Night Train, Cornwall and my dream home

So after our big day in London, we took a night train to Penzance, Cornwall. Let me just say, everyone should do this at least once. I am convinced that I want to do if for every long trip I have to take in the future.
We got to Paddington Station around 7:45pm and were able to use the first class lounge as a place to rest while we waited to board the train, which was fun as we got to over hear some of the conversations of the other passengers ( "the American health care system is simply dreadful!"). At 10:30pm we were able to board the train, and our lovely train attendant got us all settled in, she really reminded me of the lady on Harry Potter who says "anything off the trolley Dears?". At precisely   11:37pm  The Night Riviera pulled out of the station for my first real train ride!

Our "room" for the night was like a kids dream; bunk beds with fluffy white duvets, our own tiny sink and individual bed lights. So fun!

By far the best part though was waking up to the next morning to see the amazing Cornish countryside out my window. 

We got a wonderful breakfast in bed, (let me tell you, the British know how to do Breakfast) and got ready for our first day on the English coast. 

We pulled into Penzance station at 9:05am, and started looking for the bus stop because we wanted to go see Land's End before we went to our hotel later in the day. We bumbled around for a bit but found it and figured our what bus to take and how to pay for it (we've just about got the public transportation thing figured out!). While we waited, we walked down to see the ocean. I have been to the ocean before but this was different than any of the beaches I have been to. It is strange to see Ocean, beach and then rolling green hills covered with sheep and cows. It is so neat. 

Before I tell you about Land's End, I want to take a minute to share my thoughts about the roads and drivers of Cornwall. Wow. I knew before we came that the roads are tiny in a lot of places here, but I really don't think I grasped what that meant. At first I though we were driving on one-way streets, a fair assumption as it was quite certainly only big enough for one vehicle, but no they are for both directions of traffic. When a car was coming our way the fun began, either the car would find a a small pull out ( not likely at most roads have either stone walls or hedgerows), or the car would back up until the road was just barely big enough for us to pass, or the bus would do maneuvers I didn't know a bus that large could do. It is like all vehicles on the road are participating in a never ending game of Chicken. To make yet another Harry Potter reference, Our bus driver reminded me of the driver of the triple decker bus in the third book; he whipped around Round Abouts at break neck speeps, stopped and slammed the bus into reverse when the road was to narrow for passing, and weaved though hairpin turns giving all the passengers whiplash. I though we would run in to a car about 20 times but some how we came through unscathed. Amazing. 

When we got to Land's End it was misting rain and a cold breeze was blowing. we grabbed a quick lunch and then went to see the coast. Land's End itself was very touristy, lots of shops and gimmicks but the coast line was stunning. We walked for a bit and just tried to absorb the scenery. It was so wild and beautiful.

We took an even more hair raising bus ride back to town, and then hiked our way to our hotel for the night.
 And then I fell in love.

The home we are staying at is somewhere around 600 years old, set on a hill, with a pasture and horses in the front, an orchard to the side, court yard in the back and surrounded by woods. It is really everything I think a house should be! I really can't get over how lovely it is, it is not perfect and they are in the process of restoring it little by little, but that may be what I love most- you can see that generations of people have lived and worked and raised families here. It is magical.

We ended the day by taking a 10 min walk to a near by town where we ate the most delicious, fresh, tapas sea food at a place called the Mackerel Sky. SO yummy. We sat a a big window that looked out to the goings on of the little fishing town- tiny cobbled streets, old stone buildings with signs like "Johnson and Sons Boat Repair". Idyllic doesn't even cover it. 

It was another great day!

London Calling

Holy Cow, what a day. What a seriously awesome day.
Today was our "London" day, and if I am being quiet honest, it was the part of the trip that I wasn't as excited about, mainly because I am not a huge fan of cities. Or crowds. Or traffic.
London is all of those things and more, and I loved it. It was completely overwhelming, but in a good way.
So here are the things from today that really stuck out to me, in no particular order.

