We took a two week trip to England in October with Walnut.  Since he can’t fly there, we had to plan a rather convoluted route.  A train to Paris then Calais.  A car on a train in the chunnel.  Another train to London.

Getting to Paris was easy.  The train from Basel only takes a few hours.  That night, the Louvre stayed open until 9:30 pm so we spent a few hours there.  I think we ended up wandering the same halls as last time.  We need to make a plan before we go back!  Of course, the Louvre is fantastic even if we saw mostly the same exhibits as before.  We did spend some time in the ancient Mesopotamia exhibit.  Very interesting artifacts and script.  We especially liked the signature rollers/beads.

The next day we caught a train to Calais where we met a taxi we’d hired from England.  When we meet with him, he asks if Walnut had a tapeworm vaccinations between 24 and 120 hours ago.  He did not… So, we had to run to a local vet for the shot and stay in Calais overnight.  An expensive mistake!  So we scratched off our plans in Dover and wandered around in Calais- where we found original Rodin, The Burghers of Calais.

Our taxi came the following day and shuttled us to Folkestone where we caught the train to London.  Once there, we took the tube to Notting Hill where we stayed for 5 days.  It was refreshing to travel once again where I can read signs!  The tube is easy to understand and we found ourselves using it whenever we had the chance.  Our apartment in London was in a great spot.  It was a pretty nice place except for the bed.  It was a mattress on the floor in a loft.  I had trouble sleeping the entire stay in London.  I won’t stay in a place that only offers a mattress on the floor again if I have the choice.

Thankfully, our delay in getting to England only impacted the one day, and we were able to make our reservation with the tour guide, Britt.  We spent the whole day Monday touring London with her.  We started out with Walnut and viewed Kensington Park, Hyde Park and went to see the guards at the Palace.  Nearby is the Armoury, where the guards that do the change set up and practice their tunes before the ceremony.  We listened to them play a couple songs before we headed off to see more monuments in parks.  This morning gave one the sense that London was nary a city at all!  The parks were enormous with towering trees and plentiful wildlife.  It was really nice to let Walnut off the leash and watch him run around.  Near lunchtime, we dropped Walnut off at the apartment (bushed from the walking) and we took a bus to Westminster Abbey.  From there, we continued walked around the financial district ending at the Tower of London.

The next morning we went back to the Tower for a tour.  The tour was great and the Tower is an interesting site, performing many different roles through history.  We walked from there to the Globe theater for a tour but missed by one minute and they would not relent.  It was the last tour of the day, so…. bummer.  That evening we saw the play ‘Mousetrap’.  It was pretty good, and it was nice to see theater in London.  Kinda makes me miss theater in Chicago.

The Churchill war rooms museum was a really neat attraction.  Very informative about both the war and the Prime Minister.  It really made you think ‘Where have people like this gone?’  We also took a walking tour with Jenn’s detour app.  It talked about MI5 and was written/narrated by an ex-employee.

Then we took a train to Bath.  We had a nice Airbnb, though it was a bit far from the center of town.  Exhausted from our itinerary in London, we slowed things down a lot here.  We took the bus tour through Bath and it gave us a nice overview of the sites and some insight into Bath’s history.

From here we did a morning Stonehenge tour.  It was really spectacular.  It was chilly and windy, but the sun was out and the sky was clear.  We also went to Avebury, and the villages of Lacocke and Castle Combe.  Avebury was another stone circle site, far larger than Stonehenge.  Unlike Stonehenge, at Avebury, you could get close to the stones.  Lacocke and Castle Combe were beautiful little villages.

We rented a car and drove to our next airbnb in the Cotswolds near Chipping Campden.  It was strange to have to drive on the left and there were fewer signs and reminders to do so than we saw while driving in New Zealand.  Thankfully, there was little traffic on our drive, though most of the roads were barely two lanes to begin with.  Our place was on a farm in the boonies.  We did a bit of hiking there before we drove to visit the nearby towns.  Bourton on the water was built to attract tourists, and we visited the model town here.  We also went to Broadway tower and did some hiking.

We drove across the country to turn the car in at Canterbury, where we stayed our last night in England.  The taxi picked us up from here to take us back to the train station in France.  A few trains and a night in Paris later, we were back in Basel.