We left England on a beautiful, mild and sunny day.  We had been there for four and half weeks and had really enjoyed that time.  England was easy to love for everyone: we had enjoyed all the new places and experiences without having a language barrier plus we benefited from the freedom of traveling around without the constraints of school lessons. 

Food

As for food during our time in England, we quickly developed a pattern with grocery shopping and eating.  We grocery shopped for a day or two at a time so we wouldn’t end up with lots of leftovers when it was time to move on.  We ate simple breakfasts “at home” and packed lunches most days before we left for an outing (until we discovered the gluten free bread issue.)  When we had a house or an apartment for several days to a week, we cooked hot meals for lunch or dinner several times a week and ate out at a restaurant every other day or so (at home, we typically eat out once or twice a month.)  For a hot meal at home, once or twice a week, we would all go to the grocery store and pick out a fresh, individually prepared meal that we heated up in the oven or microwave.  In this way, we all enjoyed trying some typical English meals (like cottage pie) or eating some comfort food (Thai curry for Scott and me.)

One thing we noticed about the grocery stores in England is that they typically have a large area devoted to prepared foods that you can take home and heat up; this is similar to, but different from the frozen meal and foods section at US grocery stores because the meals are healthier and fresh, without many additives or preservatives.  Also, we really enjoyed a couple of fast casual restaurant chains:  Nando’s and Leon.  As most of you know or have noticed, our family eats gluten free and I was grateful for how easy it was to do so in England.  We even found gluten free fish and chips restaurants in almost every city we visited.  

Before going, we had low expectations about English food because we’d heard from several people, one being a friend who grew up in Wales, that the food in England is “not that good.”  Maybe it was the low expectations, or maybe our tastes are different, but we enjoyed the food we had there.  We liked fish and chips enough to have it one to two times a week the entire month.  We enjoyed baked beans at breakfast and on baked potatoes, even though that’s an odd combination of foods.  We were delighted to adopt an afternoon tea time with some kind of sweet cookie or cake (most of the grocery stores had a gluten free section that had at least one GF version of a traditional English sweet), and tea was not a stretch as we are tea drinkers at home.

Favorites

It was hard for each of us to pick, but here is everyone’s top 3 from the month (as remembered six weeks later):

• Scott:  Hiking in the Cotswolds, Visit to Benthall Hall, and the Hadrian’s Wall day
• Jessica: the Week in the Blockley (Cotswolds) (includes the day we went to Chipping Campden and walked home on a footpath , the day we visited Benthall Hall and seeing the Father Brown film locations), the Rylad Sheepdog Trials, and all the beautiful gardens (yes, I know I pretty much cheated)
• John:  Buckingham Palace, the Crewe Railway Museum, and the Channel Tunnel
• Abe: The Big Bus Tour in London, Fish and Chips, and The World of James Herriot
• Arlie:  Alnwick Castle and the Hog’s Head Inn, the Hadrian’s Wall day and Buckingham Palace

Also, there were some aspects of being in England that we all enjoyed and appreciated:  

• The various regional English accents, 
• The many charity shops that were in every city we visited, 
• There were electric tea kettles every place we stayed, and
• Electric towel dryers.  I think this is a fantastic invention and I don’t understand why we don’t have these in the States.

Wrap UP

It was, however, time to move on and begin our time on the continent and in the Schengen Zone. It was also time to begin a more structured schedule so we could start Abe and Arlie’s math lessons and become regular with language arts.  We were all excited about the places we were planning to go in continental Europe, but also a little sad to leave England. 

Our experience in England taught us some lessons about our family and travel (or rather confirmed some things we already knew) and we left for Paris with a couple of significant adjustments to our original itinerary:  

1. We changed our plans for Germany from a two week road-trip [going to four different cities for three to four nights a piece] to a sandwich model [two weeks in one city close to several places we wanted to go sandwiched in between two, three night stays, one in a castle in the Rhine River Valley and one in Munich]
2. We regretfully cut the two and half weeks we were going to spend in Poland and Austria

We still had to work out the details out for all of that, but we had an apartment reserved in a suburb of Paris for two weeks and a place reserved for one week in the Netherlands to start us off.

Wins from time in United Kingdom (in addition to what I’ve blogged about):  

• We really enjoyed and soaked up our time in England;
• We had lots of time nature after London and Bath; this was life-giving to our souls and good for each of us.
• We saw a good variety of places that met each of our interests

Learns:  

• We enjoy visiting and staying in smaller and mid-size cities (ie. Bath & York) more than large ones (ie. London & Edinburgh); 
• We should only have one short stay (less than a week) at a time (because we’re traveling for so many months);
• We need some structure to our days
• Look ahead at train times the night before we plan to go somewhere, even for a day outing; 
• Think about food BEFORE meal time (we learn this on every family trip we take:) and
• Always listen to my gut – if something feels wrong or like it’s too much, it almost always is, DON’T push it.