- Londoners pay no heed what-so-ever to the light up cross walk signs. If there is a gap in traffic, they are going to go. This was a good way to tell the locals from the tourist (aka me and Brynt), tourist sit patiently on the side walk, Londoners go at the first available opportunity.

walking the streets 

-London is a crazy mess of streets and buildings. Almost nothing is square. the roads zig zag all over the place. The buildings are shaped to accommodate the  the crazy roads and therefore have all sorts of odd angles. Some times there are buildings in the middle of the road, like a tiny pub, or an IMAX in the middle of a round-about. Its wonderful, it makes the city feel like an architectural maze.

One of about 50 pics of Big Ben (or the tower that holds Big Ben) because its was just so
awesome.

-Speaking of architecture, its all pretty much amazing. especially the really old architecture, it is truly stunning. The details of the builds are so wonderful to look at, you could look at one building for hours and not run out of new things to see, and there are thousands of buildings.

Tower Bridge

- We were able to attend the Evensong service at St. Paul's Cathedral, and this was probably the highlight of the whole day for me. First of all, the building itself is magnificent; the interior is jaw-dropping. Incredible artwork everywhere and in every form. I did not take pictures of the inside because we were there for a service and its just as well that I didn't because there is no way I could have done it justice. But it was a truly beautiful house of worship.
And then there was the actual service itself- the Evensong service was a meeting comprised mostly of the singing of hymns, scriptures and prayers, with a short sermon given towards the end of the meeting. It was so beautiful. The choir singing was an incredible thing to be heard, I nearly cried. It was a meeting of beautiful music for the sole purpose of praising God, and I was so glad I was there to hear it.

St Paul's

The dome of the Cathedral

- London is a cultural melting pot. Its amazing how many different types of people live in such a small area.

This guy was amazing

-We accidentally saw the changing of the guard. How does one accidentally see the changing of the guard you might ask? Here's how- we had actually planned NOT to see the changing of the guard, We didn't want to wait around forever to see the backs of people's heads. But as we were going around on our bus tour we decided to get off at Buckingham Palace, and as luck would have it, we got there at the tail end of the event. People were already starting to clear out so we were able to watch the last of it. It was pretty cool!

-  The parks here are amazing. Parks is really a lame way to describe them, I would say they are more like wooded wonderlands. They seem to do a great job of mixing sections of very structured, beautifully manicured gardens, with more wild, nature areas. Its absolutely lovely.

- London is a vibrant city, it is a mixture beautiful old buildings, rich turbulent history, young families, trendy shops, and a million other things. It is full of life and energy and you can really feel that. I don't think I could handle it for too long ( I am country girl to the core), but I enjoyed the city far more than I ever expected to.

- We saw a group of guys on a "pedibus" celebrating a Stag party (bachelor party), and it was hilarious. basically 8 people can sit on it at a time, and they all pedal while they drink a the same time. The Groom to be was wearing a wedding dress. One of the funniest/strangest things I have ever seen, ha ha.

- The royal horse guards were amazing. These have to be some of the most well trained, patient horses ( and riders for that matter) in the world. I saw people do some insanely stupid things to/around them, not to mention the enormous crowd of people that are continually surrounding them, and through it all they stand beautifully, hardly even moving. I was amazed.

- We did, saw and learned so many things that there is no way I could write about them all, but I will say that London surprised me. I really enjoyed it and I hope to go back again some day.

So British :)

Fun Fact- the artist that did these lions didn't have a lion to model them after, their hind ends resemble a dog because that is what used as a model, he he.

Admiral Lord Nelson

Tower of London- The only Castle in London

One LONGGGGGGG day

Wow, the last day... 2 days? however long it has been since we first set out on this trip, has been an insane, wild, stressful and exciting start for us!
We woke up at 2am Friday the 29th and headed down to Salt Lake, we were able to park the car at one of the UTA long term parking lots for free and ride the Trax to airport, I was a little nervous about it at first but it worked out really well for us. We got to the airport with plenty of time and sat excitedly, waiting for our first flight. The first hiccup in the trip came after we had boarded and were sitting waiting for our first flight to take off, we were informed that there was an issue getting the right engine started...ugh. Luckily the problem was resolved quickly and we were on our way.

