I'm lucky enough to live near the edge of the Peak District, the first national park to be created in the U.K. Situated at the center of Britain, its 555 square miles are within 60 miles of half the nation's population. Surrounded by Britain's once-great industrial heartland it is considered a green lung, a natural environment where millions of visitors can enjoy unspoiled countryside.

As we sit by the campfire one evening, Herbert recounts his first extended bike trip, 30 years ago. As is the way with travel tales, the wanderlust sets in, and there's only one remedy: to get back on the road.

"Glenlivet it has castles three,/ Drumin, Blairfindy and Deskie,/ And also one distillery,/More famous than the castles three!" It's not Glenlivet we're visiting on our Edelweiss Royal Tour of Scotland, but tiny Cardhu in the village of Knockando on the River Spey. The tour buses have disgorged at the famous Glenlivet, just down the road, while Emma, our kilted guide, takes our small party around Cardhu's nineteenth-century distillery.

"Dear little Bognor" is how Queen Victoria referred to this Sussex seaside town, which later awarded itself the suffix Regis ("of the King") after George V convalesced there in 1928. But he mustn't have enjoyed his stay very much. In 1935, he lay dying and his physician, trying to cheer the monarch, was heard to suggest, "Your Majesty will soon be well enough to visit Bognor." The King's reply, his last words, "Bugger Bognor!"

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!!

- Robert Browning

It is April in England. But William Blake's lines about "dark, satanic mills," written fifty years before Browning's ode, ring more accurately as we climb a clouded hill and scan the Calder Valley. The banks of the greasy Rochdale Canal are chockablock with bleak woolen mills, grimy brick-built factories, and row houses impossibly crowded together. Mr. Browning may be forgiven, however. After all, he penned this flowery effusion in sunny Italy, where memories often surface draped in rose-tinted hues.