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Well in terms of northern, everything is relative right?  But, when Bob and I aren’t headed south on Hwy 19 towards Nogales, we’re headed north to Tucson.  Tucson is an easy 30 min plus drive from Green Valley.  Tucson is the county seat of Pima County in which Green Valley is also located.  The city has a population of approximately 530,000 with the metro area being a little over 1 million.  However, it feels smaller as there are very few tall buildings and the linear street layout makes it pretty easy to negotiate.

To date, we have explored the U of A campus (we’re rooting for the Wildcats in the College World Series), walked the turquoise trail around town to see many buildings of historical importance, the impressive Pima Air and Space Museum, drove up lovely Mt. Lemmon to escape into cooler climbs, and returned to Westin Las Paloma’s Spa and Resort where we had stayed years ago after Bob completed a conference there for work.

Mount Lemmon is a mountain just north of Tucson.  The drive up is part of the Sky Island Scenic byway.  We drove to the top of the ski lift to enjoy great views and MUCH cooler temps.

Bob and I had a hot 2 hour walk around downtown Tucson following the Turquoise Trail to see many of its historic buildings.  The walk provided us with a much better feel for the city.  We were most impressed with the courthouse, many lovely restaurants along Congress and Broadway, as well as a couple of markets and a fun Hotel Congress.

We are having a record-breaking June here in Arizona.  It’s not just the fires that are hot.  We are to get to 115 or 116 tomorrow (120 or so in Phoenix) which hasn’t happened here in 20+ years.  Bob is taking all of the credit.

Regardless of temps, however, we are continuing to explore this little corner of the world.  Generally, when we travel here we hop onto Highway 19 — either south towards Nogales or north towards Tucson.  This post covers our southern explorations to date.  (Side note and rare fun transportation fact:  Highway 19 was built when the US was considering adopting the metric system so travel distances listed on road signs are listed in kilometers and not miles.  This is what you get for being proactive.)

Anyhoo, I’m not sure the rest of this post will top that fun fact, but here goes. . .  We have not yet ventured south all the way to Nogales, but we have checked out some natural wildlife areas, state parks, and cute wine and art areas south of Green Valley.  Going south always means that we will hit a border check stop on the way back.  A couple of the places that we have visited sound like we have made it as far south as Argentina.

We arrived in Green Valley, AZ, on Memorial Day and were greeted warmly by the home owners and their two dogs — Molly and Maya.  We have been even more warmly welcomed by Mother Nature, as a day or two after our arrival it hit triple digits for the first time this year and is projected to be 111 or 112 for the next few days.  We are some serious hot tamales!

See Molly and Maya below.

Molly peeking over the end table.

Maya relaxing of top of the sofa.

Our hosts have made it very easy for us here for our three-month stay.  In addition to their lovely home and yard, we have use of their bikes (which we are using!) and access to their recreation centers.  They also left us with a wealth of travel information, coupons for local restaurants and cafes, and introduced us to some of the neighbors.  We have subscribed to a local paper and obtained library cards for the public library system.  We are starting to feel like locals — especially as we are waking up early with the sun and to get a run in and walk the dogs before the heat of the day kicks in.

We have also begun to explore the local area — by foot, car, and bike.  It’s an interesting location with a strong Native American, Mexican, military, and mining history as well as some lovely natural areas and wine regions.

Mission San Xavier del Bac. This was built by Franciscan monks when this part of AZ was part of Mexico.

Inside the chapel

Hiking the Old Baldy Loop at Madera Canyon

Scenes from a bike trip to a bike trail around a new community and fishing lake in the nearby town of Sahuarita.  Many of the roads here have a biking lane, so it’s a fairly bike friendly area.  You just need to be okay about biking in an oven!

As mentioned in our last blog, Bob and I took the train from Dublin to the small fishing community of Howth for a lovely day trip before leaving Ireland.   While in Howth, we spent most of our time hiking the Bog of Frogs trail around the coast and interior and then walking the promenade along Dublin Bay.  Lovely!

We landed in the US last Wednesday for a quick overnight stay in Dallas before flying to Des Moines on Thursday.  We had a fun day with Bob’s sister Cheryl’s family who have been taking great care of our car, mail, and what remains of our personal goods.  They were awesome about letting us do laundry, repack, etc. before we headed out Friday to begin our journey to Tucson via Iowa, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and New Mexico.  The following photos prove that we aren’t in the UK anymore.

