United Kingdom
Hooley

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  • Day 64

    IN London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

    July 5, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    Our last stop
    had such an amazing time exploring Europe! We did so many amazing things and saw such beautiful sights 🤩 our last week spent in London was a banger! We managed to watch the England win both there games while we were there. It was amazing to be in that atmosphere! We explored Hampton court palace, such an incredible palace. ( just imagine living in those times where palaces like that were in use ) we also explored a bit more of London, however I did get sick so that did stump a lot of our plans. I had my 23rd birthday & managed to eat a Colin the caterpillar cake, which was one of the tastiest cakes I've ever had! The weather though wasn't on our side for most of our time in the uk, it really was a wet summer 🥲
    Overall loved it & will definitely be back. But for now that's a wrap on our euro holiday 🥹
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  • Day 32

    Day 32 - Packing 💼

    July 3, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 16 °C

    Had to start packing this morning 😪
    Lucky we managed to get everything in! 🙈 bags are definitely full and heavy lol

    Had a quick trip to Tescos with Hollie and Debs today. Love this place! It's countdown/warehouse/kmart all mixed together lol literally you can shop for anything!

    Home to some lunch and final packing.
    Kels and Guy went with Hollie to pick Tyler up from school, then they popped to the park for a play before coming home for a quick swim! Bit cold for that today!

    Then came the time we hate most.. saying Goodbye 😭😢
    It has been a wonderful 12 days with Cory, Hollie, Tyler & meeting Leo. It was so special to spend some extended time here as it has been a long 4 years apart 🥹 We will miss them sooo much, already cannot wait for the next meeting!
    Debs & Graeme also welcomed us into the home with open arms which we are very grateful.

    🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 England
    I will never ever complain about NZ roads again 😅
    Love looking at the old architecture and learning about all the history. Gosh NZ is such a new country 🙈

    It's definitely been a very sad evening saying Goodbye to close family and also knowing that our holiday has come to an end 😢 I sit here and reflect on an incredible 5 weeks ❤️
    945 pm flight soon and 30 hours to get home. Wish us luck!
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  • Day 31

    Day 31 - Wine tasting..

    July 2, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 15 °C

    Quiet morning here at Northcote. Cory is working.
    Hollie needed to exercise her horse so she took the horse and I pushed Leo in the pram, and we went for a walk.
    We had an early yummy lunch of pastries and bagels.

    Hollie & Cory brought Danny a voucher for a 1 hour wine tasting for two at the nearby vineyard Denbies.
    We arrived at 12 and started our Tour. We were given a tall glass of wine and sat down to watch a 20 min video on the Estate and it's history. The vineyard is 265 acres on rolling land. Originally Pigs and dairy then turned vineyard. It used to be the largest in England and even the Queen visited.
    Danny and I learnt alot about the vines!
    We moved through to the fermenting room where we were given another glass of bubbly (now remember I don't drink hardly!)
    Here we learnt about the process of different wines and how some are artificially carbonated and how some are carbonated naturally by yeast fermentation.
    We then move down to a wedding reception area where we were poured another glass.. and then it was a must to try the red so another glass.. 🤣🥴
    Our Tour ended here and we went to the elaborate gift shop. We brought our hosts some wine 🍷
    Hopping back in the car I was feeling rather rosey in the cheeks and a bit happy 🤣 Danny I'm sure was on point too 👌 🤣
    Hollie picked us up with Kels & Guy and took us to the river with bloody stepping stones 😅 I am telling you NOT great after wine tasting but we did manage to not fall in!
    After a short walk it was home to sober up and get Tyler from school.
    Kids had a swim.
    We ended the evening by taking the whole family out to dinner at the pub Hollie works at the Surrey Oaks.
    It was a lovely last evening of our holiday and tomorrow we do have the horrible job of packing 😪
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  • Day 30

    Day 30 - London part 2 🇬🇧

    July 1, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 17 °C

    Wow day 30!! Jeepers must be time to go home 🙈

    We did it, we made it into London and home by ourselves! 🤣🙈

    Day started with the train from Dorking to London. We had to hop off and navigate our way to another line to get to Westminster. Here we walked out of the underground straight up to Big Ben 😍 not actually called Big Ben, only the bell is! Fun fact. Victoria tower is it's actual name!