Then we arrived at Chicago, O' Hare.

#1 We had to get our boarding passes printed for Aer Lingus, and upon doing so saw that the flight we thought would be leaving in 2 1/2 hours was leaving in 1 1/2 hours. Oh Dear.  #2 O'Hare is  huge, we landed in Terminal 1 but had to get all the way to Terminal 5, where international flights leave from. It was a crazy power walk through three huge terminals and then onto a tram to finally get there. #3 When we got to terminal 5 we saw what looked like the scene from Titanic where all the 3rd class passengers are crowding to get up stairs but are stopped...

But unlike the Titanic, all these people were trying to get on, not off. The TSA check point was a completely jam packed mass of people.... and our stress levels jumped up about 190%.  I do not speak French, German, Vietnamese or Norwegian, but I was definitely able to understand "this is ridiculous, I am going to miss my flight!" in those, and many more languages.  It was a stressful nightmare, and we were sure by the time we got to the end of it that we were going to miss our flight to Dublin. But, when we got to our gate we found that they has miss printed the time on our boarding, and we had 15 minutes to spare! Phew!!!

The flight to Dublin was not bad, but we did not sleep very much (or at all), and by the time we arrived we were running on basically no sleep in the last 24 hours. We were supposed to have a super long layover in Dublin, but after asking we found we could get a much earlier flight to London that was leaving in about an hour, Yay! I think due to our total lack of sleep, we made the Dublin airport much harder for ourselves than it actually needed to be but after running back and forth between the two Terminals we finally found where we were supposed to be and were able to fly to the London Heathrow airport with no big issues. 

Because we had switched flights, and in turn arrival airports, we needed to use the Tube to get to our hotel. I was dreading using the tube; for a small town girl who's only real experience with public transportation is the tram at Disneyland, the London underground was incredibly intimidating. We walked around for a bit looking at maps and trying to figure out how to buy a ticket, when we finally asked a nice gentleman with a VERY thick Cockney accent for help. What a blessing he was! He helped us buy tickets and told us which lines to take and where to switch; he was awesome!

I have no idea how long it was from the time we got up on Friday to the time we got to our room on Saturday, but when we got there it felt like an amazing accomplishment :)

It is seriously Tiny ( if we had full sized suitcases there would be no way we could walk around the room), but very cute, quiet, clean and the location is excellent. 

Tiny, but Lovely room

The Street our Hotel is on

After we had washed up, we decided to go for a walk in Kensington Gardens, which happened to be about a block from our hotel.  

It was such a lovely walk! We saw Kensington Palace,The Prince Albert Memorial, trees we were sure were Ents, all sorts of statues, including Peter Pan, and we got to enjoy watching Londoners be couples, and families, and friends. 

Dear Prince Albert

Peter Pan!

I was just waiting for this tree to start speaking Entish

Just hanging out at Kensington Palace

Lovely Queen Victoria (Fun Fact, she was born at Kensington Palace)

The Formal Gardens

The day was cool, but very enjoyable and we strolled about in no real direction for quite a while, and loved every second of it. I have literally never heard so many languages spoken in an hour. It was like a linguistic symphony all around us and it was so neat! After a while we wandered out of the Gardens in search of food. There seem to be no straight streets and no square intersections, but it makes walking around and looking at the architecture all the more enjoyable. We finally found a place to eat near Paddington station and had some delicious Fish and Chips. After consulting some maps and wandering around a bit more (during which a woman asked us for directions to the Tube and Brynt totally pulled it off like he knew what he was talking about) we found our way back to the Hotel.  It was great day and an exciting start to our adventure but now it is....

Time. For. Bed.