We have officially begun our Tucson (really Green Valley) house sit.  More on that later.

Prior to our visit to Dublin, where we’ve been for the past six days, and after Beth’s visit to Stratford, we had two last days in Moreton-in-Marsh to play with Daisy, peruse the local market, and have a good meal out at an Indian restaurant.

After saying goodby to Daisy last Wednesday evening, we caught a train to Birmingham for a quick overnight stay before catching an early train the following day to Holyhead, Wales, where we caught a ferry to Dublin. We have really enjoyed the train system in the UK. Much easier than flying and dealing with security and other logistics.

The ferry was awesome too — large with a theatre, cafe, restaurant, shop, quiet zones, and cabins. The seas were smooth which made for an easy 3 1/2 hour trip. We would have enjoyed it more but upon waking up in Birmingham at 4:30am to catch the train, we found we had an email from our Airbnb host cancelling our 6 night stay in Dublin that was to begin that night! That made our rail/sail travel a stressful search for accommodations using slow WiFi. About 2 hours into the ferry ride (since the wifi on the train was useless), we finally found something (not Airbnb) in our price range and everything turned out OK, so we were able to enjoy the rest of the ferry ride.

There is so much to see and do in Dublin.  We saw a lot of great parks, continued our tours of colleges/libraries, learned about Irish writers and some Irish history, and sampled some Irish beer and whiskey.  See photos below:

Yesterday we did a day trip out to Howth, a small fishing village just north of Dublin.  Will do a separate photo blog on that.  Now we are getting ready for our return flight to the USA after spending 3 months out of the country. Our next house sit begins on May 30 south of Tucson in Green Valley. We will be there 3 months watching a house and two dogs while the owners test out living in Panama.

We are slow with our blogs as per usual.  This one is a farewell to England, as we are now in Ireland and actually close to heading back to the States.  Last Monday, I did a solo trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, as the bus from Moreton didn’t run frequently enough to allow both of us to be away from Daisy for that amount of time.  Bob was good enough to let me go get my Shakespeare fix, as we continue our accidental, but lovely, writer’s tour of the U.K.

As Stratford is nothing if not touristy and pricey, I chose to do my own walking photo tour of the attractions I was interested in rather than paying to get inside.  (I also took exception to the requirement to pay to enter at least three of the Shakespeare-related homes of their choosing, 2 of which I wasn’t that interested in.). Anyhoo, that being said, I had a lovely tour of a lovely town, on a beautiful day.  I soaked in as much Shakespeare (and the river Avon — though not literally) as I could get on my two feet.

We had quite the dramatic start to our Dublin visit — but more on that later.

We are well into our Cotswolds house sit and are caring for, and being entertained by, the adorable Pug, Daisy.  She loves her walks/runs, her naps on top of, or beside us, and gives us high fives for a treat.  She also has an impressive vocal (gruntal?) repertoire.  We are charmed.

We have been trying to see a bit of the area as well with hikes to nearby communities, a train trip to Oxford, and a bus ride to Chipping Camden.  The countryside is beautiful — rolling hills and valleys, and is currently awash in the beautiful yellow of the mustard plant.  The gardens here are beautiful, as they have been everywhere in the UK.

The first hike we did from our current residence was a country hike through fields and pastures, as well as along country roads, to the community of Lower Lemington and then on to Aston Magna before heading back to Moreton-in-Marsh.  We got to see a bit of the surroundings, visit an old church, annoy some sheep, and get very, very wet.  It was a consistent rain that day and the path was already wet from prior rains, so we were pretty happy to get back to the house.

After a day in, we took a quick, 30 minute train trip to Oxford to check out the university (and be able to say that we have “gone to Oxford”).  We did a tour of the university’s Bodlean Library and caught a free exhibition on how death is portrayed in Shakespeare’s writings at the new Weston library.  As with the Library of Congress in the US, the Bodlean receives a copy of all published materials every year.  The Weston Library building used to house this massive collection, but it has since been moved to a storage facility in Swindon.  The former collections building was gutted to create a functioning library for students and researchers along with a cafe and gift shop.  The Bodlean library is impressive and dates back to the 1600s when Thomas Bodley provided the funding to create the library from what had been built as a theological school for the university and also served as a “court of appeals” to resolve issues between the town and university.

