This post is inspired by Saturday’s fushmush, where Jess posted pictures of her pins, squashed pennies, Euro coins and Christmas decorations and posed the question, ‘what do you collect when you travel?’

The first answer here is, of course, ideas for blog posts/diary entries/travel articles/future novels.  I often take notes in a journal, write on maps, or take photographs to prompt my memory when I’m back home (wherever that home might be).

Then there’s the postcards.  I buy a lot of postcards – perhaps 2-3 for every new place we visit.  Most get sent, but I’ve probably still got 20 or so postcards in our stationery drawer, some dating back to our honeymoon over two years ago.

But our most tangible souvenirs are probably the magnets.  Again, we started collecting these on our honeymoon.  The first one was bought at Singapore airport, when we were only 12 hours away from New Zealand and continued to collect them ever since.  We’ve got too many for our half-size fridge but, so far, we’re managing to display them all on two sides of our hot water unit.

The rule originally was one magnet per city we stayed in overnight.  Travelling around the Greek Islands, we soon learnt to distinguish between the magnets made especially for a city and those which gave the ‘flavour’ of the place (windmills, beaches) with the name written in felt-tip pen.  In the photo above, you can see our magnets from Europe: the Vatican guard from Rome; gondola from Venice; beer opener from Munich.  I think the only place in Europe we didn’t get a magnet from was Genoa in Italy.  Genoa wasn’t a particularly touristy place – we couldn’t find an internet cafe either.

As time’s passed, and we’ve spent more time travelling around the UK, we haven’t stuck so strictly to the overnight stay rule.  So we’ve got a magnets from the Cadbury Chocolate Factory and the Prime Meridian of the World alongside the ones from Cambridge, Whitby and Oxford.  We’ve also picked up magnets from some of the West End plays we’ve seen, such as Wicked and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. One of my favourites is the small metal Globe Theatre magnet on the left here – a reminder of our summer as stewards at the theatre.

They’re not, on the whole, expensive magnets.  Some, such as the Dracula magnet from Whitby, are incredibly tacky.  But I like that we’ve taken the time to choose each one, and I like the stories they have, and the fact that they’re small and fairly unbreakable and they they can come with us in suitcases wherever we move to next.

That was way more than I intended to type tonight. My fingers hurt!

Tash

So, I went to Manchester for the first time today.  It was a work trip, and I met people I’ve been working with online, and learnt a lot and got things done.  But, being a work trip, it was a long day, an early morning train trip, the shiny Manchester Piccadilly train station, a few back streets, an office block, a walk back to the train station through the dark and then two and a half hours back to London Euston.

I’ve added a pin for Manchester to my ‘Cities I’ve Visited’ map on facebook and I’ve talked to some people who live there.  Beyond that, I’ve seen some very pretty Christmas lights near the station and learnt that £3.10 buys a lot more lunch in Manchester than it does in London.  And I hope that I will be able to go back again.

Tash

Newcastle impressed us from the start.  Not only did it have a Bookcrossing stand in the centre of the train station, with lots of free books for the taking, but also – once we’d picked up our hire car from Newcastle Airport, we came across this.  The Angel of the North.

The Angel of the North, designed by sculptor, Antony Gormley, has stood upon its hilltop, just out of Newcastle since 1998 (apparently it celebrated its 10th birthday on June 22, though the party was ultimately called off because of high winds).

The Angel of the North is clearly visible to those driving along the A1 – as we were – and there are tourist information signs letting you know where to turn off for a closer look.

Matt got out the camera, and I took my turn to pose in front of the statue with my arms outstretched – and then with my arms stretched around the feet of the Angel.

When I was a kid, we went of class trips to the Waitakere Ranges.  We’d stretch our arms out like this and hold hands, and see how many of us were needed to measure the circumference of a Kauri tree. It would’ve taken a fair few of us, I reckon, to measure the circumference of the Angel.

Tash

There’s lots that’s appealing about London: the events and the culture, the career opportunities and the sense excitement that comes from being in a place with such a history, such a continuing significance.

However, it’s also a big city, with crowds on the streets and crowds on the public transport.  That’s why, whenever we do manage to get away to other parts of England, Matt and I will usually turn to each other and wonder aloud if we really have to go back.

I’m sure there are plenty of great places in England that we haven’t even been to yet, but based on almost two years of weekend mini-breaks, these would be my top three non-London-but-still-in-England places to live:

Salisbury

Perhaps I’m biased here, as Salisbury was the first place we visited outside London and thus it was the first time we realised how green the rest of the country was.  We did the usual touristy things in Salisbury, visiting Old Sarum and the Cathedral and making a day trip to the stone circles at Avebury and Stonehenge.  But I also liked the market square, the parks and the walking paths.  At once point during our stay, I was so serious about a South-West move, that I even stopped by the public library to check if it would meet our needs.