T-minus 36 days

Time flies when you're having fun, or in this case, when you are planning all the fun things you want to do in the UK.
I originally had set out to write down each step of how we planned our trip as we did them, but like most things I plan on doing, I didn't do it. So here is a run down of what we have done in preparation for our up coming trip to England, Scotland, and (briefly) Ireland.

I got my passport! 

One of the first things I had to do was get a passport. Luckily Brynt already had one, so it was just me who needed one. It was really pretty simple, I got on the web site, filled out all the paper work, printed it off, got my picture taken, and took it all in to the County building. It was about $150 dollars and took about 6 weeks to get my passport. I was glad I did this early because if there had been any issues (people tend to transcribe my name wrong...a lot) it would have taken even longer to get it back and having a passport is pretty crucial to international travel. 

As it happened, the whole process was smooth and easy.

Side note- You do not need a visa to be a tourist in the UK, they have a handy website where you tell them a little about yourself (where you are coming from, what you will be doing, how long you will be staying) and it tells you if you will need a visa. Thankfully we don't, one less thing to worry about!

We bought plane tickets!

This was by far the most influential step, as it determined the start and end points of our trip, the duration of our trip, as well as the timing of our trip.
We looked at (literally) hundreds of different flight options, trying to find the best options for us. Our priority list went something like this:
- Open ended flights (we wanted to arrive in London and leave from Edinburgh)
- Time of year ( we wanted to go in Spring, or shoulder season, when the weather is decent but it is not the height of tourist season)
- Price (we needed to be able to afford the trip, ha ha)
- Getting at least two weeks in the UK ( we ended up with three, more on that later)
- Reasonable flight lengths ( we were fine with having some layovers and longer fights, but no one wants to spend 36 hours on a plane)

So did we get all that we wanted? Yes, I believe we did.
 We looked at so many options and so many travel sights but in the end Google flights was by far the most useful and usable. We were able to get flights going into London and leaving from Edinbugh, with the added bonus of getting a day in Dublin (Trinity College Library, here I come!). We are going during early May, right when we wanted to be there. We were able to get the tickets for a price we were comfortable with, although I will add that I wish we had bought them earlier. I started looking at tickets roughly 8 months before our intended trip time, and tickets were cheaper at that time than when we bought them, 6 months before the trip. We had originally wanted to have 2 weeks in the UK, but the way the flight prices worked out, it was significantly cheaper if we stayed an extra week, it was a tough choice (just kidding, it wasn't), but we opted for the extra week AND cheaper flights. Reasonable flight lengths- There were some pretty cheaply priced flights out there, BUT they often had such long flight times that we felt the savings weren't worth the time we would loose. So we found flights that we thought would be reasonable in both price and length.
So on our 5 year wedding anniversary we bought our tickets! By far the most expensive gift we have ever gotten for one another :).

We Bought Bags!

Luggage should not be a big deal right? HA! Leave it to me to turn something simple into a full time job. I honestly spent a good two or three months researching, debating and agonizing over what bags to take on this trip.

We really did not want to have checked bags, for two main reasons. 

#1- If you don't check a bag, they can't loose it. We have a couple of flight changes during our trip and I really didn't want to get to London and be sitting at the baggage claim for 2 hours only to find out that our bags were still in Chicago. 

#2- We want to travel light. We are huge Rick Steves fans... Rick is the Man. Anyway, one of the things he talks about  A LOT is that packing light will make your trip so much easier. He often says that in 40 years of traveling he has never met anyone who said they wished they had packed more. Brynt is a light packer anyway, so it was a no brainer for him, and I am not a girl who needs lots of wardrobe changes or a huge selection of make up, so packing light makes sense for us.

And so the hunt for the perfect carry-on began. for a while it felt like hunting for a unicorn.

We knew that we wanted convertible backpacks, bags that your can tuck away the shoulder straps on, which narrowed down the search quite a bit. I read blogs, I watched videos, I read reviews, I compared features and prices... Basically, I made a mountain out of a mole hill. After about 2 months of this, we ordered what we Thought was the perfect bag. 

