A friend and I wanted to backpack through the UK, and we kind of had the funny idea of doing it before Brexit actually took place. The idea was that we would see the UK before Brexit and then come back a few years after Brexit to see if it had turned into a utopia or the next installment of Mad Max.

I had made an open Facebook post indicating my plans, and it so happened that some of my family in the US took me up on the offer. Things worked out so that I would meet up with my family as well as spending some time with my friend as we toured through the UK.

As the time came to leave, I took the overnight bus to London from Cologne.

My dad, stepmom, and two of my brothers flew into London and were already at our air B&B. This is our reunion photo.

We then spent a couple days in London.

 

We went into a toy store that was 4 stories tall, including the basement. Needless to say, the kids were excited.

We then took the opportunity to visit Stonehenge and the Salisbury Cathedral, in the town of Salisbury, where the best Magna Carta copy is.

After a few days, my friend joined us in London, and my family, my friend, and I continued checking out London.

 

Shortly thereafter, we all got on the bus and made our way to Liverpool.

We went into the Cavern Club and saw some live music. I really loved how full of music Liverpool was. But we wanted to see a Beatles cover band.

The Liverpool Central Library is quite magnificent

We came went back to The Cavern when “Made in Liverpool” was playing, a local cover band of The Beatles.

This was where the journey with my family ended. The next day, they continued on to Edinburgh, and my friend and I went to Manchester for the day and met up with a friend of my friend.

We didn’t do too much in Manchester other than go to dinner and then later a bar. I got a nice beer which I posted about here.

We then came back to Liverpool since my friend and I went to a hostel, as my family was now gone. We had to laugh about the amount of Germans we kept running into. We had both left Germany to go on vacation, and yet, we kept running into them everywhere.

We then took the bus up to Glasgow, which was a disaster. The Megabus does not seem to have an official bus stop. We were told to go from some square, but once we got there, we found no information about our bus. We did see some bus employees, though. We asked them where we were supposed to go, and they told us that Megabus always left from another place. Frantically, we ran to that place, but there were no Megabuses to be found. After some more investigation, we went back to the original bus station and managed to piece together that we were actually supposed to simply take the local bus out of the city, and we would get a connection with the actual Megabus later. It would have been nice if Megabus had informed us about that because it was otherwise totally unclear…

In any case, we managed to make it to Glasgow, where we stayed for a couple day. We were pretty tired, the weather wasn’t great, and the city unfortunately just didn’t impress us much anyways, so we spent most of our time just hanging out at the hostel.

The Necropolis was very cool, though!

 

While walking around, we eventually just stopped in a fancy pub and knocked back a few brews, one of which I posted about here.

After a few days of chilling, we then caught the bus to Aviemore. That was also a nightmare. The first half was fine, but then we had to get a connection at some station in some town along the way. At the transfer station, again, nobody had any clue where to go. The signs said one thing, the tickets said another, and the employees had a different opinion. And since the bus was late, we kept assuming we had missed the connection. Again, in the end it did work out, but we were needlessly running back and forth in the station trying to cover all the potential gates it was allegedly supposed to show up at. I don’t know why Megabus, which is originally a British company, just can’t get their program right. The trains are much more expensive than buses, but I think it might be worth it if one can avoid the stress that the buses bring with them.

We finally did make it to Aviemore, and with it access to the Cairngorms National Park. We immediately head out into the mountains.

We spend a few days hiking around, and it was a lot of fun. We had some difficulties with the initial ascent because we were hiking up a marsh that had formed in the canyon we were hiking up, but we managed to make it to the top.

At some point, we even started joking about how there was a German sleeping in the tent with me. There was just no escape!

On one of the days, the clouds and rain came in hard. We actually got turned around a few times, and it was the first time that I actually wished I would have had a compass. I am usually pretty good at keeping my orientation, but there was no chance in the storm we were in. We did have our phones to aid us, but a little mini-compass would have been very welcome.

But the next day, it was breathtaking outside!

We didn’t make it up Ben Macdui (the 2^nd highest mountain in the UK and highest in the Cairngorms) since it was on the other side of a canyon, but we did get on top of Braeriach, which is the next highest mountain.

It was really cool to watch the fog roiling in the canyon below. Like a sea of raging waters, it whished around the canyon floor, hitting the cliffsides and spraying up large waves of harmless mist.

My friend was pretty beat, so he gave me the tent so he could head back and catch an earlier bus to Edinburgh.

I hung out for another night and hiked a bit in the canyon floor. I eventually ended up getting very close to Aviemore, and there weren’t so many places to camp that didn’t cost a lot.

I ended up stealth camping near the town in the bushes by the lake. It was a little discomforting because there were a lot of spiders. Once I got in my tent, they started making their way in between the rain guard and the tent proper. I had to pee, but I didn’t feel like opening the door and letting any in, so I just uncomfortably held it in until the next morning when I quickly took my tent down and got back on the trail to the town.

I then got to the town and caught the bus to Edinburgh. Surprisingly, I didn’t have any complications this time!

Jumping back in time, when my friend and I were booking hostel room, we were amazed at how expensive it was in Edinburgh. We didn’t have much of a choice, though, so we booked them. It turns out, the reason for that is that during the month of August, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival takes place. Neither of us knew that or had ever even heard of the festival before, so it was quite a pleasant surprise when we got to the city.

I rendezvoused with my friend and we checked out the city and the Fringe Festival together.

One thing that I find hard to find in Germany is used bookstores. I have found some, but they are few and far between. And of course, they tend to have mostly German books. It was a real treat to discover all the used bookstores in all of the UK, but Edinburgh had some especially neat ones.

And we can’t forget the Fringe aspect. We saw a show called “The Complete History of Europe” which was mildly enlightening but really funny. But there were also dozens and dozens of free entertainers right in the streets as well.

We also checked out the Edinburgh castle.

As the trip was coming to a close, I went on a fun pub crawl through the city, which had us going to this neat Frankenstein bar.

All good things must come to an end, and my 3-week trip was over. My friend continued on to Ireland while I flew back to Germany to go to work.

It was certainly not an exhaustive UK trip, and there were tons of more things I wanted to see. I didn’t even get to see enough of London, and I actually went back earlier this year, so I’ll post about that soon.

Even still, I would love to have spent more time in Scotland, I would have liked to have gone to the Isle of Skye and Wales, among other locations. One day in the future, I plan to go again. Maybe it will be after Brexit, and we’ll see how things changed.