I had dreams of my maternity leave - using it to get out and about London to visit museums and the sites, perhaps with an occasional weekend trip. Paris anyone?

Then baby arrived and I realised quickly that it might not work out as I had imagined. And I've been very happy with that, as I have to say there is nothing better than having a baby curled up against you as they sleep contentedly.

However, when Paul had to take a trip for work within the UK, I decided I'd rather tag along (somewhere with room service!) than sit at home alone with the baby for a few days. So we packed up the car with baby, dog and lots of baby gear and hit the road.

We were staying in Whitchurch at a golf resort and spa; I thought we might be able to walk into town to see the sights, but it seemed as if both town and sights weren't exactly in walking distance.

So the first day, we packed up the car again and headed out for a small trip - to dip my toes into handling baby and dog out on my own outside my 1 mile comfort radius in Chiswick.  We visited checked out English Heritage for a site near us to visit and stumbled upton Moreton Corbet Castle.



Originally built in the 12th century, it's stone facade was built in the 13th century and remodeled in the 16th century.  It fell into disrepair when the family moved in the 18th century, and while it is managed by English Heritage, it is still owned by the family.  There's not much importance to it, which I think is almost more interesting! Imagine someone coming to look at the ruins of my house 500 years from now!



The next day, feeling more confident, we decided to go out for a walk for the dog at Fenn's Whixhall Bettisfield Mosses. It claims to have one of the biggest and best raised bogs in Britain (whatever that means), but we were looking maily for a place for Belle to run around and let loose.



We drove in and parked by the canal. We decided to start our trek there and walked along the canal path. About 10 minutes into our walk, we crossed over the border from England to Wales. From there we decided to head inland.  Our whole walk, we had only crossed paths with one other couple walking with their dog, but once we headed into the mosses we were completely alone. It was muddy out there, but that made no difference to Belle - she was in heaven! We wandered for a while but then a huge rain cloud was approaching so we dashed back to the car and decided to make it a night in, room service and all!



So that Paul could get in on some of the sightseeing, we had booked one extra night in Whitchurch. So Saturday morning, we slept in (as much as you can with a 2 month old baby) then squeezed in one final sightseeing stop at Beeston Castle. I had wanted to visit it during the week, but oddly enough it was only open weekend days.

The castle offered two walks - the woodlands walk and the castle walk. So we decided to take the woodlands route, thinking it would be scenic and something Belle would like. We were right on both counts - Belle sprinted, jumped logs, ran back, chased squirrels and was generally the happiest dog alive as we walked through trees full of the autumn reds, oranges and yellows. Where we were wrong in our thoughts was that the path would take us to the castle. She told us a 30 minute walk and 25 minutes later we ended up right back where we came in.




A little rain was starting to sprinkle and the baby was getting quite heavy to carry but we persevered, intent upon getting to the top of the castle.  When we got to the top, while the castle wasn't much, the views were worth it.  With views stretching across 8 counties, it reminded me of the simple beauty of the English countryside, filled with greenery, fields and of course sheep.


Unfortunately the rain was looming, so we snapped a family photo and scurried back down to leave. Before we left, we were persuaded to purchase an English Heritage membership though, meaning we'll have lots more English adventures in the next year!

Since our move overseas in 2011, we have missed the chance to celebrate Thanksgiving in the US.  It's sad to miss out on our families (and the days off!), but we've taken the chance to bring this tradition with us to our new homes.  Once we moved to London, we discovered a great community of Americans and took to celebrating in a big way!

The tradition started in 2013 with a group of 25 of us travelling out to Dartmoor National Park for a weekend at Bovey Castle.  For 2014, we took it further and travelled to Cork, Ireland to celebrate.

While I had been to Ireland before, it was Paul's first trip and I think he may have been more excited about Ireland than the big Thanksgiving!

The first stop of the trip was a group tour and tasting at the Jameson Distillery nearby our hotel.  While I'm not a whiskey fan, it was interesting to see the process and the history there.








On our last day in Ireland, we both wanted to get in some proper sightseeing.  Paul had researched the area and the drive around the Ring of Kerry, but since we didn't have time to do it all, we picked the biggest sight - the Blarney Castle.




While the castle has an impressive history, including requests from Queen Elizabeth to take possession of the castle, it is most famed for the one stone within it - the Blarney Stone.  It's not entirely certain where it came from, but thousands (or more!) have made the trip to the castle to kiss the blarney stone in order to help them become more eloquoent speakers.  Before arriving, I was expecting a stone on display with a queue up to give it a quick peck.