    We headed straight for the London eye. I had pre purchased fast track tickets as we hate lines 🙈 and it was well worth the extra money! We were able to walk straight on and the other line was huge!
    London eye was very cool it takes 32 minutes to go right the way around. Awesome views of the city, a must do but something you'd only do once.

    We jumped on the Thames boat hop on hop off and headed for the tower bridge. We did have an issue with our ticket but the lovely lady overrode it for us!
    On the boat ride we had live commentary which was great we learnt heaps as we passed famous places.
    By the time we got to the towers it was nearly 1pm and we were starving! Found a nice pub and had a delicious lunch. We deliberated for some time as to what to do next. We were all pretty knackered but also it was a long way to come to do the eye, boat ride and to turn back home. So spare of the moment we paid for tickets to the Tower of London, and I'm bloody glad we did (kelsey not so much 🤣)
    This was very interesting, we started with and hour guided tour and our tour guide was brilliant. He explained how they get the job, you must service for more than 22 years and he has met the king and attended queen funeral and these guys actually live at the tower! Such a nice bloke.
    After our Tour we headed to the Crown Jewels, this was awesome to see! 👑 unfortunately no photos to be taken.
    It was kool to see friendly Raven's all around the castle .
    After a quick refreshment we walked most of the other parts of the tower. Incredible history, cannot believe some of the towers were built in the 1200's! This place has been a Zoo, a Kings house, Prison, torture camber, quite amazing really. All in all we spent 2.5hours here.
    It was now rush hour on the tube 🥴 so we took the boat back to westminster to kill some time then took the underground and train back to Dorking. Home at 740pm we all had and exhausting but good day 😍
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  • Day 29

    Day 29 - Brooklands Museum

    June 30, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 19 °C

    Chauffeur Cory drove the 4 of us to Weybridge today.
    Here we visited the Brooklands Museum. We left early as when we went to book our tickets it was Porsche day 🙃 so literally every man and his Porsche was there on display as well 🤣

    The reason we choose to come here is because it has a full sized Concorde on display so you can imagine how excited Guy was!

    We arrived at 10 am went straight to book our "Concorde Experience" we couldn't do our Tour until 11:55am.
    This place is huge 🙈 we started outside by looking at all the other planes. We were able to board onto one that belonged to the Sultan of Oman. This was his private plane. He donated it to Brooklands as it was built there.
    They had a couple of Mclaren formula one cars and one even made of Lego!
    Quick bite to eat and we were able to do the Concorde tour. We boarded from back steps and watched a movie about the plane. 30% of the plane we were on was built at Brooklands also.
    The plane is absolutely huge, when it used fly the outside temp reaches 127° and the whole plane expands 8 inches.
    One seat cost around $12000 nzd to fly on the Concorde, serving high quality food and drink 🍸
    We were then able to sit in the seats and watch a slightly simulated take off and landing. This plane was so ahead of its time, it's a shame it had to be pulled from the air due to the sonic boom it made flying over land.
    We were even given Concorde boarding passes and certificates 😍
    Such an awesome thing to see in real life.
    So much more to see at the museum, aircrafts, cars and motorcycles for miles but it was all so interesting. Even had a London bus museum, and we were able to board a double decker bus at 2pm and go for trip around the town of Weybridge.
    Cannot believe we spent nearly 5 hours there but it was well worth it!
    Safe to say we were all pretty tired after that day! Lucky Debs and Hollie had a yummy pork roast on for tea with homemade Yorkshire puddings too! 😋
    Of course the kids had another swim 🏊‍♂️

    Bedtime won't be late for us tonight and the 4 of us are off to London 🇬🇧 again tomorrow on our own 🤣🙈
    Wish us luck!
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  • Day 24

    Day 24 - Dorking

    June 25, 2024 in England ⋅ 🌙 22 °C

    Well English push bikers took it to a new low for me today 🙈 as we drove out the gate some loser was texting, biking with no hands and smoking weed all at the same time 🤣🥴

    Unfortunately I haven't been too well with this cold and cough, lucky I have some special pills from Germany to help me through!

