We’re back from holiday! We went up to Glasgow to watch some of the Commonwealth Games, and used it as a chance to have a road trip and see a few more places in the UK on the way.
Photos we took at the Games on flickr
I want to describe our last two weeks, so decided to do it with statistics and photos!
I walked more
We did a lot of walking, hiking and climbing. We walked in loads of places, like the Lake District, Peak District and Argyll Forest Parks in Scotland. Faith, in particular, loved scampering up hills for hours.
We walked high, up hills and mountains, and we walked low, in caverns in the Lake District.
Photos of some of our walks on flickr
Before going on holiday, I was walking fewer than 4000 steps a day. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been walking over 13000 steps a day. So I’ve been walking more in a couple of days then I was walking in a week before.
I swam more
We swam a lot. In Scotland, we swam pretty much every day. And even on our travels up and down the country, the kids took any chance to jump into any water we found, paddling whenever they could.
Photos of the kids paddling on flickr
I really should swim more often to reduce my back pain. Before going away, I wasn’t swimming nearly enough, only going when friends with more sense than me nagged or dragged me to the pool. Unfortunately, I don’t have stats for this, as I’ve not got my own swimming tracker – I borrow monitors when I swim at home using the SWIMTAG scheme at Fleming Park.
I drove more
We did a lot of driving in this holiday! We drove up to Glasgow sort of along the West of the country, along the Lake District, and came back sort of along the East, through the Peak District.
Photos from our travelling on flickr
I tried a few different ways to track it, like Google Maps Engine, which is still pretty flakey and buggy, especially on mobile, so I gave up on that and used classic Google Maps.
View Summer road-trip in a larger map
My daily commute to work is about five miles, so I don’t normally do a lot of driving.
We did a lot of driving in the last couple of weeks.
The round-trip was nearly 1,660 miles, and we did it at almost 57mpg.
We had a lot of games in the car. It was also a chance to listen to more podcasts, such as BBC ones like Beatrix Potter and Wind in the Willows for the kids. I particularly enjoyed a Pragmatic podcast on coffee – over an hour of geeking out about coffee.
I read more
I don’t read enough books. Months go past without me reading a single page – before this holiday, I hadn’t read anything since April.
In the last couple of weeks, I read three books.
I need to make more time for reading.
We saw more
We spent a lot of time walking and doing outdoors stuff, but we also did a few touristy things, too.
Photos from some of the tourist stuff we did on holiday on flickr
Glasgow Science Centre, Jorvik Viking Centre, World of Beatrix Potter, and Warwick Castle were all awesome!
I slept more
Before going on holiday, I was sleeping about four hours a night.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sleeping about nine hours a night – over twice as much! This is a habit I want to try and keep up after getting back.
I disconnected more
I spend most of my time at computers. Even when I’m not at a laptop, my iPad or my mobile keep me connected. I’m never not online.
This was a strange couple of weeks. I had no signal at all for most of the first 8 or 9 days. My phone didn’t even show a network name, let alone have enough of a signal for an Internet connection. And no free wifi. The first place we stayed at didn’t even have TV in the rooms.
So I was offline. I’m not sure I liked this… it was like a chunk of my brain was turned off. It made me realise how often I pull out my phone to look up some obscure factoid. I definitely felt dumber without Internet access.
Some of the things we found on holiday on flickr
I had to resort to using the BBC Red Button screens (is that what we call the new Ceefax stuff now?) to look up stuff like the current Games medal table.
We stayed in more places
Amy planned a very cool range of places to stay at along the way. We had five different places in two weeks.
- A lovely bed-and-breakfast on a farm in the Lake District
- A holiday home in a remote village in the Argyll forest – with a six-mile single track road to the nearest main road and no mobile signal for miles
- A motorway service station – I’d never tried this before, so it was kinda fun. And you get a lot of choices for breakfast 🙂
- A room above a remote country pub
- A city-centre hotel in a spa town
It felt like we covered all the bases there!