The date is now December 27th, 2006 and Karla and I were ready to venture off on our own a bit. Without having any real plans other than wanting to visit Cambridge, we packed a backpack, grabbed my camera and headed off to the train station. Cambridge, England (like Kingston, Ontario) is University town, quite famous for its posh Universities and for a few people of note such Charles Darwin, Stephen Hawking, and even founding members of Pink Floyd. The first thing I’ll mention (besides, I would seriously recommend visiting this city) about Cambridge is it’s public transportation system. Europe is known for it’s reliable train system (which it really is), but man… Cambridge really has public transportation, walking and cycling down pat. They’ve closed nearly all of their city centre to vehicles and provided a free bus service around the city core that you can hop-on, hop-off. Even out-of-town residents can park outside the city for £2 for the whole day and for no extra cost, they can take the bus (which runs reliably every 10 minutes) into the centre. This is how Kingston should operate… but good luck getting rid of our freaking mini-vans and SUVs… I suppose that’s a rant for later.

Karla and I made our way to the local Cambridge Tourist Information Centre where we were greeted by a very friendly woman who helped us find a place to stay that night. We ended up staying at the Crowne Plaza because we weren’t quite adventurous enough yet to test out a bed and breakfast. After checking into the hotel, we immediately went out to discover, and boy did we do that. We walked well over 20 kilometres that day exploring all the sites we could walk to and around. The universities, colleges and cathedrals are larger than life, no word of lie. We toured through St. Johns College and it explored its jaw dropping architecture and massive court yards… we saw Cambridge University, we hand fish and chips in an old English pub where they manually pumped the local bitter from the tabs still. We literally walked & shopped until we dropped. By the time we were back to our hotel at 5:00PM we could barely stand… our knees, shins, feet, etc were in pain, so we had a nap until closer to 9:00PM. By the time we got up and decided we were hungry for dinner it was closer to 9:30PM and little did we know the entire city centre shuts down at 10:00PM. The local pubs even stop serving meals at 10:00PM, so as a last resort we headed back to the hotel and even they stopped serving food already. We were almost out of luck for food until we discovered they serve pizza for room service 24 hours per day. We ended up with a pizza that ended the day perfectly.

After a bit more exploring in Cambridge on December 28th, we headed back to Peterborough in the early afternoon on the train, still feeling the aches and pains in our legs from the previous days walking extravaganza. We took it easy at Brianne’s place that night in preparation for a big day following.

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