Kim Schmidt Photography LLC | Northern Virgina Family Photographer

What was meant to be a pit stop for us turned into two days of hanging out on the “best beach” of UK, Newquay (pronounced new-key). We rode the hour-long bus ride from St. Austell to Newquay to pick up an automatic car from the airport so we could head east to the Seven Sisters Park. We arrive to find out that a German woman that was renting the one automatic car went the wrong way in the roundabout, hit a lorrie (or truck for us Americans!), and totaled the car. The gentlemen was extremely gracious and had spent hours trying to find us a replacement before we arrived. While Anthony drove a stick shift for many years, he didn’t feel comfortable doing that + driving on the wrong side of the road. *it should also be pointed out that the majority of the world drives on the right side of the road, any British territory continues to drive on the left. They are in the wrong!!!*

Trying to make lemonade out of lemons, we lost out the money at our hotel near Seven Sisters, and stayed in Newquay for the two days to enjoy the beach. Luckily we had our bathing suits with us and hit up one of the beaches closest to us. The weather was perfection this day. It made us excited about spending our last full day of holiday at the beach, though we woke up on that Sunday morning to extreme overcast, dreary weather. We were after all in England!! Lemonade, right?!? We decided to walk from one end of the town to the other to see all the different beaches, stick our feet in the coldest water, and enjoy each other’s company. It wasn’t so bad, we were on holiday and in England for that matter. It’s not lost on us that we are very fortunate to be able to travel!

Get ready for a long one!!!

When visiting a location, google is your best friend, right? While we didn’t have much of an agenda starting out, one of those top 20 places you must see in England popped up in the browser. eden project was on the list and I just knew we had to go. It’s the world’s biggest conservatory with three different biomes. This place was once a china clay mine, and the founders had the foresight to think long-term goals. The Cornwall area is fairly poor and tourism is minimal considering its far away from big cities + there isn’t much to offer tourists. Once the eden project became a reality, it’s help tourism tremendously. Honestly, we wouldn’t have ever gone that far southwest.

I worry about the future of our planet, how the choices that have been made across the globe for many decades is finally catching up to us. This project just goes to show you that this world is bigger than just you+me. It takes something extremely ugly, an eyesore really, and creates beauty that you cannot necessarily find in one spot. I’d love to see more abandoned mines turned into similar parks.

Definitely check out the timeline of some behind-the-scenes. Anthony was worried that it would be preach-y and make you leave feeling like a terrible human being. There is only one spot, The Core, that Anthony felt uncomfortable. The Core is their educational center, so it makes sense that it would have items in there that could make you feel bad (i.e. a smart car filled with all sorts of everyday items with the price tag that it really costs to make with the resources). The Core is very interactive for children + it’s air conditioned with bathrooms! Otherwise, the park is amazing, full of beautiful life!

Several things to note about Eden (I couldn’t find the answers to some of these questions when I googled, so hopefully others will find these helpful!)

• if you take public transportation, you receive a discount on admission. just show your ticket from the bus when you buy your ticket. Also, make sure you know the bus time tables. 6:00 pm is the last bus from the eden project back to “civilization”.
• We stayed in St. Austell and ended up taking two different bus companies. Make sure to ask for a roundtrip ticket, it’s much cheaper that way. The First Bus 101 company is double the price of Western Greyhound 527. They both take the same amount of time to get into St. Austell, so I’d take Western Greyhound.
• Eden is very eco-conscious, providing as much local, sustainable food items on site. The prices are much higher than we wanted to spend though. The eden project is fine with you bringing in your own food and drinks. We were a tad worried about this and I couldn’t find anything on their website that said any different.
• The gift shop at the entrance sells some bakery items. Buy there if you are interested in a scone or bread. We luckily passed on the yummy looking scone in the restaurant and when I arrived into the gift shop and saw them there for 60p verse the £3, I rejoiced. It was an amazing scone.
• The workers at the ticket booth will try to entice you into purchasing the £6 guidebook. There is no need to spend that money. There are plenty of well-marked maps throughout the park.
• Visit the rainforest biome as early in the day as possible. It’s steamy and will only continue to get warmer throughout the day. There are several cooling rooms, but we weren’t able to take advantage of them with screaming children inside. No thank you!

