A Summer Weekend in Dover

Officially, the first day of summer this year in the northern hemisphere is 21st June (I know, I just looked it up!), but personally, I've always found it easier to categorise the seasons by months, like so:

Summer: June, July, August

Autumn: September, October, November

Winter: December, January, February

Spring: March, April, May

...which makes the 1st June the first day of summer. So, when Claudio and I went for a weekend away in Dover from the 1st to the 2nd of June, it felt like a great way to start my favourite season of the year!

We started our trip by taking the Elizabeth Line to Farringdon, followed by the tube to King's Cross/St Pancras. As we had a little bit of spare time before our train to Dover, we had a look around St Pancras International station. It was exciting to see the Eurostar trains going to France and Belgium!

Despite the fact that Dover is quite far from London, the train we took was high speed, and we were there in about an hour. Arriving at Dover Priory Station, I was happy to find some vintage travel posters, which I always love seeing!

The retro vibes continued once we reached our hotel, the Best Western Premier Dover Marina Hotel & Spa. This is one of those grand, 19th century English seaside hotels, located right on the beach. I'd always wanted to stay in a hotel like this!

Before checking in, we had a walk around the beach and the pier. From outside the hotel, we could see the iconic sights of the castle and the white cliffs, which was very exciting!

We entered the hotel and checked into our room, which was small, but very cosy, with views out across the beach and the sea. I'd done a search with flexible dates on the Hotels.com app, so had got the room for well under £100. I'd then made a bid of an extra £10 for a room with a sea view, which was accepted. All in all, I feel it was a pretty great deal!

While bidding for the room upgrade, I'd also added another extra to our stay: afternoon tea at the hotel's Churchill Bar & Lounge! This afternoon tea only cost around £20 per person, which I thought was quite a good deal, as in London, you'd generally be paying upwards of £30-£40.

Everything was so tasty (especially the scones!) and it was made extra special by the fact that we were sitting in the window, right next to the beach.

Later in the afternoon, we went down to the beach. In my opinion, it's not a proper beach holiday without a swim in the sea, so even though the weather wasn't exactly boiling hot, we still took the plunge and had a quick dip in the English Channel. As you can probably imagine, the water was very, very cold, but we felt amazing afterwards!

We warmed up in the best possible way, by visiting the hotel's spa, which has a steam room, sauna and jacuzzi. Though the steam room was a little too hot for our liking, the jacuzzi was absolutely perfect. It was a super relaxing way to end the day!

Waking up right next to the sea the following morning was very special. We could even see France in the distance, right from our bed!

We started the day with eggs on toast and coffee at Wheeler's Fish & Chips, which is also part of the hotel, before going off to explore.

Our first destination of the day was Shakespeare Beach, a tranquil pebble beach overlooked by cliffs. These are not the famous white cliffs that you see on postcards (those are on the other side of the town), but they were very picturesque.

Our next little adventure was climbing up the hill to the castle. With its steep stone steps surrounded by foliage, the climb reminded me of my hike to Machu Picchu, though, fortunately, it didn't take nearly as long!

We decided not to buy tickets to enter the castle - at £30 per adult, we felt it was just too expensive. (Since moving to Reading, I've been slightly shocked at how expensive most activities and events are around London and the South East!) But at least we were able to walk around it a bit from the outside. It's actually the biggest castle in the entire country, and it was pretty spectacular to see.

Then it was time for even more walking, as we made our way to the National Trust site on the White Cliffs of Dover.

The site has a really nice café and gift shop. Of course, being at the beach, we had to have some ice cream! It gave us energy to continue on with the last bit of our walk to get to the famous viewpoint of the white cliffs.

I'd never been to Dover before, so it was very special to see the cliffs, which are such a famous symbol of Britain. To make things even better, we could see the cliffs of northern France reasonably clearly in the distance. France has always been one of my favourite countries, so it was exciting to be so close!

To sum up, our weekend in Dover was super fun and a much-needed break for both of us. We've had our fair share of stress lately, what with moving house, and in my case, dealing with various issues at work while searching for a new job, and in Claudio's case, trying to get his first job in the UK. Fortunately, the latter is no longer a problem - Claudio has just started a new job, doing the same thing as he was doing back in Chile! It's a real relief, and I'm so proud of him, as the job market is really rough at the moment, and he was thinking he might have to lower his expectations in terms of the sort of role he could aim for. So it's a great achievement for him, and also gives us stability we've never had before (we've never both been in stable, full-time jobs at the same time).

So, overall, our new life in Reading is getting off to a great start, and we plan to have more little adventures like this in the near future!

