York is, in our opinion, a truly gorgeous medieval city. William the Conqueror built two castles in York, one on each side of the River Ouse, in 1068. While one of the castles was destroyed in short order during a subsequent battle, it was quickly rebuilt. Clifford’s Tower still remains standing to this day, though the other castle at Baile […]
After the Romans abandoned Eboracum/York (and England in general) in the early 5th century, Eboracum became known as its Saxon name of Eoforwic to the remaining local populace. However, our understanding from a historical museum is that the people of that era preferred more rural settings rather than towns so Eoforwic was not the bustling town it was during Roman […]
York was founded in AD 71 by the Romans and named Eboracum. Eboracum means “yew tree place”. It was originally a fortress, and later a town sprung up around the fortress. The fortress was mainly intended to protect against the Scots to the north. There were walls around the fortress and town, which are, for the most part, still the […]
York is a place that is near and dear to our hearts. We have our own personal history we have developed here over the past 14 years, which has included multiple trips. Our first backpacking trip in Europe together in 2009 was our first brief visit to this city, where we fell in love with it! We returned in 2010 […]
We have LOVED Halloween in York. It is all the things I love about Halloween: atmospheric, fun activities, spooky stories, cute costumes, and mild weather. But there is basically no trick or treating or sugar. As much as I adore seeing all the cute costumes of the kids (including my own!) and handing out candy, I despise how much candy my […]
While Northumberland is a gorgeous and easy-walking (aka mostly flat!) area of the country, we picked this section to walk for more than just these two considerations. Last summer, we read the entire Harry Potter series with the girls and watched each movie after its book was finished. Our children fell in love with the series. Coming to the UK, […]
Traditionally, Thanksgiving is quite the holiday for us back home. We always host a Thanksgiving dinner for our family, which involves tons of baking and cooking most of the weekend. It’s my favourite holiday of the year, as it incorporates some of my favourite things in the world: great food, family time, cooking, baking, and reflecting on things that we are […]
We made it back to York, England on the evening of September 8. We got off the train and walked to our AirBnB accommodations, dropped everything off, and headed straight out to grab dinner at our favourite low-key pub, Lendel Cellars. As soon as we got to York, it felt to both Jon and me that we were coming back […]
We have found Edinburgh to be an extremely expensive city to visit, especially as we stayed in a hotel here and therefore needed to eat out a lot more since we have no kitchen of our own to cook. That said, we found tons of amazing things to do around town that were free or close to it. Portobello Beach […]
During our first trip to Edinburgh in 2011, we stopped at Stirling during an excursion we did. In fact, we did many excursions on that trip. We were excited to do at least one excursion with the girls, to show them other areas of Scotland. We started to second-guess that when we started looking at prices for the excursions. They […]