We took a bus ride to the Cotswold community of Chipping Camden to hike up Dover Hill and have our first English tea at a local tea room.  We also had time to peruse the high street area shops before catching the bus back to Moreton-in-Marsh.

We have also hiked to other nearby communities including a lovely walk to Blockely which provided a lovely view walking in as you enter from atop a hill and walk down into the village.  On that day, we returned through Bourton-on-the-Hill before coming back into town where we stumbled upon a craft market underway at the hall in the Town Center.

Today we did a quick hike to Longmouth.  On the way back we saw a duck less duckery and a large oriental style mansion, called Sezincote, that is open to the public on special occasions.

While it is early in the season, this area seems already to be hopping with tourists.

After leaving Windermere and the Lakes District, we hopped on a train to check out Cardiff, Wales before our next house sit in Moreton-in-Marsh, England. We had some quick train changes in a couple of locations, but we lucked out and made all of our connections. In Cardiff, we stayed at a newer hotel close to the station and the Millenium Stadium.

For our first 1/2 day outing, we set out for the visitor info center near Cardiff Bay. Cardiff Bay is a gorgeous area where we saw some lovely buildings — the Millennium Building (in which the visitor centered was housed), The National Assembly Building, Roald Dahl Plass (Roald Dahl was born in Wales and baptized in the Norwegian Church which is now also located along the bay.), the Pierhead Building, a merry-go-round, and lots of retail and restaurants. After picking up area info, we took a 45 minute cruise around the harbor to give an initial overview of the area. We made our way back to the city center and began to see why Wales is known as the city of arcades (covered area between buildings with shops) as we passed at least 4 or 5 of them in our little walkabout.

We began our first full day in Cardiff walking a few blocks to a castle. Cuz it’s Great Britain, and you can stumble over one of these almost everywhere. We didn’t join the bus loads going in, as it was a bit pricey, but we did explore the very large Bute Park that abuts the castle and runs alongside the River Tath for a number of miles. To enter the park, we walked along the wall of animals that surrounds the castle — a series of different animal sculptures that sit atop the stone wall guarding the castle. After walking much of the park and watching the other pedestrians and cyclists using the park as well as the ferry boats cruising the lake, we walked over to Town Hall to see the building and nearby park. We also got to see a couple of newlyweds coming out of the building! We stumbled on a couple of markets in the city center — a lovely Mediterranean one (food only) that was outside and occurs just on Saturday and an indoor market that sells produce, take away food, and home goods that is open everyday. At night, we caught a bit of the Leicester soccer game that was the official end of the season, although they had already won the championship based on points.

Our second (and final) full day in Cardiff was the best-weather day yet. I believe it reached a high of 79 F. We had reserved bikes the prior day and picked those up about 9:30 for a full-day rental. While the bikes were of borderline quality, they managed to get us around. We biked out of the city to see two more castles — Castle Coch (long slog uphill for the photo op) just outside of Cardiff and Caerphilly Castle in the community of Caerphilly which we paid to explore. The best part of our journey was that the out leg was primarily uphill (though it didn’t really feel like it), so the return leg was downhill — almost all the way back to Cardiff! We wanted to continue our adventure, so we followed the bike paths back to Cardiff Bay to further explore the area. Everyone had the same idea, as it was so nice out, so we got lots of people watching in as well. Awesome, awesome day!

The next day we caught a crack of dawn train (5:12am!) to head to Moreton-in-Marsh for our current house sit. We had a lovely transition with our host couple and met their Pug, Daisy, before they headed to London to fly to Japan. More on the house sit and the Cotswolds in the next blog.