The E-bags tls Mother Load Weekender Convertible. They arrived and they were awesome. Just perfect and everything we wanted. Yay! But then....

 We read the bag restrictions on some of our flights. Some European airlines have different size and weight restrictions on baggage than American airlines do, and our bags, though they met the American requirements, did not meet the European requirements. Sad Day.

 So it was back to hunting. I wont go into too much detail, but I will just say that I think luggage manufacturers might be in cahoots with airline companies to force people to to check baggage, 90% of bags seemed to be just a hair too big one way or the other. After much more agonized searching, what we decided on was the Osprey Porter 30.

  In the end I am really glad we ended up with these bags. They are light and comfortable to carry, they hold a ton of stuff for how small they are, they are easy to compress, and they look great (I know that is not important, but always an added bonus). 

I will end by saying that if I ever need to order more luggage ( I really really hope not!), I would order from Ebags.com again for sure. They have awesome deals and they were so great to work with when we needed to send back the first bags and get the new ones. A+!

Oh, one more quick note on baggage/packing. With our bags we will be using packing cubes- these little things are an organizational dream come true, plus you can fit SO much more stuff in your bag. I am fairly sure this is how Marry Poppins packs her bag. 

 We booked a night train!

Towards the top of my bucket list ( right under "Go to England") is "ride a train". I have never been on a train before and have always wanted to. So in the course of trying to figure out how we wanted to get from London to Cornwall ( Brynt wasn't too keen on learning how to drive on the other side of the road in one of the biggest cities in the world) we came across the Night Riviera Sleeper train. You get to stay in your own little sleeper compartment while the train whisks you out of the city, across the British countryside to the lovely sea side town of Penzance. Sounds dreamy right? Lets hope it is as awesome as it sounds! I am very excited about it :)

We Found Places to Sleep!

Finding places to stay, from Land's End to John O' Groats, at affordable prices was a huge undertaking. We will be staying in Hostels, Hotels, Inns, B&B's and even a Castle or two (happy dance for that last one). 

A big chunk of our budget was set aside for lodging, because its just a really expensive part of travel. But I was actually surprised at how many affordable (and awesomely cool) options there were to choose from. 

London was by far the hardest place to find an affordable room, but we were able to get a private room, in a cool hostel about 15 mins walk from St. Paul's Cathedral, for a price that didn't make me cry, ha ha. 

We chose to stay away from big hotel chains, mainly because we want to be more immersed in the places we are going and we want to get to know the people we are staying with. We found some great places (for great prices) and have even been contacted by several of the B&Bs we are staying at asking if we have any questions or if there is anything they can help us with. Talk about friendly, and we aren't even there yet! 

All of these pictures are of places we are going to stay at- I am so thrilled and can't wait to be there in person! It was a lot of work to find them all but I think it will really be worth the effort.

We Reserved a Car!

We knew when we started planning this trip that we would need to rent a car because- #1 we are going a lot of different places/covering a lot of ground and #2 we like to get off the beaten path and take our time. So we started shopping around. 

There are lots of different car rental options, some of which are really expensive, but through the Rick Steves web site we found Auto Europe. Their prices were great, they had pick-up and drop-off options where we needed them (Penzance and Edinburgh) and their site was very easy to navigate and understand. We opted to pay for full coverage insurance on the car because in the unlikely chance that something does happen to the car, we didn't want to deal with insurance/legal trouble. Some times peace of mind is worth the extra cash. 

Odds and Ends

There have been all sorts of odds and ends that we have done/bought/researched in preparation as well, so many that I can't really remember them all at the moment. But they range from things like buying outlet adapters to finding great hikes we want to take. My odds and ends list still has quite a few items on it and we are only 36 days away from take off, but I think we will get it all done... hopefully. 

I can't wait until I am making blog entries on British soil, I have butterflies just thinking about it!