Otherwise known as my girls’ first international trip to go see my friend, and their aunt, Jessie, who’s living life and taking names while currently doing her PhD in Canterbury, England. (We are literally the only ones that are allowed to call her Jessie fyi, everyone else must call her Jessica. Benefit of being best friends for close to 30 years. Love that 🙂 )
Straddling June to July the three of us flew over, and we did aaaaalllll the things. It was a fun and yet very exhausting 9 days. When I got back, I’d never been more glad to be a gas guzzling American that drives everywhere to do their errands, as bad as that sounds. Walking everywhere and taking public transport is just so time involved and physically exhausting. I’m sure if it’s all you’ve ever known you’re used to it, or if you live there you get used to it, but my feet hurt! I had cankles for nearly 36 hours after we got back still.
Anyway, prepare yourself for picture overload as I walk you through our fun yet tiring week (ish).
Day One: Travel Day. Overnight with a layover in JFK. First takeoff was 2pm our time, last landing was 9am England time/ 4am our time. The girls and I slept maybe 2 hours on the plane? I even dosed us all with 10mg melatonin and nothing. As you can tell we were very tired. After we landed and were reunited with Jessie we had 2 separate 1 hour train rides ahead of us. They fell asleep on both of them. I totally conked out on the second one. No picture evidence of that though, luckily.
Day Two: River cruise, or rather a punting cruise, in Canterbury. Very informative, very entertaining, and gorgeous views. Then we took a bus to Dover to see the Dover Castle and the White Cliffs of Dover. Sooooo much walking, all mostly uphill, really steep hills. For the adults, totally worth it. As you can tell from the pictures, the littles didn’t really agree that the physical effort was worth the vistas. If you ever plan on visiting Dover Castle and take the bus, take some advice. Take a taxi from the bus dropoff point up to the castle. We started out the afternoon exhausted because of that “little” hike and lost a good amount of time we could have used for looking around the grounds.
Day Three: Took another bus to Botany Bay for an overnight in a hotel on the coast. The girls requested to go swimming in the sea, so we provided. However, it was frigidly cold so this Mama only went shin deep and then immediately backed right back out. They claimed you got used to it the deeper and longer you were in it. I refused. They had fun though. And I had fun watching them have fun and I went for a walk along the water. Also, side note, this is the very first time in my entire life I’ve worn a bikini in public. Only two-piece bathing suits I’ve had in the past have been tankinis that covered everything. First time I didn’t have to wear an actual bra under the bathing suit for support, since no bathing suit ever has enough proper support for H cups. It felt so nice!
Day Four: In the morning Jessie took the girls down to the beach by herself and allowed me some time by myself to take a nice hot bath. I woke up feeling bleh. Wearing a bikini on a cold, English coast wasn’t probably the best idea. From this day on I dealt with a lovely cold/cough (not covid, did a test).
After they came back we took the bus back to Canterbury, which we literally ran to catch. We had lunch at Cafe Chambers. Super yummy and a surprising tangent into my family history. The Mayflower Compact was signed at Cafe Chambers once upon a time. My great-whatever-Uncle John Howland was on the Mayflower as an indentured servant. You can see his name on the copies of the document they have up on the walls. Our actual ancestor, his brother, came over to join him a few years later.
After lunch, we went to the Canterbury Cathedral. I visited here when I visited Jessie last Winter. Still gorgeous. Added bonus, they had a scavenger hunt for the kids. It kept them engaged and had little educational blurbs about all the things we found. And they got fun little pins when they completed it.
Day Five: The Day of Yum. Jessie had to go to an all day conference for her PhD program, literally all day, like 5am to 1130pm, so we were left to our own devices. We had a nice relaxing day. Up until this day we averaged 20,000 steps a day. This day we barely broke 5,000. It was nice. We slept in. Had breakfast. The girls watched a movie and let me sleep and be sickly for a bit. Then we went had a proper English Afternoon Tea at a teahouse. It was very yummy. Then we milled about the shopping district of Canterbury for awhile, replaced my plug converter that broke. While wondering around we saw a sushi place called Mr Miyagi’s, so of course we had to try that for dinner, and so glad we did. It was so good that Zoe even liked it! Then back the Jessie’s for showers, bedtime routine, and movie in our pjs. It was a nice slow paced day to recharge our batteries.
Day Six: We participated in Canterbury’s Medieval Pageant. The kids get a little passport and we went around the town visiting different sites of historic interest, learning about them from volunteers, maybe doing an activity they had set up. They get a little stamp on their passport and at the end they got a large chocolate coin for collecting a certain amount of stamps. We visited so many spots and saw so many cool things I couldn’t include all the pictures on here. It’d be too much. Needless to say though, if you’re ever in Canterbury when the Pageant/Festival is happening you should go and participate, kids or no. It was fun and educational.
Day Seven: Took the train into London, stashed our luggage at a luggage storage place at the train station so we could do the tourist thing before checking into the hotel. We visited Kensington Palace and Gardens. Very pretty, though the outside isn’t what I associated with the word palace. It was a big fancy brick building. It could have been just a government building from the outside. The inside was very palace like though, although smaller rooms since it was more of a family home I guess?
Then back into central London to visit the London Bridge Experience and then dinner. The London Bridge Experience is advertised as the scariest experience in all of England, and not going to lie, it was done pretty well. From then on though the London Bridge is Falling Down song would pop into our heads the rest of the week at random intervals. Dinner was a Harry Potter themed Potions class with Cutter and Squidge tearoom for a evening tea service. We mixed potions for our drinks and were served some very yummy food. Afterward we made the trek make to the train station to recollect the luggage and then a taxi to our hotel for the next two nights.
