12 Days of Christmas: England
The 5th country we visited in 2024
After 5 weeks in Argentina and thinking it maybe not being where we were going to try living (we left the door open to it, as our minds weren’t made up at that point), we needed to see Albania. Yes, we had been in Greece just five months earlier, which is next door, but at that point I hadn’t been ready to consider Albania. Let’s not talk about how ridiculous it was to now need to fly nearly halfway around the world, again.
Since there was no easy way to get from Argentina to Albania, we picked a route through NYC and then onto London, where we spent a week in the first half of April. We absolutely loved it!
In fact, we liked London so much that we decided to go back to the UK over the summer (mid-June to mid-July) to explore beyond the city and we ended up staying for a month. In part, this was strategic so that we didn’t use too many Schengen days. We went to several parts of southern England (Bournemouth, Oxford, the surrounding countryside—including to Bletchley Park, and Bristol and Bath) and considered seeing many other places, including Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and the Lake District. Unfortunately, many were too expensive without prior booking and the direct train from Bristol to Wales was being repaired, so taking a day trip there became too cumbersome.
London was hands down our favorite part of England, with Oxford and Bletchley Park in second place. Bath was pretty and we enjoyed our time there, but Bournemouth and Bristol were meh. Overall, getting outside of London gave us a much better sense for what English country roads are like (so narrow, so many hedgerows, so difficult to drive!), what English pubs are about (not terribly impressed with the food), how gloomy English weather can be, and the fact that “forests” seem to mostly be just big fields with some trees here and there.
We did really appreciate the break from translating things, as well as the familiarity of stores and supermarkets. While they weren't the same as in the US, they felt fairly similar, which reduced the level of cognition required to navigate them. Also, we found groceries pretty affordable, all things considered.
We will absolutely go back to London, probably multiple times, as it feels like we barely scratched the surface there. I could even see going back to Oxford, though next time we’d like to see Cambridge. And at some point we’d like to get up to Scotland and over to Northern Ireland and Ireland, but who knows when that might happen.