Once we arrived at the top of the castle, I saw the reality.  The stone is built into the castle battlements - in the past, people were simply lowered to kiss it. Now, to ensure that everyone who kisses it lives to tell the story, they've built in protective bars and have a friendly staff member hold on as you give it a smooch!


So with great feast with friends and gaining the gift of gab, we called is a successful Thanksgiving. This year may not have been quite as exotic, but is certainly exciting as we enjoy it as a family, with my sister and a friend from the States visiting.  We certainly have a lot to be thankful for!

When we were planning our trip to Cambodia and Thailand, I kept hoping, hoping, hoping that our trip would overlap with the Loy Krathong Festival. This is the famous lantern festival, known to most only because of the gorgeous photos with thousands of laterns lighting up the sky. The hard part about visiting is that the dates aren't released very far in advance, as they are based off a lunar calendar, so it could be completely up to luck if you make the festival.

Our luck? The festival was the week before we arrived!! However, for tourists like us, they also do an international festival with a set date which coincided with our trip - unlike the normal festival, there are tickets which sell out months in advance and had sold out when we booked our tickets.  I put my name on a waiting list and hoped for the best.

Even without the festival, Chiang Mai, home of the Yi Peng (or Loy Krathong) festival, was full of excitement during our days there. On the first night, we wandered the streets, which were full of people, parades, singing and lights! We found our way to the river and purchased some floating lanterns, made wishes and set them free.  The night was raining, making it hard to keep the lanterns lit and making slush of the ground. We set up shop at an outdoor beer festival to take it all in.




Our friends were leaving the last day, while we were continuing our stay by another night. We decided to wake up early for a bit of a cultural exploration and took a tuk tuk out to see Wat Prathat Doi Suthep. In addition to the temple being beautiful, it is situated on top of Doi Suthep mountain, giving great views over the city, so we got an early start hoping to catch the sunrise over the city.










That evening we decided to skip the celebrations in order to better explore Thai food with a cooking class. For our first stop, we hit the markets to find the fresh ingredients we would need for all of our recipes.  The markets were busy, filled with people shopping for their evening meals, and full of unusual fruits and veggies. I had my eye out for the famed durian fruit (said to reek of fish and is banned from many hotels and planes), but it was out of season so I was either fortunate or unfortunate depending upon your stance on the smelly fruit.



After our shopping, we headed back to the site to cook up our evening meal. It was quite the feast! We started with spring rolls, headed over to soup (coconut and tom yum), then made our main meals (pad thai and stir fried hot basil). For our dishes, we even made our own curry, grinding up fresh green chilies to make the paste. With our enthusiastic grinding, Paul managed to get some in his eye, rendering him out of commission for the rest of the grinding, and making me a bit hesitant to finish up the job! The finished product was worth it though - so delicious. We tried recreating the pad thai at home once we got back, only to find it just wasn't as good. Was it our cooking or the lack of farm fresh ingredients? I'd like to think our cooking wasn't to blame!



Despite the commercialness (and even inauthenticity compared to the real event), it was moving and magical. I can only imagine sitting in on the real deal.  After we lit our first lanterns, we stood back to take it all in before lighting a few more lanterns to send our wishes and prayers up.  As the lanterns slowed, excitement began again when the fireworks started.  It made a beautiful display against the backdrop of a sky lit with lanterns. I don't think I could have asked for a better ending to our time in Thailand and it's an image that is etched forever into my mind - how could it not be?

While a new baby means I'm not getting as much sleep as I'm accustomed too, it means I get a lot more time to catch up on television and movies during all those late night, early morning, midday, afternoon and evening feedings.

In the first month, I'd watched all of How I Met Your Mother, Call the Midwife, and several movies including Pride and Prejudice (old and new).  It was then I realised it had been almost exactly a year since I had struck out like Elizabeth Bennet in the Peak District of England and I had yet to write about it. Call it baby brain, call it pregnancy fatigue, but either way, I've fallen seriously behind on the blog in the last year!

On to the Peak District though. I've always been an Austen fan, even in high school. I remember curling up on the tiny sofa at my friends house (3 of us on what was surely meant to fit no more than 2 people) and watching the best Pride and Prejudice, the BBC version of course. In those days it was VHS, so we had to get up every hour to pop in each of the five tapes. If we were short on time, we'd skip ahead to the 4th and 5th tapes since that's the best part anyways.

When a friend came to England to visit who is also a Pride and Prejudice fan, we decided to head north to see some of the stately homes for ourselves.

