I intended to post this before now but just realized I’d moved onto Ireland without closing off the UK portion of our travels. When I look back over the photos, it’s amazing how much we did and saw in the UK. All told, we drove over 1400 km (not including day trips), traveled for 23 days and stayed in 7 places.
We moved too often, we didn’t plan exceptionally well, and we had to miss out on some things because of budget but looking back, we wouldn’t change anything. We had a blast. Here are a few things we learned along the way:
- It’s expensive. There’s a reason I stopped posting about budgets and spending after Spain. It has been OBSCENE in the UK and just too depressing to tally the numbers. We have been trying to be careful but we have been hemorrhaging money. We stayed in a couple of questionable places, and we stayed for free for one week, but even still, our budget was completely blown. Admission prices are high (for example, Edinburgh castle cost us about $100), eating out was expensive (even a basic restaurant would come in at around $100 for the five of us), and we found groceries and accommodation to be much more expensive than Spain.
- The English countryside was surprisingly beautiful. I did not have the greatest experiences in England earlier in life and England was frozen in my mind as I saw it back then. I’m glad my image has had a reboot. I knew there were beautiful places in England but I didn’t realize they were everywhere! Every drive we went on and every place we stayed offered endless opportunities to visit quaint English villages with quaint little houses with quaint little names. There’s a reason that the Cotswolds are so well known but we actually preferred Shropshire and the little area we were on the border of Wales. I’m not sure it was more beautiful (it was as beautiful in our eyes) but it was a lot less overrun with holiday makers and tourists (like us). It felt more like we were immersed in real rural English life.
- The old adage ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’ absolutely applied to our stay in Melton Mowbray. It was an extremely eclectic place to stay near a repurposed railway station on a site with pretty rough looking caravans and rustic cabins. It was a diamond in the rough and we needed to keep an open mind to realize that and appreciate it.
- No visit to Northern Ireland should miss the Giant’s Causeway. We highly recommend taking the coastal route from Belfast and then make sure to go to the Giant’s causeway in the early evening. I’ve been there quite a few times before and you are in a long, crowded line of tourists making their way to the rocks if you go there during the day. In addition parking is free in the evening so as long as you’re not interested in going to the visitor’s center (I’ve never been but can’t imagine I’m missing much), it is completely free to go visit the Causeway with only very few other people.
- Chat with the locals. We found people to be so friendly and welcoming. I don’t think we had a single bad experience dealing with people and we had so many pleasant experiences talking with people we came across – shopkeepers, neighbors, Airbnb hosts, etc.
- Plan out your diet. Perhaps it was just our bad choices but our diet went to crap in the UK. There was a lot of bread, pastries, processed food and fried food involved in our day-to-day eating – things we generally don’t eat much of at home.
- BRING RAINCOATS and LONG PANTS. We thought the weather in Oregon changed on a dime but it was amazing how many times it rained here on otherwise sunny days. It also got downright cold some days – weather we hadn’t anticipated for our August travels.
We will return again sometime soon. We’d like to return to Scotland for long enough to do it justice…and London is still waiting to be explored.