Bob and I had lovely weather for our 2.5 days in the Lakes District of England.  The Lake Distract Park is huge, so you can base a trip out of any number of towns.  We stayed at a little B&B (3 rooms) in Windemere in the southern portion of the park.  However, we enjoyed the communities of Ambleside, Waterhead, Bowness and Troutbeck, as well, during our stay.  Windemere is the busier town with a nice quay area for catching a ferry to get onto Lake Windemere.  It also has plenty of retail, dining, and supermarkets and made for a good base for our stay.  The first afternoon of our visit, we climbed up to Orrest Point for a lookout over the town before exploring some of the town’s other walking paths along the lake, near streams, and around town.  We loved the local architecture almost as much as the beautiful scenery.

For our 2 full days in the Lakes District, we walked to Ambleside (about 4.5 miles) and then did hikes from there and/or explored the town.  The first day we did a short hike to a waterfall once we got to Ambleside and then continued onto Wansfell Pike before coming down into the little community of Troutbeck before heading back into Windemere.  Bob had picked up a book with some detailed hikes, and we were surprised to see that it came with translations!  This proved useful as we were told to follow a “beck” but had to look that up to learn that it meant “stream.”

The next day we again walked to Ambleside and did another short hike before going to the Armitt Library and Museum to learn about Beatrix Potter.  What a renaissance woman!  She wrote, she illustrated (not just her books but also plants — specifically fungi), she was an amateur mycologist (fungi studier), and she raised and showed sheep (and did very well!).  She also bought about 8,000 acres of land in the Lakes District to donate to the National Trust to help preserve as park land.

After the museum, we continued to explore some fun Ambleside shops before heading back towards Windemere via Waterhead and a stop for some yummy English ice cream.

We are currently in the principality of Wales for a few more hours before heading out early tomorrow morning for a train to Moreton-in-Marsh, England for our next house sit.

On Tuesday morning, May 3, we left Our Scottish house sit for a 6-day vacay before starting our next house sit in Moreton-in-Marsh, England. The last couple of days in Thornhill had us touring a lovely estate, a castle and its lovely grounds, attending a music festival and doing our farewell transition with our host couple.

The Dumfries House is a large country estate near Cumnock, Scotland. It was the home of a former Earl of Dumfries who had it built between 1754 and 1759. We had read an article in the paper about the home since arriving in the UK (but prior to our visit), as Prince Charles had led a consortium to purchase the estate and its contents (which includes a number of original Chippendale pieces) as they were at risk of being sold off due to the cost of upkeep. We were formally welcomed into a room of the house to begin the tour with a video greeting by Prince Charles on the historical importance of the estate and the various efforts underway, many supported by his Prince’s Trust, to restore all of the buildings on the estate as well as provide various career training programs for youth, establish a community garden, etc. The home is lovely — especially the Chippendale pieces — however we were unable to take any photos in the house. It is used for special functions and Prince Charles stays on-site on occasion.  In fact, we just missed him as had had been there the day before our arrival for a special presentation.

We also toured Drumlanrig Castle which is just outside of Thornhill. It was open for tours this time! The castle was built between 1679 and 1689 and was the home of the Duke and Duchhess of Buccleuch and Queensberry. The current Duke lives in the area, though not at the castle. Again, we weren’t able to take photos during the tour, but the grounds are amazing. The grounds around the castle are gorgeous, but the estate is so extensive that there is a bike rental facility on site for biking on the grounds as well as in the local area. Bob and I were a bit disappointed with ourselves that we hadn’t found the hiking information on our first visit, as we may have checked out one or two of the trails.

The last weekend in April was a bank holiday weekend, and Thornhill had a music festival from Friday through Sunday. There were a number of acts that played during the afternoon and evening at about 4 venues in town. Bob and I caught a Saturday afternoon performance. By a group called Redfish who played upstairs at one of the local hotels. All of the performances were free.

Our hosts returned from their vacation to Guernsey and Devon late on Monday afternoon. Bruce was very glad to see them! We had a lovely debrief with them on the house, garden, Bruce.  They had been super helpful with instructions, so everything went smoothly during our stay.  They also went above and beyond by providing great advice on travel and things to see, treating us to dinner at the Buccleuch & Queensberry Arms Hotel in town, and driving us the 50 miles to Carlisle, England to catch our train.  They are both lovely, accomplished individuals, and we hope that our paths may cross again.  Bruce will remain a much-loved friend as well.

We are currently in Windermere, in the Lakes District, where we have been for the past 2.5 days. It is gorgeous!!!!  But more on that in a later blog.