London
By the time a notification about this post is delivered to your inbox, it will be just 24 hours until we depart for London! This is about when I start wishing that time would slow way, way, down. It was okay watching the days fly by until our departure date, but once we land I sure don’t want our time in the UK or Ireland to go by that fast! I want to savor every moment we are there!
As I mentioned previously in my post, On the Road Again (2022), we will be visiting 4 countries this trip with two close friends of ours, Mike and Denise: England, Scotland, North Ireland, and the Republic of Ireland. Lisa worked her butt off getting the trip planned out (I helped), and an amazing job she did!
For some reason, Queen Elizabeth never checked with us before departing this world. Now, all of London, especially London transportation, has been thrown into a tizzy! We are told the crowds, train and tube stations, will be “crazy!” We had been watching the news for rail strikes – there was one scheduled for our trip, but fortunately, got suspended until after we are out of London.
This morning, however, we got an email from our Devon/Cornwall tour company informing us that the place where we were supposed to meet our tour van had been moved to another city. They told us we had to act “now” to get tickets. Yikes! And this was before coffee!! We jumped on it, of course, as this isn’t our first rodeo, but it was definitely an unwanted adrenaline rush! If this is all that changes between now and when we land at Heathrow, we will breathe a sigh of relief!
Scotland
While most everyone seems genuinely sad the old girl is gone, the queen’s passing is certain to make our visit to London memorable! Getting to see the inside of Buckingham Palace or Westminster Abbey is out of the question, I think, and other venues may close temporarily as well. However, I hope to take some pictures of these places with the enormous queues outside, with folks lined up for miles. I figure the people-watching will be especially delightful!
The four of us all like to visit the markets when we travel to an interesting city and London and visiting the Borough Market is on our list of to-dos! The London Travel Facebook group I follow has folks telling me that it is nuts right now at Borough Market, but still definitely worth visiting. It has nowrrow aisles, I guess, so I was cautioned to make sure we use a credit card we can |tap| with to avoid clogging up traffic while paying for something.
We have a full day planned for one of the days we’ll be in London with a British friend of mine, who – bless his heart – is coming to London by train to show us around the town. How nice is that? We are all looking forward to visiting some pubs!
Belfast, North Ireland
We are not checking any baggage this trip. We’ve read too many horror stories in the news about lost luggage at Heathrow. I’m packing especially light this time, as light as possible, that is. I won’t be taking my laptop or tablet, which means I probably won’t be posting very often to my blog. As mentioned previously, history tells me that I won’t have time or energy to do blogging at night after a busy day – and every day will be busy!
I contacted a cousin of mine, whom I have never met, who lives in North Ireland. I met his aunt (my cousin, Gwen Drake) back in 2003 and we have exchanged a few emails over the years. He is going to be in France while our group goes to Belfast, so there is no chance that I might actually get to meet him face-to-face. He even offered to put us all up at his house! Now that would have been fun! We learned back in 2003 what wonderful hosts the Irish can be. Oh, well. I told him Lisa and I will see him the next time we visit North Ireland, and there will be another time!
Republic of Ireland
We can hardly wait to get there!
Talk to you soon!
This is going to be a real adventure!
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