Day Eight: Visited Windsor Palace. Now this is what I associate with the word palace! Everything was big and grand and gorgeous through and through. Inside any of the buildings on the grounds pictures were prohibited though, so I had to do some very stealthy picture taking because of course I couldn’t not document the prettiness all around me. Once back in London proper we jumped on the Hop-on Hop-off tour bus for a little tour of London, ending with getting off at the Tower of London. All of the flowers around it are in bloom right now so they were putting on a special event just to see the flowers. We looked at them from afar and saw a Beefeater too!
Then we had a fancy dinner in our own personal igloo tent thing at a restaurant on the river with a view of the fancy bridge everyone thinks is the London Bridge but isn’t actually. After dinner we took a boat ride up the Thames to see a few more sites and then walked to see Parliament and Big Ben. The girls have talked only of “meeting Ben” since it’s one of the few English landmarks they know thanks to Peter Pan and Doctor Who. And after a very long day of doing the tourist thing we caught a taxi back to our hotel. Jessie took the girls swimming while I packed the three of us and made sure none of the suitcases were over the weight limit.
Day Nine: Travel Day. First lesson of the day: Staying at a hotel near the airport is not worth it and does not actually save time getting to the airport unless you take a taxi. The shuttle took an hour when we were a 5 minute car ride, and we had to pay for it! The train from London takes an hour. Same difference time wise in the end and we could have spent more time site-seeing on our tourist days and less time traveling to and from the hotel. Second lesson of the day: Heathrow is absolutely crazy! We were already prechecked in through the app and just needed to drop off the luggage. It took nearly 2 hours to get through the line just to drop off the luggage. Then across the entire airport practically to get to security, another 45 minutes to get through that. Ran to our gate. Got there with 20 minutes to spare before boarding and that’s with the flight being delayed 40 minutes. If it hadn’t been delayed we wouldn’t have made it. I had thought I gave us plenty of time. Nope!
Our layover was in Detroit and was a whopping 40 minutes long, because of the initial delay from Heathrow. In those 40 minutes the girls and I had to go through customs, collect our luggage from baggage claim, recheck it, go through security, and then get to the gate. We did it all at a mad run. At one point my phone fell out of my pocket and a TSA agent actually ran after us to give it back. We made it to the gate with 4 minutes to spare before boarding was done. We were the last on the plane. They literally closed the doors after us. That was fun. All along the way though people we encouraging us, which was nice. There was a lady in the row behind us on the first flight that literally stopped the traffic in the aisle so we could get out, and told me “You got this Mama!”. The same TSA agent that ran after us, when we were going through security told me “You can do it!” when she saw us stressing and overheard me prepping the girls when collecting our stuff. And the ladies at the gate in Detroit asked if we enjoyed Delta’s new “exercise program” as we were ran up and tried to catch our breath (with me wheezing and coughing, probably sounding so great). The flights themselves were fine. The timing in-between the flights, not so much.
We were all very happy to see the Hubbie/their Daddy. They ran to him in the airport and attacked him. I think he as a little happy to see us all too. When we got back to the house we all did covid tests, and all were negative thankfully, especially with my lovely cold/cough I was rocking. At that point my voice was this squeaking raspy thing when I talked too much.
We LOVE Jessie to pieces and love visiting her, and really appreciate when she helps us so that we have the opportunity to do so, but that feeling of coming home is also very nice. She even expressed to us that she loved us but she was enjoying the quiet house with her cats now that we were gone once again.
I’ll leave you with some points of advice if you’re thinking of traveling to London in the future:
I bought this luggage set specifically for this trip and it was sooo worth it. If you look it up, yeah it’s not the cheapest thing in the world, but it cut the hassle probably by 75% if not more for me. They’re TACH brand, bought off amazon. That black strip you see on the side is a giant piece of super strong velcro. They attach to each other on both sides, all three pieces. If you have multiple sets you can attach up to 6 pieces together. Then rather than pulling the whole luggage train with the collapsible handle on the top, which you can do if you want, there’s a removable adjustable black strap that attaches to the little loops on the biggest one to pull at a better ergonomic angle. Each suitcase has a bunch of little zipper pockets inside for organization, and the smallest carry on one has a connection for a usb charger and a little hook for a water bottle. And when you eventually unpack, they all nest in together for easy compact storage. I packed both the girls in the big case together and me in the medium one. They only had to worry about their carry-ons. It saved me from having to coordinate pushing/pulling so many people’s luggage at once on so many different forms of transportation over the week, and saved me from having the girls having to mess with checked luggage themselves. SO worth it to save the hassles, and they held up really well through all the travel.
Second bit of advice: if you’re doing the tourist thing around London, buy the London Pass. You can do it ahead of time and download the app. It’s worth the money and it saves you a bunch and helps you plan too. The app has all the opening and closing times/days at a fingers touch for all the things.
Third bit of advice: if you’re using the underground/train system a lot, get a day pass or better yet an oyster card. It’s cheaper in the end and easier than buying for every trip. If you accidently buy a one way ticket though, you can use your touchless pay-and-go function on your phone to pay at the turnstiles. Which leads me to…
Fourth bit of advice: Load your credit card onto your phone before you go to use the touchless tap-and-go function. Basically everywhere in England uses the touchless payment option. It’s so easy and saves so much hassle. The shuttle to the airport literally only had touchless or cash options for payment. No credit card chip reader or slider.
and lastly Fifth bit of advice: the hotels right by the airport aren’t really worth it to save time getting to the airport unless you take a taxi. None of them are actually connected to the airport itself so you can walk. Also give yourself several extra hours more than you think you need when dealing with Heathrow. I thought 3 was enough. Should have done 5 to feel comfortable and not stressed.
And that’s it! Hope you enjoyed the post 🙂 I know it was really kind of long 🙂
Adventures from the Loser's Bench 