Durham

Durham was another place that had us checking the real estate agent windows.  Again, it had a cathedral and castle and history to spare, but what I liked most was the way the locals seemed engaged with that history.  Outside the library (which unfortunately was closed) we stopped to look at a newly unveiled statue.  Noticing our interest, a local man came up to us and explained the story.  He’d barely finished and left when another local replaced him at our side saying that he’d got the story wrong.  A strong university presence meant that what otherwise might have just been a gorgeous town – and it is gorgeous with that huge cathedral and the river – also felt quite dynamic and an appealing place to live.

Cambridge

We spent our first wedding anniversary in Cambridge, and fell in love with both the town and the surrounding countryside.  The weather was perfect, as we wandered around the University Backs and out to The Orchard for scones and tea, ate at local pubs and were punted along the river.  Central Cambridge, like central anywhere, had the usual high street shops, but the town centre felt so much more romantic with the presence of the River Cam.

Sadly, it’s probably too far to commute from Cambridge or Salisbury or especially Durham to our jobs in London every day – so moving out of the city isn’t really an option.  But we’re off to explore the out-lying neighbourhood of Kingston this afternoon.  I’ll let you know what I think.

Tash

So, in the early centuries of AD, a wall was built in Northern England.  This wall defined the edge of the Roman Empire in Britain, a Roman Empire ruled by one Emperor Hadrian.  Hence the name.

Over 1800 years later, parts of that wall still exist – and are able to be discovered and walked along, on a long weekend escape from London, on a rare sunny day at the end of September.

We stopped at the Corbridge tourist office, picked up maps.  We asked for the best wall-walking spot, and were told to travel on – almost half-way across the country on – to Housestead’s Fort.  Again, as the name suggests, there was a fort there.  But the focus of the day was the wall: first finding the wall (unexpectedly difficult), climbing up onto the wall, walking along to wall for as long as we could, then next to it for a while, while it stretched out in front of us as far as we could see.

Tash

Battle is a strange and slightly amusing name for a town.  It’s even more amusing, for us at least, when it’s placed next to the word ‘Station’.

However, I was less amused, when upon arriving at the town at 4.00pm, ready to take in some of it’s 1066 history, on a rare sunny day in October, we found that the Abbey and Battlefield had just closed.

Okay, it’s our fault for not noting the closing times.  But it’s just that we were there, and wanting to see the battlefield, and with so many other places that we still want to visit in the UK, who knows when or if we’ll go back.

Tash

We hired a car yesterday and Matt drove us down to Dover.  We’ve been through Dover several times, leaving on the ferry to France, arriving back in the UK.  From a distance, we’d seen the white cliffs and the castle on the hill.

That was our first stop yesterday: Dover Castle.  And with English Heritage Membership, we managed to avoid the £10.30 entry fee.  The Dover Castle complex is vast.  It’s the site of a Roman lighthouse, a 1216 seige, a visit by Henry VIII, and – more recently, home to a set of underground tunnels, where they coordinated the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in World War II.

We could’ve spent a whole day, maybe more, at Dover Castle.  Since we only had a fraction of that time, we decided to focus on it’s wartime history.  There’s three layers of tunnels under the complex.  We joined a guided tour of the first two – one operating as a hospital; the other as a strategic headquarters for the military.  Apparently the one below was to be used in the 1960s in the event of a nuclear attack.  That level remains closed to the public, remains more of a secret.

England does it’s history well, I think.  It comes with audio guides and placards giving the important facts.  Or videos with old footage.  Or tours with the sights, sounds and smells of a World War II hospital.  A chance to stand inside a lookout and scan the horizon with binoculars, as others used to do, when the sight of an unknown ship had far more serious consequences. 

Being here has given me a whole new appreciation of what the past is. 

Tash

So, football’s kind of big here.  Not quite as big as the other kind of football, the one that takes up at least seven pages in Melbourne newspapers during it’s season.  But the game that I grew up calling soccer and now call football definitely has it’s followers.  Such as my darling husband, who ranked 64th in the world in last year’s fantasy league. 

He chose our team almost two years ago, before we actually arrived in London.  I agreed because the name matched my favourite bookish activity: Reading.  Two years ago, Reading had just been promoted to the Premiere League, expectations were high.  This season, they’ve been demoted again.  A perfect time then, to try out our Reading membership cards, to wear our Reading shirt and scarf, and go see a match.