Stonehenge and Salisbury

It sounds strange, but despite being from Wiltshire and having lived here most of my life, I've only actually been to Stonehenge once, when I was 9 or 10 years old. And the only reason I went that time was because my sister's French exchange was staying with us and really wanted to go! Actually, my family has always preferred to go to Avebury, as it's much nearer to where we live, it's free, and it's a lot less crowded.

However, my partner Claudio recently mentioned that he really wanted to go to Stonehenge - unlike Avebury, it is famous all over the world as one of the great historic landmarks of Europe. Moreover, we're going to be out of the country for most of December and plan to move away from Wiltshire in early 2025, so it made sense to go as soon as possible. The journey from our house is about 70 minutes, which may seem long by British standards, but is not long at all by Chilean standards, so Claudio was quite happy to drive down there!

The one big drawback of visiting Stonehenge is the cost; if you book online in advance, it costs a little over £25 per adult, and it's even more if you pay at the counter on the day. Very expensive, particularly in today's cost of living crisis! There is, however, the option of parking a little way out from the site and walking along a public footpath to a free viewpoint, which allows you to see the stones from one side only. We did consider this option, but eventually decided to cough up for the tickets, in order to see the stones from all angles and to visit the museum. We viewed the purchase of the tickets as a kind of bucket list experience, as we don't plan to go back for many years - probably not until we have kids who are old enough to find it interesting, which I certainly didn't when I went at the age of 9!

The drive down was actually quite interesting - we went through Avebury and then through some other pretty towns and villages like Devizes, with lots of traditional thatched cottages.

After arriving and having our tickets checked, we went to have a look at the recreation of houses from the prehistoric period that's located just outside the visitor centre entrance. There's even one that you can go inside!

And then we got on the shuttle bus over to the famous stone circle itself.

Weirdly, it was actually a lot bigger than I remember it being (usually I remember things from my childhood as being bigger than they really are), and while I remember only being able to see it from a distance, there's now actually one side of it that you can see fairly close up - though maybe that was always the case, and I just didn't remember it!

This time around, I also felt more of a sense of power and mystery coming from the stones; it's incredible to think that they were put there 5000 years ago, and that some of the stones came from as far away as Wales. It's a shame that we'll never get to see it as it was in its heyday when it was fully formed, but it still looks pretty good for its age!

Having now seen both Avebury and Stonehenge in recent years, I'd still choose Avebury for a day out, as it's a much more relaxing place (and it's free!), but the formation of Stonehenge is very special and unique and certainly worth seeing at least once in a lifetime.

Back at the visitor centre, we had a go at pulling an extremely heavy rock, before visiting the museum. Inside the museum, there's a big circular room made out of screens with images of Stonehenge as it was in the past, making you feel like you're inside the circle. That was pretty cool! It was also interesting to see a timeline showing how old Stonehenge is in comparison to other historic places we've visited or hope to visit in the future. 

We then headed south towards the city of Salisbury, stopping off at Old Sarum, which was once both an Iron Age hill fort and a Norman castle. I believe I'd seen it on TV once and been really impressed by it, which was why I wanted to go, but we quickly realised it's one of those places that looks much more impressive from a bird's eye view than it does on the ground.

Old Sarum is made up of two circular mounds - a smaller one on top of a bigger one - and while the bigger one is free to walk around (though there's a charge for parking), you have to pay £8 per person in order to walk around the smaller one, which has the remains of the Norman castle. Based on our view from the ticket office, there wasn't really that much to see there, and we'd already paid a lot for our Stonehenge tickets, so we decided to pass and just walk around the bigger mound. Our experience there was a little underwhelming, but I'd absolutely recommend looking up the bird's eye view images of the site.

Our final stop of the day was Salisbury itself, where our first port of call was the famous cathedral, known for having the tallest spire in England. It really was a majestic building to see and we're glad to have visited it, but unfortunately there's a charge of £12 to go inside (£10 if you book online in advance), and we couldn't really justify that after paying out so much for our Stonehenge tickets. You can walk around the cloisters for free though, which is a nice experience.

The rest of the city was also a picturesque place to walk around. It's very beautiful in a kind of Medieval English way, and made me think of York, as opposed to other beautiful cities near me like Bath, Cheltenham and Oxford, which have a more continental vibe.

All in all, it was a very fun day out, and felt like a real adventure, despite the fact we didn't leave our home county! Even though we're planning to move in 2025, it is nice to have places like these so close to our doorstep, and we're going to try to appreciate them as much as possible during the rest of the time that we'll be living in this part of the world.