Greetings from Cambridge!

Hello everyone!

It's been a busy day here on the travelling front. Two days ago we left Edinburgh and visited Abbotsford, which is where Sir Walter Scott made his home. It was a lovely estate with lots of historical artifacts and beautiful gardens. Sir Walter Scott loved history so he had tons of things in his house. (Which was left almost the same as it was when he lived there.) He had a mantle clock that had belonged to Marie Antoinette, and writing tools that belonged to Napoleon, and the cross that Mary Queen of Scots supposedly was holding when they beheaded her. In my opinion, Abbotsford was the best museum/house we visited so far. There were two rooms absolutely filled with all kind of books and it smelled old and full of ancient knowledge...

Looking out from Sir Walter Scott's house you can see the river Tweed and we went and looked at it. You had to cross through a horse field to get there and the horses were while friendly. They followed us around for a bit, let us pet them and feed them grass, and then they grazed near us as we took pictures of the river and the house.

After Abbotsford we made our way to the town of Banbourgh. We were scheduled to go to the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, but the time was in, so we couldn't get there. We contented ourselves with playing in the ocean after we all found some lunch. Banbourgh was a very small town and there was not a lot of selection. I ended up buying a steak pie and an apple pie from a butcher/pasty shop. It was very good! I sat on the grass near this giant gravel car park and watched Dr. Scholtz and Kirk play soccer with a cheap ball that Kirk had purchased. We waited for everyone else to show up and we made our way to the beach!

The beach was fun, the the sea was very very cold. It was a nicer beach than Coney Island, but the North Sea was definitely colder than the New York Atlantic! We found some shells, and looked in some tide pools. We also climbed on some rocks and then Mary-Kate and Dr. Scholtz went swimming for a very short while. I could barely run through the waves crashing onto the beach, so I don't know how they did it! While we were there the sun came out and we could see a lighthouse off in the distance and a couple sailboats out at sea. Tim built a sandcastle and I wrote a couple postcards.

We finally made it back to the bus and Mary-Kate and a couple other people who some managed to get when in the ocean changed clothes in the luggage trailer, which ended up being pretty funny. Then we made our way to the town of Shiply. We actually stayed in a hotel which was a nice change from the stressful hostel. I watched David Tennant on the TV show TRICK OR TREAT and that was really cool!. I love David Tennant.... :-)

The next day we left for the town of Haworth to visit the Bronte Parsonage. That was kind of interesting because the town was having some sort of 1940s celebration, so everyone was dressed up in war-time clothes. There were people dressed up like American Soldiers, British Soldiers, nurses, etc. It was very festive. They were playing Glenn Miller and singing George M. Cohan. :-)

The tour of the Bronte Parsonage wasn't the most exciting place to visit. It was very simple. But what *I* found interesting was the graveyard outside the Parsonage.... It is jam-packed with gravestones. The tombstones are almost on TOP of one another. It's a medium size graveyard, but it has over 47,000 bodies buried there. In the Bronte's day, evidentialy because of all the bodies buried there, they couldn't decompose properly and a green phosphorescence would rise over the graveyard at night and the fluids from the corpses would seep into the water supply and taint the water. People think that this helps account for the really high infant mortality rate in the town. I got some really good pictures of the graveyard.

Okay, I have more to write about... But I don't have time right now. I'll have to catch you all up later! Cheers!