Next Country - England!

But we were also going to Wales. Soooo, was our next country actually Great Britain, or possibly the U.K. or maybe the British Isles? How do I refer to it? 

I never can get this straight, so off to Google for a handy chart. 

Yes! Our next country was England!

Wales is a separate country (I know, I know!), but we were in the region of all of those! Sheesh! 

Despite the confusion, this part of the world was one of the places that I was most excited about. It is the homeland of so many of my favorite authors and legends and stories!

C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Roald Dahl, George Orwell, James Herriot, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, J.K. Rowling… I have to stop. I could go on and on. 

The kids were most excited to see all things Harry Potter, but also for Sherlock Holmes (both the books and the tv show).

We had said goodbye to John and Carol in Poland and were now going to be meeting my parents for our last big road-trip through Great Britain. 

We arrived on a very early flight on the 4th of July. I know, ha ha!

My parents were also arriving on a very early flight … 

So, if you know Bob and Marsha Berry, then you know they are great at the big things in life that matter. They are kind, compassionate, intelligent, and humble. My mom is always ready for a hug, and my dad will never cease to find a way to encourage you.

They are masters of the essentials of excellent human flourishing… However, they are not masters of the art of traveling, nor in using technology.

So, we needed a good plan for them to navigate London until our rendezvous.

1) Get their Drimsim set up and successfully turned on. This was the international SIM card that Tom and I used to have data worldwide. It’s worked well for us everywhere we have traveled so far. 

2) We scheduled a driver to pick them up at the airport. My parents haven’t experienced many international red-eye flights. It’s hard to help people understand how they are going to feel, and while Mom was feeling frisky, and eager to navigate the London Underground at morning rush hour after an 8-hour overnight flight, (she had “watched a bunch of YouTube videos” after all...) I strongly recommended that she and Dad do their best to start this month-long trip without a fight in baggage claim.  (In hindsight, they both agreed that the splurge was worth it.)

3) We booked a luggage storage point. We couldn’t check into our Airbnb until 4 pm, and since their flight arrived at 6 am (ours at 7 am), we had the whole day to navigate London. We didn’t want to be hauling our luggage everywhere. Luckily, this is a common enough problem in the city, and there were loads of places that we could book luggage storage with. We found a budget hotel near our Airbnb that offered this option.

4) Lastly, we determined an easy meeting point. We settled on the British Museum. Our Airbnb and luggage storage was in walking distance. They had air-conditioning and a restaurant with coffee. Plus, it’s the British Museum. So awesome!!!

What I didn’t anticipate was that on a Friday in July about of a billion other people and school (!) groups would be there as well. 

We did find a reasonably quiet space in the “Reading Room.” I had read allusions to the Reading Room in literature for years with confusion about why it would be a thing “to read” at the British Museum.

Once I understood, I got all sorts of book-nerdy fan-girly. 

This is Lucy mimicking my reactions to reading the signs of which famous authors used to be regulars.

Then we floundered on the ground floor as a group of seven for a bit before deciding we needed to implement the buddy system. Some went for ancient Mesopotania and others for Egypt.

Me, and my lucky buddy Sammy, headed for the Islamic Art section.

I’ve learned from my time living in DC that it is better to find one or two sections in a museum and do them well rather than attempt to traverse the entire massive set of collections. I read each placard and examined every gorgeous artifact displayed. It was fascinating.

However, I suspect that Sammy wished he had gone to see the mummies instead...

The next day we hopped on one of those Big Bus Tours and went all around the city, hitting all the major must-see sites.

We also took a river cruise on the Thames and got to see many of them again, only this time from a boat!

We had a great time with all of it.

And ended the day by going to a quintessential English pub. The Marquis Cornwallis (yes, that Cornwallis) had some good food, but also had some interesting art.

The next day was Sunday. For us, that meant trying to find a church. Tom really wanted to visit the Alpha Church, which is Holy Trinity Brompton. I found an 11 am service, and we arrived 45 minutes early to discover a line of people wrapped around the church waiting to get in!

This service ended up being one of our highlights of the entire trip to England. I’ll write more about that in a separate post. 

About 30 min before service began, we are in the packed balcony.

Afterwards, we met up with an old friend of ours from our time in DC. Nate joined us for lunch and then a leisurely walk across Hyde Park, with quick side stops at a pop-up Lego event and to chase the ducks near Kensington Palace.

Our destination was the Princess Diana Memorial Gardens. 

If you have read many of our travel blogs, then you know that as a traveling family we are always on the hunt for a wonderful playground.

This one was so whimsical and the kids enjoyed it so much that we went back again another day.