Bucket List (UK)

Well, I’m cheating, really.  I don’t have a ‘bucket list’ about the UK, per se, but I do have a list of things I’d like to do next time I’m there.  Having already explored a lot of the main tourist attractions and historical sites, I’m on the hunt for the local, the interesting, and the uncrowded.

If I were to truly design a bucket list for the UK, it would simply include the list of Scottish friends I would visit, for they are what draw me back again and again.

That said, there are a few things, new and old (to me) that I’ve simply got to explore my next visit.

On the must see list are:

1. Dickens World in Chatham.  It’s the 200th anniversary of Dicken’s birth; I ask you, how can I not go to Dickens World?
2. Hay-on-Wye for the book festival.  If you’ve never been and you love books, it’s a must.
3. Fast Castle/Dowlaw Farm, a place, if not the place, where I have been stilled and known God was God.
4. Guernsy- locale of the book The Guernsy Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.  Some of the best places I’ve been I’ve learned about in books.
5. Eating my way through Inverclyde: the best filled roll in the world at the West Station in Greenock, the haggis appetizer and banoffee pie at the Inverkip Hotel and the Ceylonese Curry (so, so spicy good) at Taj Mahal in Gourock, to name but a few.

Things in Scotland that call out for more exploration:

1. Puppet Animation Festival in Banff
2. Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh
3. Gilmerton Cove, Drum Street, Edinburgh
4. Camera Obscura and World of Illusions, Edinburgh
5. Anything, any time, anywhere, with music, preferably involving a fiddle and dancing