It's an interesting challenge writing a travel blog years after the fact, but in the interest of trying to jot down what I can before I forget it all I'm going to try.
Travel was certainly not something I grew up fantasizing about. In every sense of the word, I was a homebody – I didn't learn to ride a bike until years after my peers and I delayed getting a driver's license, both with the understanding that I wasn't planning on going anywhere.
I met my now-wife at a young age. In many ways, we had very similar, sheltered childhoods. For her, though, the prospect of being an adult meant a chance to try new things – travel being on that list.
The ultimate question of any new American traveler is inevitably "Where can I go where I understand the language?"
Heathrow, Here We Come!
It was right about the time this photo was taken, landing for a transfer near Amsterdam, that I remembered that Canadians also speak English. But that didn't matter, because as far as my wife and I were concerned everything worth seeing was in "London."
I put London in quotes here as it was not entirely apparent to us that England, or the UK for that matter, was a lot bigger than we had anticipated. That is to say, it is one thing to look up flights, and train schedules, and zoomed-out images on MapQuest, but an an entirely different matter to be there, walking with aching feet through endless streets.
My wife and are are planners. I suspect in another life she was a travel agent or architect. She spent weeks looking up and writing down every train we would take, every sight we would see, and every place that had passable afternoon tea. I grossly misunderstood the assignment and spent twenty-something hours researching tipping culture and how to order a pint at a pub.
Both would prove to be useful, I guess, in varying degrees.
A lot happened on this trip, so trying to condense it into a single blog post doesn't feel right. Breaking it up into 200 posts feels more right, but I'm guessing there's an ideal number somewhere in between.
London 2013, part 1 of ?