Big Adventures: A Little Bit of Europe

My husband and I recently concluded a little two week trip to Europe.  This is a trip that I'd been planning for well over a year--I'm a fan of traveling, and my husband is a fan of me so he humors me (though he'd probably be happy to stay home and play video games).

The TLDR of the trip was that we spent a couple of days in Bath, a couple in London, a weekend in Luxembourg, and the rest of the remaining week in Paris.

Now for the longer version (though not as long as my actual travel journal).

March 11 - We flew into Heathrow and immediately picked up a weird little Czech rental car called a Skoda Fabia.  One of the things I was struck by in our wanderings of Europe were the sheer number of car brands I'd literally never seen or heard of before, like Skodas and Peugots and bears, oh my.

One of my major fears going into it was driving on the left side of the road.  I'd heard horror stories from family and friends and, since Jason had specifically washed his hands of left side driving, this part of the journey was up to me.

Can I just say that it really wasn't that bad.  It's possible that the huge build up of negative expectation put me in a position to be pleasantly surprised.  Most of our driving trouble came from getting off the wrong exit on the round-abouts.

Anyway!  We made a quick pit stop in Oxford to grab lunch (and an umbrella for Jason) and make a short pilgrimage to the grave of one JRR Tolkien.  His and his wife's grave site, and many others of the graves in this charming little cemetery, were planted like a garden and it seemed like a very nice thought to me--maybe the family comes in weekly to tend to the little garden--old life giving way to new, etc.

Another couple hours of driving brought us to Bath and our cute, medium-ish sized B&B with a very enthusiastic reception woman who gave us a full run down and marked all sorts of things on a little map for us.  I think we ventured out to find dinner, but we were pretty much pooped and jet lagged to boot, so we called it a night not long thereafter.

March 12 - First of all, B&Bs are awesome, and English breakfasts are awesome.  Also, thanks to feeling inspired to take part in the local culture and a helping hand from milk and sugar, I think I'm finally on board with black tea.

It was unfortunately, and not entirely unexpectedly, raining this day (the various weather prediction services wanted us to expect rain at EVERY leg of our journey at this point).  Between that and some drama wherein we didn't understand fully how to operate the shower, we were too late to join the local free volunteer-driven city tours.

Instead, we opted to go see the Roman Baths (which is a largely indoor experience).  Jason had a fantastic time running around (figuratively speaking) and listening to 99% of every audio tour opportunity which made me vicariously happy (if also slightly bored at times).  We easily killed something like 2.5 hours in there!  At the end of the museum, there is a point at which you can taste the spring waters--tasted kinda gross, but isn't that the way of things that are supposed to be good for you?

We ducked into the very historical Sally Lunn's for lunch and had some famous bunns (and tea).  And, magically, by the time we left the rain was clearing.  With better weather, we took a little walk to the top of the town to the Royal Crescent and scoped out future eating options.

In the evening, I ventured to try out the Thermae Bath Spa (not present in the town when I went as a kid), which has theoretically applied the thermal springs for modern spa purposes.  Jason wasn't into it, so I went alone--and was kinda disappointed.  I think I was expecting the kind of temperatures one might find at an onsen in Japan, and their pools were more like warmish bath water.  It was also clearly more fun as a group activity.

March 13 - Breakfast and checkout were all that we had time for in Bath this day as we, literally, had an appointment with Stonehenge.

Yeah.  It was windy as heck.

After that we dumped the car at the airport and took the Underground into London, where we were staying in Notting Hill.  Our hotel was really quite close to Kensington Gardens and the Palace therein, so we spent the last bit of our afternoon there.  Between that and the nearby pub for cider and fish and chips, it was a nice little introduction to London.

March 14 - After the breakfasts at our Bath B&B, the Notting Hill hotel's breakfast was kinda a bummer (though still accompanied by teapots of already brewed tea!!)

We took the tube to Tower Hill and managed to get to the Tower of London just shortly after opening time.  It was still quiet and we made a direct line for the Crown Jewels exhibit.  Left that feeling a bit of "Neat!" and also "this is ridiculous--who NEEDS this stuff!"  We managed to catch one of the Yeoman Warder tours slightly after it started, which was both interesting and, at moments, horrifying.  I won't go into to details, but some of the "humorous" beheading stories got to me a bit in a way I didn't entirely expect.

View of Tower Bridge from the middle of the Tower of London.

We did lunch and wandering in Borough Market and made a random but very pleasant stop at a tea shop called Bird and Blend.  The gentleman let us smell every tea blend we wanted, asked us about our travels, and on top of our various tea and tea accessories purchases, gave me a free Chocolate Digestives (read: chocolate cookies) tea latte (I'm a big fan of this tea now, by the way).  Jason is a big fan of the Pink Grapefruit tea.

Caught a glimpse of the old Globe Theatre location and the new Globe Theater, but decided that we were running low on steam and thus headed back to the hotel.  Extremely disappointing dinner experience nearby.

I will work on finishing up this narrative... to be continued.