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A retired Australian garden designer -- and tragic Anglophile -- sets off to the UK with a backpack and a folding bike to explore the country of her convict ancestors. By train, car and bike, and sometimes boat and tiny plane, this first-time traveller finds the Britain of her dreams, where history is preserved and cherished, where writers and poets are lauded and celebrated, where gardens are this other Eden's floral heart. From London to the Highlands of Scotland, from the Norfolk Broads to the Isles of Scilly, in gardens and galleries, battlefields and bike paths, her adventures 'Around the UK' proves that age and inexperience is no hinderance to international travel.
The story begins in London after a stressful to-do at Heathrow airport where our traveller is abandoned by the scheduled airport transport company. However, help is at hand with the unexpected appearance of friends who have travelled from The Hague to welcome her to the UK -- and take her to tea at the Dorchester.
She stays for a week in each of her chosen areas, based in a cottage from where she explores the surrounding cities, villages and countryside. No two days are alike: the battlefield at Culloden contrasts with a boat trip to the Outer Hebrides, Cambridge by bicycle one day and lost on a hike at Wicken Fen the next, every day something new and wonderful. The twelve chapters of the book represent a week of travel and as the weeks turn to months, summer in Scotland eventually becomes autumn on the Cornish Riviera.
Around the UK in Eighty Days is a book for those who have travelled these byways to remember again the thrill of discovery and adventure, for all who would come this way in the future and for those who travel in their imagination.
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