While a car is definitely helpful in the area, we decided to take the train first to Sheffield rather than fight London traffic getting out of town on a Friday afternoon. We stayed in the city and really only had time to hit up the pub, where we couldn't decide if we were insulted or flattered that they didn't consider us to look 18, so had to be IDed.  We were happy to get out the next day and start off in the country.



Our first stop was Chatsworth House, but we had a little drive to get there.  In the films, you see the beautiful, green rolling countryside and it didn't disappoint during our visit.  Whether it was sheep grazing on a hillside, beautiful rock walls along the lanes or oceans of grass, green from the rain, there was something beautiful everywhere we looked.  The lanes were a bit narrow though, so bravo to my friend for navigating the unfamiliar terrain on the other side of the road! She was such a trooper for driving the whole trip.




Chatsworth House dates back to the 16th century (although there was a manor house before that) with the Cavendish family who still reside in the house today as it has been passed down through the generations. It is odd to think of these as family residences, the objects as someone's prviate art collection, rather than the museum associated with historic homes.  The collections inside held everything from rocks, to plates, to the usual sculpture and paintings.



While the insides were lovely, we were excited to check out the gardens, especially since it was a lovely sunny day.  We successfully navigated the maze, past water features and then around to the back for a look down the long lawn at the familiar facade.




Except on this occasion, the facade wasn't so familiar. Chatsworth House is familiar as Pemberley from the BBC Pride & Prejudice, and you probably recall the fountain out on the lawn as you get a beautiful look at the facade.  Except during our visit, there was a temporary contemporary art feature on with rocks and teeny tiny little snakes, rabbits, birds and other creatures spread out amongst the area.  Slightly disappointed, we still circled around looking for the scandolous sculptures of men and women hidden among the rocks.



The next day, we headed further further west just to the outskirts of the Peak District to visit Lyme Park. This is a hunting estate also dating back to the 16th century, owned by the Legh family until it was donated to the National Trust in the 1940's. Can you imagine growing up in a place like one of these?



After seeing Pemberly, we figured this was a perfect way to round out the trip as the setting of the oh so imfamous lake scene from the BBC Pride and Prejudice (so famous in fact they erected a 12 foot statue in the Serpentine in Hyde Park for a short display). The grounds were beautiful and on a sunny day full of everyone with their dogs on walking holidays. We walked around the house, but decided not to trek out to the lake itself, which was a bit further set out from the house.





Then, like most weekend trips, it was over too soon and we were back to London, and like most of 2014, I was heading off somewhere else the next day.  The Peak District has plenty more to offer though, so it may require hauling Paul, Belle and the mini Tart back out there for a visit!

Since baby Tart has finally arrived, I figure it's about time that I get around to talking about our "babymoon" in preparation for her arrival. I know a lot of people take a relaxing week vacation at the beach, but I decided I finally wanted to go on my Balkans roadtrip which had been topping my travel bucket list for the last two years.

Paul wasn't so sure at first, but after our 2 hour car ride with three kids during a recent trip to the Alps (which included 1 nursing session, 1 crying session and 1 baby puking), he came around to see what I was saying when I said a car trip wouldn't be nearly so easy with a little one in tow.

Besides the point of the ease of a roadtrip sans baby, I was set on the Balkans roadtrip so we can continue my streak of "independent" travel and make our own schedule of stops for food, pictures or whatever else hit our fancy as it came across our path. And while the Balkans are popular (especially Croatia), they still seem less visited than other typical Europe destinations. So, for a couple of years, I'd been jotting down the names of interesting places and sites, put together an itinerary, mapped it out (a few times) and was just itching to go. So I cashed in the baby chip, and we visited last May - 5.5 months pregnant.

Our first stop was Albania.  I'd thought about Albania for a while, although I can't remember why it started in the first place. As I was telling a random person I met about this dream road trip, and as it turned out, he was Albanian. He confirmed I must visit and recommended we try out Durres for the beach.

I had read up on Albania and it seemed the beaches to the south were probably more along the lines of what I was looking for, but we only had 2 days in Albania and at 3-3.5 hrs from the airport we flew into, I decided to take his advice try out Durres instead.



We landed late on Friday, checked into our lovely hotel and had dinner at the restaurant in the hotel - I was exhausted by that point and didn't want to expend the energy to walk 5 minutes down the beach for a meal. So we ate quickly and went to bed to rest up for the day ahead of us.

