my iPod, a few episodes of Star Trek, some g&t’s and the little airplane map thingy on the screen. I like this feature because it seems like the video game airplane can make it over the ocean safely. And it did!



Fly airplane, fly! If I will it hard enough, it goes where I want it to.



The new iPod has enough Futurama, Star Trek and Brisco County Jr. installed on it to keep me entertained for hours. I found some software online from Cucusoft and ripped my DVDs to it (DVD to iPod converter).

After landing in Heathrow and standing in the immigration line until the end of time we caught a train to York. I didn’t sleep a wink on the plane of course (couldn’t take my eye off the screen with the animated airplane) so I tried to catch a few z’s on train.

Upon arriving at York, completely exhausted and begging to take a nap, my wife (who is tougher than I am) dragged me out and forced me to go have fun. I solved this problem of no sleep by going to my favorite pub in York, The King’s Arms, for a few well deserved Samuel Smith bitters. We caught a meal after that and enjoyed the rest of the day walking the walls and taking in York.



The King's Arms in York is known as the "Pub that Floods". It has flooded many times in the past few decades and is made of solid rock for the most part. They have no carpets (wisely) and a beautiful bar. I'll post more pictures of it on day 3.



Pictured above is Yorkminster Cathedral. York is a beautiful city with so much to see. Yorkminster Cathedral is simply amazing and these pictures hardly do it justice. It is very old and it is very big. We don’t have these kind of things in the States.



To end the day we picked another pub at random to grab a beer.

End day 1&2!

Back from the U.K.!

Bollocks! We're back from our 2 week trip of England and Scotland. My wife and I had planned for nearly a year to return to the U.K. and see more of the country. We had been there in 2005 and really enjoyed the country, people, history, food and beer. Most people think we're crazy but we love cellar temperature cask pulled ales, fish and chips and cottage pie with mushy peas. Yum!



We practically circled England and even made our way into Scotland for a few days. Since my film production is pretty much confined to editing at the moment, and that's usually not the most exciting thing to blog about, I'll be using my blog to let friends, family and readers know the day by day account of our fantastic trip.



Above is a shot of me at St. Ives on the very Southwest tip of England.

Here's the overview of our trip. Starting in Pittsburgh we bounced from Philadelphia to Heathrow Airport outside of London and went straight to York (one of our favorite cities on Earth!). We then visited Masham, Durham, Stirling, Doune, Keswick in the Lake District, Penzance, St. Ives, Canterbury, Heathrow to Philadelphia and finally back to Pittsburgh.



We both love photography and planned to photodocument our entire trip every step of the way. Above is a photo of my wife using our Canon Digital Rebel XTi on top of Castle Crag overlooking Derwentwater Lake in the Lake District. We're both interested in history, architecture and fine brewing so we saw many cathedrals, castles and visited a few breweries on our trip. And a "few" pubs.



There is a nice picture of me sitting at the bar at the Theakston's Brewery in Masham. As everyone knows I love beer and my favorite beer on earth comes from the North of England in the Yorkshire region. There's just something magical in the water up there. I was fortunate to visit the Samuel Smith's Brewery for my 30th birthday in Tadcaster a few years ago. Visiting Theakston's this trip was a real treat. Old Peculier is one of the best beers ever made... although I think I'm holding a sample half pint of Theakston's XB in that photo. Their Theakston's Bitter is excellent and was one of the best bitters that we enjoyed during our trip.



Here's a great shot of me sitting in Doune Castle in Scotland. That was one of my favorite days because not only was Doune Castle beautiful, well preserved and a lot of fun to tour without any bastardized commercialism or forced tours... but they also filmed Monty Python and the Holy Grail there! They even let visitors borrow coconuts to clack around the castle (which I did and I have video).

You may notice the location where I'm sitting from the scene where Michael Palin's character walks into the room full of ladies in Castle Anthrax. I had our video iPod with us to make sure we were at all the correct spots.

I'll start with day 1&2 on my next blog post. I'll combine those days because we stayed up for 2 days straight when traveling over there. We photographed the entire trip with both cameras, our Canon XTi and Canon PowerShot SD500. I'll be posting small and some enlarged versions of our photographs from the big camera. None of the photographs on this blog are permitted to be used anywhere or reproduced without my permission. However I hope that you enjoy them and let us know what you think!Cheers!