So I was thinking about some places I want to go on vacation in the future and immediately England, Wales and Ireland came to mind. Sort of weird for a person afraid of flying as I am but there you go. Regardless of how I feel about flying I still want to go check out several places including Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Liverpool.
One of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard show. I haven’t listened to it in quite some time since I’m not commuting any more but I always used to listen to it for both the consumer information as well as the vacation deals. I am not quite as cheap anymore when I book our vacations, otherwise we would have been staying in some dive when I went to Nassau for $75 a night but I do try to be frugal when I am looking at hotels online.
CheaperThanHotels.co.uk has some pretty good deals on hotels in England and the surrounding countries. Finding Dublin accommodation is as easy as clicking the link. Dublin is the largest city in Ireland as well as being it’s capital. It was originally a Viking city and as far as I know it’s been the primary city for several hundred years.
I watched a show with Anthony Bourdain a couple of months ago on Dublin, or rather some of the food and eateries in Dublin. The whole city has really been undergoing a transformation the last few years with plenty of new development. I don’t know much about that, but I would certainly like to head over to the Guinness brewery and hang for a while.
The picture to the left is the Ha’penny Bridge over the River Liffey in Dublin. Until 1919 this pedestrian bridge was a toll bridge, thus the unofficial name. It was originally called Wellington and that changed to Liffey Bridge but everyone still calls it Ha’penny bridge. Prior to building it there were seven ferries that ran across the river. The bridge itself is made out of cast iron.
They also offer Edinburgh accommodation as well as Dublin. In addition to Ireland I want to see Scotland as well. Scotland is situated in the southern part of the U.K. and Edinburgh is a favorite of travelers. It is considered to be one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Edinburgh is steeped in history and while movies like Braveheart are fictional accounts of what really happened, as usual with things like that there is at least a kernel of truth involved.
This is Edinburgh Castle, taken by Stuart Caie from Edinburgh and originally posted to Flickr.
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and I would love to go visit there as well. It is the largest city in Scotland and the second largest in the UK after London. It’s also the center of the United Kingdom’s shipbuilding industry. I’m not particularly interested in the engineering aspects but I would love to check out the shipbuilders and take lots of photos. The big thing about going to Scotland is that there is so much of our collective past in Britain that I want to be part of it. Glasgow accommodation is easily had as well as the aforementioned cities.
One more place I would like to visit is Liverpool. Liverpool accommodation can be had through the CheaperThanHotels website as can several other cites.
Anyway, Liverpool is just over 800 years old, having been founded in 1207. After having traveled around the eastern seaboard of the US several times and visiting what I think of as ‘old’ or even ‘ancient’ historical sites, 800 years seems like such a long time for a city to be standing.
Of course most people know of Liverpool from the home of it’s most famous citizens, the Beatles. In the 1700’s Liverpool controlled a pretty big portion of England’s slave trade as well as 40% of the rest of the world’s trade.
The industrial city peaked in size about a hundred years ago with a population around 800,000 people. Now it’s somewhere around 400k. Liverpool went through a period of time where unemployment and industries weren’t doing very well but it seems to have rebounded and is growing faster than the rest of England now.
I think if only given a choice of one place I would have to go to Ireland. While I want to visit Scotland and the rest of the UK Ireland holds more mystery, at least for me.