I have a slight obsession with community gardens. I point them out when we are driving (or taking a train through the English countryside for that matter!). It tends to drive Anthony batty but I continue to do it. I have no shame people. As I mentioned earlier, there are 3 biomes, including an outdoor one. Part of that includes this community garden from all over the world!!!! The vegetables in the rows were so beautiful and made me long for coming back to the States to eat fresh veg once again!! The building below collects rain water (the park itself collects as much rain water as possible and recycles it for toilet water) + there’s another building for seed saving in this part. It was one of my favorite parts!
Holy lavender…it smelled amazing.

The mediterranean biome. While this was the smaller of the biomes, it was beautiful inside. Though a bit harder to capture with the camera! In the last photo is the largest rosemary plant I’ve ever seen!

The rainforest biome is the world’s largest indoor rainforest, including a waterfall, lots of ponds, indigenous homes/huts, fruit trees (hello bananas!!!!), beautiful flowers (the one below that looks semi-phalic looking is gum!), birds & other wildlife, and lots of heat/humidity. By the time you get towards the end, you seriously just want to blast through it to get outdoors and away from the heat. I mentioned above, that it’s best to visit this biome first thing!

My apologies for the long post!! I took so many images and really wanted to share them all! Plus I had to give my two cents about the experience too.

Bath was by far our favorite location on this holiday. The town is beautiful, quaint, and full of rich history. We booked our B&B through VisitBath. They were running a summer promo that if you booked through their site then you also receive two tickets to the Roman Baths. Count us in! Our inn-keeper, Steve, at the White Guest House made our experience a million times better. He was gracious upon our arrival, giving us tips on when to visit the Roman Baths and places to eat. He also went above & beyond anything that we were expecting, including throwing the few clothing items I hand washed before our adventures into the dryer. If you are looking for a place in Bath, definitely stay at the White Guest House!

We arrived to Bath fairly late that day, upon Steve’s recommendation, we went to the town center and grabbed pizza at The Real Italian Pizza Company. It was yummy! Go eat there!!!! Luckily the sun stays out pretty late in England, so we were able to wonder around the city even though most everything was closed.

The next day, we participated in a free walking tour in the morning. Apparently I made Anthony carry around the camera during that few hours and didn’t snap one photo with my camera. They are all on my phone instead! HA!. We then hopped on the Scarper Tours bus for a lovely, steamy drive to Stonehenge. One downside of this local tour company is their audio system in the bus makes it nearly impossible to hear the driver when pointing out details along the way (it’s also expensive too but the convenience was worth it to us). Up until this very day, we had amazing weather. Then the heavens decided to open upon us during the walking tour. It stopped right before we got onto the bus for Stonehenge, and if you wouldn’t believe, it was a massive downpour the minute we got off the bus. Not only was it raining but it was cold+windy too. While I’m not 100% sure if it was the smartest to wear a dress that day, I will say that the cotton dress dried pretty quickly!



We returned to Bath around dinner time and then headed to the Roman Baths before dusk hoping to not have to deal with too many crowds. That was the case until 9pm or so when an tour bus full of Italian kids came running amuck. The Baths are beautiful, extremely interesting and tastes like sulfur-filled water (at the very end of the tour, they have a faucet for you to feel the temperature of the water + taste it if you’d like).

It was a jammed-packed day of interesting sight-seeing. Next is Saint Austell (and if you haven’t ever heard of this city, don’t worry, it’s not really a popular tourist destination!).

On July 4th, we traveled from London to Oxford. Before we left for holiday, we had one friend who was extremely concerned about us not getting to celebrate+see fireworks on the 4th of July. He wondered if England would celebrate for us. Obviously there is no celebration since that marks the day we gained our independence from them – we had to school J on this. 🙂 In American fanfare, we celebrated with pizza for dinner at AskItalian.

Anthony was accepted to present at a conference at Oxford, which made our trip all do-able (this is the same reason we came 2 years ago). Last time we stayed in the housemaster’s apartment but this go round we were stuck in a dorm room with two twin beds + shared bathrooms. Yay! It was a real treat (read: I slept like crap the entire time).

I explored the heck out of the city two years ago so I had plans of staying in my pajamas + editing away. Mission accomplished! Sunday morning I did wonder west of town. I love all the charming homes, they’re my favorite!

I saw on my map about a boat rental nearby and captured some images there. Now that I’m going through all of these images, it makes me super anxious to share all the images from 2012. I have some very colorful ones to share!

Next up: Bath!