Skip to main content

Paris 2025 - The Start of a Long Journey (Day 1)

After many months of waiting, it was finally the day for us to set off on our eagerly anticipated holiday to Disneyland Paris. From researching many different travel options, we decided to go on a bit of a long winded route to get to Paris which involved driving down to Southampton to stay in Nicole's mum's 'AirBnB' before getting a coach into London the following day to embark on the Eurostar. This meant that the first day of our holiday involved a lot of driving. Unfortunately, the traffic was not good so the trip took us about 2 hours longer than usual. However, we still managed to find time for our compulsory two stops. 

Firstly, we took a detour to Coughton Court, a National Trust property. Shannon had read online that the family are planning to take it back from the National Trust and it would therefore not be free for members to visit for much longer, so we wanted to make sure we paid a visit before this happened. The site consisted of a 15th century house, gardens and opportunities for walks (sadly we didn't have time for the latter). As part of viewing the house, we were able to go up the spiral stairs out onto the roof of the tower which provided sensational views. 

We then headed off on our second stop before arriving in Southampton, which was to McDonald's for a McFlurry! We made an impromptu stop off one time on our journey down and this seems to have stuck as a tradition. Nicole enjoyed the Biscoff flavour and Shannon had a smarties one. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Southampton 2022 - Drive home (Day 8)

The drive home was horrendous. There were no less than 10 accidents, there was queues everywhere and the alternative route was suggested through Reading. We did not opt for this route as we didn’t want to head towards the masses of people travelling to London for HRH’s funeral. I think the total journey took us twice as long as it should have and is not one that I would like to do again. Hopefully next time will be better. I didn’t get to twist Nicole’s arm into another Leon’s as we didn’t quite make it there for lunchtime. Let’s see what the next holiday has to offer. We realised when writing the posts from this holiday that we really didn't do a very good job at taking photos. Watch this space for more photos from our future adventures!
Post a Comment
Read more

Harry Potter Adventure 2023 - Driving down south (Day 1)

Over the past few years, Nicole has been invited to guest lecture at the University of Reading. This year the lecture was face-to-face for the first time since COVID. This meant that we made it into a mini holiday break. Why not when it is such a long way to drive! We set off as soon as we could on Saturday morning as we were hoping to stop off at Henley for some lunch and a wander before we set off to our AirBnB for the weekend. The drive down felt very long! I don’t know if this was due to setting off earlier, so we didn’t have lunch halfway down, or maybe I am just getting a bit more impatient with long journeys. We made it down with few issues and hit Henley at just the right time for lunch. However, during the last few minutes of the car journey, I spotted a bird I had not seen before and soon became fixated on finding out what the mystery bird was. I didn’t think I would need to bring the binoculars and bird identifier book so had left it at home. I had it in my head it was a big...
Post a Comment
Read more

Southampton 2023 - Ape-ing Around at Moors Valley (Day 3)

  You may have noticed by now that there can tend to be a bit of a theme in our holidays of us at some point doing Go Ape. We have said we would like to have a go at as many of the courses as we can, and also still had some of our gift voucher to spend, therefore decided to tackle Go Ape at Moors Valley Country Park . This is somewhere that Nicole used to go a lot when she was younger as it features a play trail, which is a series of different natural and wildlife themed play equipment spread out through the woods. Although we explored this later on, we started our day off with Go Ape. I would say that this Go Ape Course is probably my favourite so far. They seem to have done a lot of work on it since Nicole last completed it (although admittedly this was probably at least 15 years ago!). They have a different safety system in place than the other Go Ape courses we have done, which involves you being connected to the course at all times once you are on a section rather than havin...
Post a Comment
Read more