    Cory, Danny, me and the kids popped into Dorking town today. Dorkings mascot I spose you could say is a Rooster 🐓
    This is one of Cory and Hollies local towns.
    We walked down the street exploring some of the shops and then stopped for a bite to eat. We had a look at the church Saint Martin's, as usually there are squirrels around and the kids we lucky to get a close encounter.
    I quite like Dorking, definitely more my pace!

    I went to the supermarket. Fruit and veges are a good price here. I brought a big container of Raspberries for about $5 nzd and these were bloody huge! Big bag of carrots is about $1.40.
    I am going to miss all the fresh blueberries, strawberries and Raspberries we've been having!

    Nice afternoon in the Garden with some snacks while the kids were in the pool.

    As I type this everyone is struggling to get to sleep because we are hot 🤣🙈

    Super early start tomorrow as we try to beat the traffic and get down to Cornwall ⏰️
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  • Day 21

    Day 21 - just chillin

    June 22, 2024 in England ⋅ ☀️ 18 °C

    Gosh another sleep in! Haha
    Gunna be hard when we go home lol!

    We went for a walk up to Leith Hill castle. They stored a lot of the ammunition up there back in the day as it was the highest point of the area. From here we could actually see London!

    Guy is in plane heaven here as we are right beside Gatwick air port and there is a plane taking off every 3 minutes so he is always outside telling us who it is 🤣

    After our walk we went to a small farm park to have some lunch. Here we could let the kids go for a good run around on the playground while we ate!

    A quiet afternoon has been lovely 😍
    Kids had another splash in the pool and Guy has been mesmerized by all of Greame's (Hollie's Dad) stories involving history of wars etc and the treasures he has found whilst diving in old ship wrecks etc he has some very cool things!

    Heard the weather is not very nice at all today,lots of thunder 😕!
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  • Day 8

    Rotherfield - Salfords

    May 15, 2024 in England ⋅ 🌙 13 °C

    Borderline - Tame Impala
    Cela fait maintenant 7 jours que nous avons commencé notre voyage. Les premiers kilomètres semblent tellement lointains à présent. Il nous tardait de reprendre la route! Nous sommes partis de Rotherfield en traversant la campagne anglaise, avant de rejoindre la piste cyclable. Après avoir fait la moitié de l'étape nous nous sommes arrêtés à East Grinstead pour manger mais surtout pour retrouver ni plus ni moins que Kyria Lamarche! Nous lui avons raconté notre périple tout en engloutissant notre déjeuner au Carlo's Lounge. Après ces chaleureuses retrouvailles nous avons repris la route à travers la piste cyclable ou nous avons croisé le chemin d'un couple de faisans. Après avoir longé l'aéroport Gatwick, nous sommes à l'arrivée de notre étape, à r
    Rotherfield.
    Demain se déroulera la dernière étape de notre épopée cycliste, direction LONDON BABY!!!
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  • Day 325

    End of an era

    March 27, 2024 in England ⋅ ☁️ 9 °C

    The last few days in London after leeds were a little sombre, it had dawned on us that we were officially splitting up and it was definitely a bit of a bummer to be saying goodbye after such an amazing year of adventures.
    Yesterday we went to check out all the monopoly places we'd seen stops for on the tube but hadn't visited yet. We went to Trafalgar square, piccadilly circus (it's just a square not an actual circus), bond street and Leicester square, plus covent gardens but that's not in monopoly. It was a rainy but fun explore. For the evening we went out for one last trip to the pub with Sam, we played pool and drank guinness but didn't stay out too late because I had to go home and pack.

    This year has been the best ever and I'm so grateful spencer decided to join me. I just had a little scroll through some of my old posts on here and its honestly unreal how many amazing things we got to do and see. Spencer was a perfect travel partner and I'm going to miss him very much. I can't wait to be able to look back and talk about our euro adventures for years to come :)
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  • Day 4

    Harry Potter, here we come 🧙‍♂️

    August 13, 2023 in England ⋅ ☁️ 20 °C

    Today is birthday gift fulfillment day!
    Pénélope will visit at last the Harry Potter studios, her 18th birthday gift, and she chose to go fully dressed in her favorite Hufflepuff outfit, which she has also received as a gift for her birthday from her Mamie and her Papy.
    We shall tell later about our adventures at the studios...
    Meanwhile, Elliott and Béatrice are planning a trip to the British Museum and Soho.
    Stay tuned!
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