Day ?, what day is it?

Well the last couple of days have gone brilliantly! We rode out of the Motorway services to the glow of another amazing day. Clear, warm, no wind – absolutely gorgeous! We rode about ½ a mile to Leeds Castle and were seriously blown away by the place. It was positively breathtaking!

We walked in from the car park through the Duckery where Rachel found a rare type of black necked swan that she talks about in Micro. Apparently a huge source of sustenance for this variety of swan in the wild is a somewhat obscure group of algae called labyrinthula. We managed to get a bunch of pictures of the swans as they swam back and forth looking positively regal. We then went a couple of steps further and saw the most interesting looking duck/goose bird. I thought to myself that they resembled a NeNe from Hawaii but seeing as I am currently in England I put that thought out of my mind. Soon we passed a sign that said they were extremely rare and endangered NeNe’s from the island of Hawaii! Crazy!

After an extremely beautiful walk up through the duckery we came into view of Leeds Castle, what an amazing site. It’s built onto two islands in the middle of a lake/moat and it was partially built for the sheer point of being beautiful and it was not a disappointment! The castle was amazing with an extremely old medieval section dating from the 1100’s and a newer part. The Castle was lived in until 2001 until the daughter of the last owner passed away.

The castle also had amazing grounds that contained lots of lakes, meadows and beautiful landscape, gardens, aviary, hedge maze and grotto as well as a birds of prey show. It was an awesome time and we left there at about 3pm for Painter’s Farm. It wasn’t far and the ride was amazing, over the top of the North Downs in Kent. The campground was also amazing. Unforturnately there wasn’t anywhere to eat so we had to go into the nearest big town, 3kms, to find a great Chinese buffet. The only problem was riding back up the hill so stuffed we could hardly move!

Today also went amazing, we slept in a little because we didn’t need to go anywhere fast today. We got going about 10:30am found a great bakery for breakfast and bought some lunch or dinner, whichever we needed it for, and started the pilgrimage to Canterbury. Beautiful ride, lots of fun until we hit a divided A road and couldn’t get across, we were able to find an overpass but it threw us for a loop for just a moment. We found the National Cycleway Path into Canterbury and managed a stunning view of the cathedral from above, amazing! The town is also amazing and confusing, those medieval builders just didn’t have cars and bikes in mind when they designed them!

We stopped at the Information Center, or as Trevor put it non-information center since the guy there couldn’t answer any of our questions including when the tours of the Cathedral started, ate lunch and headed to the campground.

We got there in plenty of time for us to wash some clothes, shower, post Rachel’s grades and eat our dinner from the bakery. It’s still beautiful but getting a little cooler. We’re planning on seeing all the sights we can in Canterbury tomorrow.

We’re running out of battery and can’t find anywhere to charge up so we’ll get back on when we can.