Born Free Leap'n Lions RV Club Info & Discussion Forum

This is why we do what we do Where else can we sit at a Starbucks and look at Tudor buildings (some of them faux, but who cares)? Today we visited Chester, a small city in the west-central county of Cheshire. IMG_4386.JPG Its medieval center is surrounded by two miles of stone walls: in the southeas...

We put a few miles behind us, heading east and then north on divided highways. We made a quick stop in Wells to see theiir unique cathedral. It has very unusual scissor trusses in their sanctuary. IMG_4102.JPG And then we stopped at a campground at Burnham-on-Sea, an awful place masquerading as a la...

Another exciting bus ride took us to Porthcurno, where there is a theatre carved into a rocky cliff on the English Channel. This idea dates from 1932, when a local group wanted to stage “The Tempest” in a perfect setting. Ever since then, with time out for WWII, the Minack Theatre has been going and...

Taking a bus instead of driving is definitely easier on us but not on the bus drivers. We took a bus to Penzance, expecting it to travel on the main route. Instead , it rather quickly cut off on a “white” road to a small town. The road brought back a lot of scary memories. We couldn’t believe a bus-...

What a difference a couple of easier days make. We drove out of the Lostwithiel campground on a narrow road and got ourselves safely on a “B” road that brought us to the nearby 600-acre Lanhydrock Estate, now in the capable hands of the National Trust. This is another “Gosford Park” setting and has ...

May 17 This is Susan writing. We ended our most recent entry saying (in reference to the driving) that we expected more of the same. But instead it got worse--much worse: damage-to-Rover worse. We got out of Dawlish reasonably easily, compared to getting in, by heading south and west to a motorway. ...

When we drove back down the long hill to leave Brighton, we headed for Chichester, stopping on the way at Arundel Castle. This site had great motorhome parking in a large field. IMG_3523.jpg And the castle was impressive, too. It was and is still the home of the Dukes of Norfolk, one of them a frien...

May 8 We have seen some remarkable places--the field of the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (at Battle, England, of course), Rudyard Kipling’s home (a gracious large stone house with 13 fireplaces) just as he lived in it, the little town of Rye, the home of Victorian actress Ellen Terry with its collecti...

After a few more days showing Emily our favorite spots in London, we put her on the Underground to Heathrow and returned to Rover late at night, the buses now blessedly running all the way to the campground. The next day we drove to Canterbury, stopping along the way at Leed’s Castle at Maidstone. I...

April 29. (If, dear reader, you do not care about the Royal Wedding, best skip this post ) We are in London for the royal wedding. Our daughter, Emily, flew in to join us. This was our first attempt at having three adult bodies staying in Rover, and on the whole, she and we bore up admirably. (Emily...

We ventured forth into the English countryside. With information from enthusiastic tourist office employees, we drove to Lavenham and Long Melford, two medieval towns that would be great film and tv locations . . . and, as we learned, had been so used. We were told we could get through the narrow st...

April 24 Because the ferry to England didn’t leave until 10:15 p.m., we decided to spend the day in Den Haag, which is quite close by. But it is a busy city, and all the parking signs led to garages with height restrictions. We finally just lucked out finding a spot on a street alongside a canal. Ro...

On April 12 we left our condo in Minneapolis with three overweight (50+ lb) suitcases. So our first job was to shift books and a 4-lb. box of Borax to our carry-ons. Funny how neither the security guys at Minneapolis nor the ones at Newark airports liked the box of white powder in the carry-on that ...

The first bunch of 2010’s Things We Have Learned will apply to Italy because that’s where we’ve spent nearly all our time so far. 1. In the US, having a university in a town tends to do good things for the town’s ambiance. The same is true in Italy. 2. Gothic facades on Italian churches usually date...

Well, shoot….we haven’t seen these kind of figures before. We “budget” $1000 per week, but our initial look at the bank account showed we used $14,063 in 12 weeks. Still, a closer look shows we really weren’t too far off the mark. Here’s the breakdown. We traveled 4753 miles, averaging 56.6 miles pe...