Just FYI, an Anglophile is a person who is fond of or greatly admires England or Britain and a Hibernophile is a person who is fond of Irish culture, Irish language and Ireland in general. We know you were wondering.

After almost two long months in Spain (and most of our Schengen visa time allotment yikes), we headed out of the Schengen area to the U.K. with plans for travel through England, Scotland, and Ireland. Our good friend Nate has a flat in London where he works, and he kindly allowed us to stay there a while after the Camino while he was back in San Francisco. His place is pretty sweet so it was the best possible situation for us to rest after our long walk. We flew straight to London from Santiago and immediately settled in pretty nicely, watching a whole day of movies on our first day in the flat. Thanks Nate!!

We got to London on July 12, and stayed for a little over a week walking around the city, meeting up with friends, enjoying the crazy good food and just plain CRAZY nightlife. We did our duty as good tourists and hit up museums, parks, etc. Given our fascination with all things mysterious and dare we say occultish, a definite highlight was a tour of the Freemason museum, including a private hang in the absolutely surreal Grand Lodge. However, the freemasons here, including the young lad that gave our tour, would likely strongly oppose our use of the term occult to describe the ultimately benign (at least on paper) group.

After some serious chill time at the flat, we peeled ourselves away for an amazingly fun adventure in Scotland and Ireland!

First, a train to Edinburgh in Scotland. Wow, that city is so neat. It looks like a medieval Harry Potter land (and indeed is where J.K. Rowling wrote the story). Dark towers, narrow winding alleys, and of course the imposing castle all make for a very cool backdrop to the pub hopping we did. We managed to get in a good urban hike up to the top of Arthur’s Seat for amazing views of this coastal city.

After a few days, it was time for some more serious hiking. Apparently, we didn’t get enough walking in Spain so we decided to do three days along the West Highland Way. We had heard about this walk back in 2013 on our Camino trip, and Laura had always wanted to make it happen. The whole thing takes about 7-8 days but given our time limitations (and the cost – this ain’t Spain anymore), we just did three.

This hike was INCREDIBLE. It went well beyond our expectations in beauty, toughness, weather, and just the general awe-factor. We got two great weather days, a real treat, and one super rainy day. We felt very lucky. We did long days, one day was a good 20 miles (!), but felt in pretty good hiking shape still (and had much lighter bags) so it wasn’t too bad. We ended in Fort William, and had an extra day in this nice highland town.

You literally could hear bagpipes on the wind and see castles everywhere we went in Scotland. A really magical and beautiful land that was tough to leave. But after a week, it was time to move on to Ireland.

We flew into Dublin from Glasgow on Friday and spent a weekend touristing and catching up with an old friend of Javi’s from his original 2006 Camino. It is always nice to get a local to show us around the city, and Steve was a very generous host. On Sunday we picked up a car and commenced our Irish road trip across the country. We went to Glendalough south of Dublin and then moved on through Kilkenny to the south west coast. Again, like Scotland, Ireland just surpassed any expectations we had and was just the most amazing place. The hits just kept on coming.

Ireland has a ton of ancient stone circles so we did a little tour of a few of those magical spaces on Beara Peninsula before settling in a nearby hostel. Beara was a really beautiful part of the area, split between Cork and Kerry, that was not nearly as touristy as the rest of that part of the coast. We then did the obligatory Ring of Kerry drive and the Cliffs of Moher, which had a lot of tourists but for good reason. Both places had a major wow factor and were just gorgeous. We got super lucky with the weather and rarely got rained on. The Irish west coast is just plain nuts, it is so lovely it’s hard to comprehend it.

After a pub hopping night in Galway, we made our way back towards Dublin, but not before stopping in for a night’s rest at a rural farm and a visit to the Ireland Scarecrow Festival in Durrow.

Good times all around, it was certainly sad to end such an amazing trip but we have our sights set on GREECE! Before that, though, it’s a few more days in London.