alliston in wonderland : england : day one

As you may have read in earlier posts, my plan was to write a post per day on my trip across the pond... Obviously, that failed. So, now that I'm (unfortunately) home, I'll catch up. I'm going to backdate these posts to the days they're about so as to make myself feel better about not having actually done it on time. To be honest though, it's not that I slacked off, we just were too busy enjoying ourselves and doing things for me to sit down and blog.

Before I really get into the day, I'd like to share a piece from an article I read on the plane giving the low-down on all the teams in The 2014 World Cup. The whole article was brilliantly written (wish I could give credit but I've no idea what the magazine was or who the author was), but I'll just share my favorite bit. If you don't follow football (proper football, not American-- I'm not allowed to call it soccer when I'm dating a Brit), then you may not know who Mario is, but trust me, he's great entertainment.

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I flew into Manchester at about 6:30am local time (1:30am Michigan time).

Met my lovely boyfriend after grabbing my bags (which were for once not over the weight limit!!!) and off we went to take a hike through The Lake District. He took me to a place called Ullswater where we hiked around for a couple hours and saw the gorgeous Aira Force waterfall.

After our hike around there, we decided to head back to Carlisle (where Tom lives) to drop off my luggage and get some lunch. Later on, Tom had to go to a council meeting (did I mention he's a city councillor???) so I decided to take a nap before going uptown to meet him and have a drink with him and his parents. Here's the rest of the night in photos: