Stonehenge-Bath-Cardiff

We See History

The morning of June 19th started off super early, or as I call it, normal wake-up time. We set our alarm in the parent's room for 5:30am. If I recall correctly, we were downstairs at breakfast just after 6:30 when they opened. The kids rolled in shortly afterwards, and we all found something to eat. We were on the bus around 7:15 and we rolled out almost at 7:30 on the dot. We learned quickly that our Travel Director was a very punctual man! Luckily, there were no "perpetually late" members of our tour group.

The first stop of the tour was Stonehenge!! (Yes, this one gets 2 exclamation marks, for the fact that I've wanted to see this famous site in person since I was at least 12 years old!) 

Yes, this picture is everywhere...but this one is mine!

The family remembers this trip as:

• "Smaller than I thought it would be!" (C)
• "Cold, windy, I hated it." (S)
• "Oh, and you can't walk all the way around it, you have to stop and walk back." (S)
• "Very cool, but also, just a bunch of rocks. Hard to fathom the amount of time they have been there." (me)

The best story that we'll always remember about Stonehenge actually started several weeks before our trip:

Coincidence and Happenstance

We have friends, call them the "M's", whom we have known for over 22 years. Our eldest children (mine is "N" in this blog, theirs will be known as "E") were born 2 days apart, and have been "besties" all their lives. In a random conversation a few weeks ago, we found out that E was going to be going to the UK too.

This summer.

No, the week we were going...

Actually, London...

Staying at a hotel less than 2 miles from ours...🤯

The same dates as us...🤯🤯

And then she'd be heading off for a tour...

of Stonehenge...

The exact same date and time as our tour of Stonehenge... 🤯🤯🤯

And while they were texting on the respective tour buses, we lost internet access on the site, so it took a few trips around the stones before S finally ran into E and we all got to say hello and catch up!

And so, even though we live just 30-ish miles apart, these two friends who haven't seen each other much in the last few years due to life and school, managed to meet up 4 thousand miles from home with much joy and happiness! 

Onwards to More History!

By the time we got back to the gift shop/parking area at Stonehenge (there's a shuttle up to the stones and back...it took a bit), there was a massive line for food. We barely had enough time to grab just a couple of bags of popcorn for myself and S, who were starving, and get back on the coach. The next stop on the tour was Bath. 

I had no idea what to expect here. I went in not knowing what was here, or what we'd be doing. I found a perfectly delightful town that I would love to explore further! 

Darren had the bus drop us off and walked us into the site of the Roman Baths where we would later get tickets. He showed us a few interesting spots along the way and then pointed us to a lovely cafe where we could get Cornish Pasties for lunch. Given that Curt and I love these, we hurried over to get near the front of the line for food. We then took our hot pasties back to the square in the middle of town to enjoy the buskers under the shadow of this gorgeous cathedral. 

After lunch, we were given tickets to enter the Roman Baths museum and explore on our own for a few hours, until it was time to meet up with the group again. 

Again, this was another part of the tour where I had no idea what to expect. The history in this building was mind-blowing. To think that the actual Romans had walked those exact stones that we were just mere inches from, or sacrificed cows on this block that was still there...it's so hard to wrap my brain around. 

I can't fit all the pictures from Bath in this post, so the rest are here for you to explore: 

https://link.shutterfly.com/TUGx62oWDrb

Another Country - Wales!

The next few hours were spent driving to Cardiff, crossing into the country of Wales. Along the way, Darren would pop onto the bus's intercom system and give us little tidbits of information about the places we were driving past or through. We got lessons on the local agriculture, politics, religious practices and more, both present and historical, over the course of the entire tour. If I recall correctly, this trip focused on the different sheep found around the UK, some raised for wool, but most for meat. The reason for this lesson now was that our Welcome Dinner included an optional "Lamb faggot" dish (which is the word for meatballs), which I did get and found to be edible. ;P (Not my favorite meal of the trip but also not the worst.)

We arrived at the hotel to find a lovely "Congratulations!" gift in each room for the girls. Trafalgar knew we had booked this trip as a celebration of N's graduation from High School, and S's start of High School, and had passed that info on to the hotel. They put out macarons and strawberries for us.

As mentioned before, we had our Welcome Dinner this evening, at a lovely authentic Welsh Pub. The food and atmosphere were delightful, and it was a wonderful end to a full and busy day.

Day 2: Meet the TD

 On June 18th we finally got a taste of what a Trafalgar tour would entail. We were positively clueless about how group tours worked, or what to expect at all. This day gave us a little intro into what the next 19 days would be like...

The email from the Travel Director Darren said: 

"SATURDAY morning you have a sightseeing tour leaving the hotel at 8.30am with a badged London guide so please go have breakfast anytime before then and enjoy the morning with him/her who will make themselves noticeable to you in the lobby."

So we set our alarms for 7am (I think?) to leave enough time to get dressed, eat breakfast, and get down to the lobby to meet our tour group and local guide. It took quite a bit of time to sort things out, as it turned out there were TWO Trafalgar tours doing the same thing at the same time! Once the local guides figured out who belonged on each of their buses, we were off.

The local tour guide stood at the front of the bus with a clear view of everything in front and on both sides of us. She'd say something like "and on your left, you'll see blah blah blah", and then some seconds or minutes later, we'd get a quick glimpse of the 2nd floor of whatever building it was, and hopefully figure out it was the one she was actually talking about. I did not like this style of touring very much.  Granted it gets you to see (ie: glimpse as you drive by) many far-apart-things in a short timeframe, but there was no time to really explore things or see them without someone's head or another bus or unfortunate window reflection in the way. 

After a while, we were let off close to Buckingham Palace, in just-barely-enough time to get in place to see the daily Changing of the Guards. 

While we were watching, it started to lightly rain. Luckily, we'd prepared for "typical London weather" which we assumed would be quite rainy, and we all whipped out our rain coats and watched the rest of the show. Afterwards, I experienced my one-and-only (I expected more) paid public toilets. I used my tap-to-pay credit card to pay the £0.20 fee ($0.25) to open the turnstile. Then we returned back to the coach to continue our tour and return to the hotel.

We grabbed some lunch and a quick nap, which was a mistake. Little did I realize in my planning that "day of the week" matters, and on Saturdays most tourist sites close early. It was 2pm when we were ready to go back out, but all the places we wanted to see had already stopped accepting entrants, or were going to close by 3pm or 4pm, leaving us no time to travel to and explore said locations. I decided to at least give N her desired ride on the Eye of London, so we walked over there and bought last minute tickets. The wait in line was about half an hour, and the ride itself took about the same amount of time.  We got a few nice pictures of the London layout from high up.

It's a bit tough to see in the picture, but from this angle, we noticed a carousel right beneath us!

When we "landed" we contacted S at the hotel and asked if they wanted to join us for a carousel ride. We walked back to the hotel to get them, then back to the park to ride. 

We also made our way to the Boots (drug store) inside Waterloo Station (about 2 blocks from our hotel) to find some toiletries and medicines to have with us for the rest of the trip. Stuffy noses were spreading around, and everyone needed a bit of sinus-pressure-headache relief at some point or another in this trip. The Boots closest to our hotel only had a limited selection, and the one in the train station was much bigger! We also knew we'd need to be at this station in 2 weeks to get to London, so it was a good scouting mission, too.

After this, we all went back to our rooms for an early bedtime...our Travel Director had informed us that our bags all had to be outside our rooms by 6:30am the next day, and we had to eat breakfast and be on the bus by 7:30!

Official Day 1

 This is the part of the trip I deemed "Phase 2" in my head - the official start of the Trafalgar tour. We still had absolutely zero information about anything we'd be doing. No word from the travel director at this point. No information about what would be happening today, including any timing. We had our hotel reservation vouchers, though, so we soldiered on with our plan.

We used the "FreeNow" app to request a Black Cab to pick us up at our Sheraton Heathrow hotel, and got to the Park Plaza County Hall hotel lickity split and zero issues (other than N once again getting carsick).  Upon trying to check-in, there was a slight hiccup as the front desk could only find one of our rooms under our name. After I dug out the Trafalgar paperwork, the clerk discovered that they had Curt's middle name as his last name, and all was well.  We asked if our rooms could be near each other, due to wanting to put the kids in one room and us in another. They couldn't accommodate that request, so they upgraded Curt and me to a suite, instead, so that we had a couch and "living room" area so all 4 of us could hang out together. The girls were in a room 3 floors down. We went there first, dropped off their bags, checked out the room, and then went up to our room. We gawked at the view (I mean, look at that...)

 and the spaciousness of the room, and then asked the concierge for advice on where to get something to eat. He pointed us to a little alley behind the hotel, just a block or two away, so off we went on foot.

We stumbled upon "graffiti alley": 

and then found our way to a "pedestrian" street full of food vendors. N found this sign and snapped the picture, I had no idea until I was writing this blog that this was the history of the place! 

After grabbing some delicious bread, more coffee, and some fries, we got ready for our next adventure - finding our way to the Tower of London.

This time, I knew that a cab would be both pricey and a very long trip, and we wanted to use the Underground instead. We got a couple of tips from the hotel's concierge on how to find the nearest station, and off we went. Like the complete tourists we were, we took about thirty billion pictures in the 2-block walk from our hotel to the Underground station...because, I mean, how could you not? Just look at these views!

Finally got to the entrance to the Underground station, and made our way downstairs.

We found the ticket machines and got all-day passes for the girls (in case we wanted to go more places), and Curt and I just used our "tap to pay" credit cards to get on and off "the tube". With a quick confirmation from an employee, we hopped on the next train and off at Tower Hill. 

Upon reaching the surface again, there were signs everywhere pointing us to the Tower and Superbloom.  After much anxiety about how to do this, it turned out to be super easy! (I'm sure all my reading up ahead of time on how the Underground worked helped.)

We did the Superbloom tour very quickly because it was more than 90 degrees in the direct sun without a lick of shade, and the only water we found came out of a black hose lying in the sun (hot soup, anyone?) 

It was so hot, they had even closed the "slide" option to enter the moat, so I was bummed at missing that chance.

Looks like fun! :(

But the views were still lovely, even in the heat.

However, once we were inside the Tower, we were absolutely enthralled. We got there just in time to start a Yeoman tour, so we took that (about 45 minutes long) to learn about the history of the Tower and the many, many famous people who died there. If you know your British history, you know what I mean. If you don't, it'll take about 10 years for me to explain it to you, so let's just move on, shall we? LOL

We had planned to spend about 3 hours here. We actually stayed until they closed and kicked us out (about 6.5 hours total). We absolutely loved every bit of it!! We toured the grounds, the White Tower,  saw the Crown Jewels (again, no pictures allowed in there), met the famous Tower Ravens, missed meeting the Ravenskeeper, and then walked the entire perimeter and explored every room, read every sign, enjoyed every view from the walls, and finally made our way to the church. We talked to the two Yeomen in the church for so long, and impressed him with our love of the place and the history, that one of them invited us as his personal guest to the Ceremony of the Keys that night!! (Unfortunately, we couldn't make it happen, because it was so late, but we were so thrilled to be invited!)

We took so many pictures of the Tower, I couldn't spend all that time filling up this blog! So, I'm trying a shared Shutterfly folder instead. Click here to browse them! https://link.shutterfly.com/HpX642BxArb

We reversed our trip on the Underground back to the hotel, to learn that we had missed meeting our Trafalgar tour director by about 5 minutes. (If we had any information about when he was going to be there, we would've made it back earlier). However, he finally emailed us with details and information, so we felt better knowing what would be happening over the next couple of days. 

At dinner that night, we congratulated each other on figuring out public transportation in a strange city, and having a wonderful day!

View from our room at night. I swear it never got darker than this the entire trip!

Windsor Castle and Town

 Windsor Castle

Driving up to the castle involved going a short distance through the town of Windsor. At this point in the trip, every last rock was fascinating to me...🤣 I mean, I was HERE! In England! The real place, not the EPCOT DisneyWorld version! Yeah, trust me, this did wear off eventually...but it took a few days as you'll see.

So, part of the 1200 pictures I took are just the approach to the castle, because it STILL fascinates me that people just live and work in a town where a massive castle overlooks the landscape as if that's just a totally normal thing. (And for them, it is, of course! But it is alien to me, and I loved it).

And just after getting through the main gates, I started what would become a daily tradition: the family "castle selfie". We had various degrees of thrill about this, but my philosophy was that I can get pictures of everything we saw on the Internet anywhere...but I can only get pictures of my family in those places if I take them myself!

We picked up these little audio box things and earphones and started our tour. The downside to this one is that photography is not allowed inside the building - it IS the Queen's home, after all! My "brain pictures" are already fading, but again, a Google search will bring up tons of professional shots of all the rooms we saw, without some random tourist's head in the way. 😜While we were touring, we stopped and talked to a couple of the docents, and learned how to tell (by the flag flying over the castle) whether or not the Queen was in residence (the Union Jack means she's not there, but her Standard flying means she is). Turns out, that day, she and Charles, Camilla, and several other members of the Royal family were in the same building as us! We even saw some preparations being done to take them to the Royal Ascot, although we never glimpsed any actual Royalty. Still, we were breathing the same air. ;)

After our inside tour, we walked around the rest of the outside of the building, and here we got to take a bunch of pictures. Some of my favorites are below. N remembered to take videos, too, which I love for the purpose of getting the audio to help take me back to that moment in time.

The Queen's garden

Approaching the entrance through the grounds

The lamps have crowns!

Loved the mix of architectural styles

                                  Me, posing in front of the guard

N showing off her joy of being here!

Weird crop of this sign, but I was taking the picture in the middle of a stairwell about to be run over by another party...but it made me chuckle.

S and Curt waiting for us to be finished taking pictures already, so we can go inside and see more...        

After we had finished our extensive tour of the Castle and grounds, we set out to explore the town of Windsor as well. We were hoping for some food at this point, as we were unsure of when we last ate, or what time dinner might be. We lucked upon a cute little cafe serving afternoon tea, just the thing to fill our tummies and our bucket lists! Eating afternoon tea in the shadow of a castle?? Yes, please.

Finally, feeling a bit more explore-y, we wandered around the town and shops a bit more, until we finally were tired enough to want to get back to our hotel for some sleep. 

Curt and I then remembered it was our 21st wedding anniversary, and so we went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner and drinks, while the girls claimed they were not hungry and stayed in their room.

As "first day"s go, this one was just about perfect! 

First Day in England

 There was the plan...and then there was what happened. 

I am a planner. See prior posts...and laugh at me if you want to, but this is actually something that brings me a lot of joy. It also used to cause a lot of problems, because when things did not go to plan, my reactions were not healthy. This trip was a test of my new methods, and I did not have to wait long for the chance to put them to use!

Knowing that our flight was landing early in the morning, and we'd have a 5-hour time difference to adjust to, I'd decided through my research that the best way to adjust quickly would be to stay awake and active - outdoors as much as possible - for the first day in London, and try to not sleep until as close to a "normal" bedtime as possible. I pre-purchased tickets to Windsor Castle for noon on our arrival day, estimating that 5 hours would be enough time to get out of the airport, drop our bags at the hotel, and get over to Windsor (a 20-minute ride away...remember this fact, it'll be important later).

Despite a delay taking off, we had a tail wind or something, so our "time in the air" for our flight was shorter than predicted, resulting in us arriving pretty much exactly when we were scheduled to. Getting out of Heathrow was really easy - signs are clear, people are friendly, layout is mostly sensible. We had a small issue with the automated passport readers not working for 2 out of 4 of us, but they were quickly processed by a human agent instead, and by the time that was done, our bags were out and waiting for us. We grabbed them and headed for the exit. Other than forgetting to tap an ATM for some Pounds, we made it out to the taxi stand and got a ride over to our first hotel without a hitch.

Details:

• Used a Black Cab stand at Heathrow, wonderful experience: staff hailed the cab for us, the driver was professional, friendly, and helpful
• Paid for the ride with contactless credit card (Chase Sapphire), was not prompted to tip, and never did tip a taxi driver the entire time, even though I wanted to. For this trip it's because I didn't know how and was just too tired to try to figure it out.
• cabs "seat 6" but with our bags it meant that 2 bags went up front with the driver, 2 in the back with us, and I sat in the fold-down seat facing backward. If we had bigger suitcases, we would've needed to get 2 cars to fit it all.

We arrived at the Sheraton Heathrow hotel to find our rooms were not yet ready, despite requesting early check-in. We were able to leave our suitcases with the front desk, and have breakfast at the hotel's restaurant. N was feeling quite nauseated from the plane and taxi rides, as well as exhausted like the rest of us. The lack of sleep and food were making everyone a bit cranky, and it wasn't feeling like a great trip at this point. However, after some food and time to sit, we did all agree that a "quick trip" over to Windsor would be a good way to pass the time while we waited for our room. 

First-time Traveler Mistake:

We asked the front desk for help getting a cab to Windsor Castle, and they pointed to a "virtual concierge" - basically, a huge tablet hung on the wall. We're pretty tech-savvy folks, so we walked over and clicked the icon to order a ride from a company called "WeKnowLondon" (not the Black Cab company we'd used earlier). We entered the destination as "Windsor Castle" and picked the first (and only) option that matched. The driver arrived a few minutes later and off we went.

Remember how I said that ride was about 15-20 minutes from the hotel?

About 15 minutes into the ride, I was like...why are we heading towards London, when Windsor Castle is the opposite direction from Heathrow? But I kept quiet, feeling like the idiot tourist.

About 35 minutes into the ride, I was like...why are we in the heart of London and not at the Castle yet?

I asked the driver how much further, and he said it was another 35 minutes away.🤯 After a few minutes of discussion, and me pulling up Google Maps, I finally had to convince the driver that he was taking us to the WRONG place! (He tried to tell us there were TWO Windsor Castles in London. For the record, there are NOT.) After getting in touch with his dispatcher, he turned around, and we took another 45 minutes to get us to our actual destination!! So much for our "quick ride" to kill time! N was SO carsick by this point, it was awful. And on top of that, since the hotel (technically) did not make the error, we had to eat the fare for the entire trip (over $250). 

Lessons Learned:

• "WeKnowLondon" absolutely does not (We exclusively used Black Cab for the rest of our days in London and had the best experiences from then on)
• Check the address of where you request to go
• Ask the driver where they think they are taking you, before they start driving

Click here to keep reading about the rest of our day after we finally got to Windsor Castle!

Here we gooooo!!!

 Today's the day!

First, welcome to any new readers I may have picked up this week. I am excited to share our family's adventures with you!

Second, my plan to update this blog as we go is a bit loosey-goosey. I don't know what kind of time, internet access, or patience to type on my phone screen, I will have throughout this trip. I do want to make sure to take notes every day and will have my paper journal along for that. I hope to share some pictures to my Instagram account as I think of it. I will also possibly use this forum for short-hand notes to come back and edit later. In the end, this blog will be our virtual scrapbook, so I can say for sure that detailed updates will definitely happen, even if it's several weeks after we get home. 

On the schedule for today - finish packing, get the place ready for the house-sitter, get to the airport, board the plane, and hopefully sleep our way across the ocean!

I am so freakin excited!!