On Saturday, we got up to explore the beach and started to wonder about the destination I had chosen.  While it was certainly the sandiest of the beaches we would visit over the next week and a half, it was also the dirtiest.  Rotted out boats lay strewn about on the beach as if they washed up and were forgotten. Hotels and buildings built side by side with perhaps an alley between, and looking as if they were built in the 70's and never touched since. I found upon our departure that I'd been biten by sand fleas (a thing I didn't realise existed until this trip).



As we continued further, waiting to stumble upon the nice tourist beach, we walked past miles of empty beach chairs as we had beat the crowds of locals that flock here in the summer to escape Tirana. The more we walked, the more we became certain that this was it - the beaches that we were told about.



And while the setting wasn't gorgeous, you had to give it to them for a lively atmosphere. Plenty of children playing on the beach, games of football right up next to the water. There were so many vendors, their carts full of everything from floaties to wading pools, pushing their carts along the beach (or if they are lucky, driving their motorbike cart).  We even saw a man walking his bear down the beach for tourists to pose with.



Still, after one day, we decided we needed to get out and explore what else Albania had to offer, hoping it would be more than Durres. We had heard about Berat, thinking originally we would skip for the beach, but it was now sounding a bit more intriguing given our findings in Durres.



Called the Town of a Thousand Windows, Berat is famous for the old Ottoman style buildings built into the hillside during the 15th century (and are what gave the city UNESCO status in 2008). While the Turks left hundreds of years ago, these little houses have remained, although with a castle.  The town was cute and quaint, so we spent some time wandering the streets below looking for lunch, then wandering the walls of the castle for fantastic views of the city below.  While it didn't hold a candle to a lot of other old towns we had seen, it certainly was above and away from Durres.




The 1.5 hour drive to Berat had been uneventful and as fast as you could be in a sad little Volkswagen that was past its prime with a barely functioning air conditioning (dream conditions for a pregnant lady).  On the way back, we decided to take the second route offered by Google Maps. It was only supposed to be 10 minutes longer and we figured we could get some different scenery.  It would give us about 2 hours in Tirana before we needed to pick up the other Tarts joining us on the babymoon (James and Ariel).

About 30 minutes in, we got to a fork in the road. Right, was a highway that wasn't quite going where we needed to. Left was what looked like a dirt road. Trusting Google Maps, we followed the little blue dot expecting to see the highway appear.  About 2 hours later, and probably only 12 miles, we did finally get to the highway, but only after miles and miles of this:



We rejoiced when we hit the highway and could speed along to the airport, with little time left to get there, much less sightsee.  A few miles further, we rounded a corner and came upon a police stop point.  A few cars were flagged through, yet, surprisingly, as they came to us, we were pulled over.  The officers grasp on English was almost non-existant, so we handed over everything the rental car place had given us to accompany our dilapadated VW and hoped for the best.  We got a few questions from the officer ("Texas?") then were handed a slip. Paul tried his best to play the tourist card, but to no avail. He had gotten a ticket in Albania. The best part? It wasn't for speeding, but for driving without his lights on at 2 pm in the afternoon. We decided it best to just pay the $10 ticket rather than argue any further with the silly logic behind this rule (which happens to be a law throughout the Balkans as we found out later).

On the last day in Durres, we stopped to visit the amphitheater there.  Thinking we would have to pay, we weren't sure if it was worth it, but once we appeared, they just waved us in without a care and went back to their tea and gossip.  The theatre was interesting, but no Ephesus or Pammukkale (yes, I acknowledge this sounds terribly snooty). We wandered the streets for a bit, grabbed some ice cream, but ultimately decided we had seen all Durres had to offer and hit the road.



The first two days in Durres, Paul and I had spotted little concrete bunkers all over the hillside. We investigated and found out that over 700,000 of these exist in Albania, remnants of the Communist rule of Hoxha. He was quite a paranoid ruler, constantly worried about people invading, so built these to help protect and mobilise if necessary during an attack, which never occurred. They turned out to be so solidly built that they are nearly impossible to remove, so they've just been left there, some re-purposed into rooms or shops, but many simply abandoned where they stand.



We were so excited to show these to James and Ariel and share the story, but in our drive, just hadn't seen one. As we approached Montenegro, Paul and I worried that they'd just have to hear the story when we finally spotted one! We pulled the car to the side of the narrow barely two lane "highway", tossed on the hazard lights and got out for some pictures. It turned out to be just in time as we were just around the bend from crossing into our next destination: Montenegro.

I know I've ragged a bit on Albania here, but if you're in the area, I'd skip Durres. There probably are better places to visit in the South for beaches, or even Tirana to understand the history of Albania. So if you're still interested in visiting, look around to see what other gems there may be to find!