The match was in Ipswich, at Portland Road stadium and Reading was playing Ipswich town.  We were assigned to the very small ‘away supporters’ section of the ground.  Well, when I say ‘assigned’, I mean we had tickets.  Matt’d booked them over the phone, and we’d picked them up when we arrived.  It was just too bad that there were two men already sitting in our seats, who had exactly the same tickets as us.  Same date, same block, same seats, totally identical.  Luckily the section wasn’t sold out, so we didn’t have to move into one of the home team areas.

Going to the footy is memorable for the chanting.  I can’t say I understood much of it, and perhaps I didn’t want to.  The turnstile gates are tiny, and the seat rows are crammed in.  People yell abuse at the referee.  When there’s a goal, all that team’s supporters stand up to cheer.  We didn’t get to stand up.  Reading lost, two-nil.

When Ipswich Town scored that second goal, Reading supporters started to file out, while the Ipswich fans turned to the section and waved goodbye (in a less than friendly manner).  Matt and I stayed to the end, but we didn’t change the result by doing so.

Ipswich itself was another English town, with the same shops on the highstreet.  Beyond that, the lanes got narrower and the buildings older.  We even saw a house with a sign commemorating the fact that it was near the house where Thomas Wolsey was born.  The Bailey’s infused creme brulee from Tonic Bar and Lounge on Falcon Street was amazing.

Tash

After having a Cornish Pasty in Cornwall, the next logical step was to have a Devonshire Cream Tea in Devon.

The only thing standing in our way was time. We’d already driven all the way from St Ives, I needed to be at Exeter Central train station by 4pm, and we still had all of the Dartmoor National Park to cross.

We stopped at Tavistock for some local advice on which roads a caravan shouldn’t attempt (having learnt through recent experience not just to rely on our TomTom). There wasn’t time for a cream tea there. In fact, it was the tourist information officer himself telling us to hurry or we wouldn’t make the train.

So we drove on through Dartmoor National Park. It’s a rather bleak place, kind of like Desert Road in New Zealand, but without the mountains. Just openness and scrub, and sheep with spray-painted markings who sometimes choose to lie in the middle of the road.

In Princetown, there was a prison but no obvious sign of cream teas on the the road through town. In Postbridge, we stopped and parked, but we could only find a place which sold ‘takeaway cream teas’, which we thought might detract from the experience somewhat.

We continued driving, and as we did, I saw a small sign advertising a castle where you could have cream tea on the ‘south-facing terrace’. Of course, by the time I told Dad, we’d already driven past. So he pulled into a small lane, turned around, and back we went. The path to the castle was through a golf course. Through stone gates, and we arrived at a large manor house. The carpark obviously wasn’t intended for caravans, and we were all feeling a bit scruffy after two days of travel – so it was back through the golf course, and back on the road.

We finally found our cream teas in the little village of Moretonhampstead. The epic struggle over many miles faded from our memories as we were presented with individual pots of tea, strawberry and raspberry jam and clotted cream. Yum.

Tash

As I was heading to St Ives, I was trying to remember that nursery rhyme I learnt at primary school: something about a man and his wives and cats and sacks and kits. And I was wondering if the St Ives that I was heading to was the St Ives from the nursery rhyme because when I had typed the destination into our hired TomTom, it gave me a whole list of St Ives’, spread around the country.

As I was heading to St Ives, I discovered that it’s not such a great place to take a campervan. Especially if you haven’t booked a campsite in advance. And particularly if you are following the directions of the TomTom, down some very narrow English lanes with stone walls on either side.

We stayed overnight at Balnoon Camping Site, at took advantage of the 20p per four minute showers. In the morning, we relocated to the car pack above the village, and walked down towards the sea. We didn’t see the Tate St Ives. We didn’t hire a boat or take a trip to view the seals. But we did watch bakers make Cornish Pasties in a window of Cornish town.

We walked along the narrow streets, and took photos of the hanging baskets and heard the seagulls. When around just one more bay, and then just one more. Mum checked the water temperature. Unusually for the British beaches I’ve seen so far, there was sand and people with body boards.

As I was leaving St Ives, I saw a postcard which had the nursery rhyme on it along with a signpost showing St Ives and Lands End. And I thought I had been to the famous St Ives, and the thought sustained me as we walked back up the hill. But then, tonight, I’ve Googled “as I was going to Saint Ives”, and it seems that several towns claim it. Wikipedia, source of all knowledge says: “There are a number of places called St Ives in England and elsewhere.”

So really, I’m none the wiser.

I’ve been to St Ives though – or at least, one of them.

Tash