Before I get into recapping all the stuff we did in England on our trip, I want to talk a bit about the planning process and what worked and didn’t work well for us. This was our first trip overseas as a family, and I certainly don’t claim to be an expert, but I always find it helpful to read about how other people approach trip planning when I’m doing it myself and trying to nail down the elusive perfect itinerary for a new location.
In summer of 2018, my in-laws made the very generous offer to take the whole extended family (our family plus my husband’s sister’s family) to Ireland in summer of 2019. This left us with a year to plan, and we used all of that time. I’ll talk about Ireland planning later on; here I’ll stick with the ten days in England that we added on for just our immediate family at the beginning of the trip.
So first up I’ll just give you our final itinerary: where we went and what we did. Then I’ll talk about how we settled on it and how it worked out for us.
Day 0: Atlanta to London
This actually bled over into Day 1, as we left our house at 9 AM our time and arrived at London City Airport, 3 flights later, at about 8:30 AM London time/3:30 AM EST.
Day 1: London
We were very tired, but we couldn’t check into our Airbnb until afternoon, so we dragged ourselves to the National Maritime Museum for a couple of hours.
Checked in to Airbnb and tried, with mixed success, to stay awake until a reasonable bedtime.
Day 2: London
Morning: British Museum
Lunch at Museum Tavern
Afternoon: Museum of London
Day 3: London
Vauxhall Farms
Westminster Abbey
Late lunch/early dinner at the Laughing Halibut
Treasure Trail in Westminster area
Day 4: London
Victoria and Albert Museum
Lunch at Honest Burger
Hyde Park/Diana Memorial Playground
Day 5: London
Tower of London
Day 6: London to Bath
Pick up rental car at Heathrow
Stonehenge
Arrive in Bath and check into hotel
Dinner at Slug+Lettuce
Day 7: Bath
Roman Baths
Bath Treasure Trail
Dinner at Cosy Club
Day 8: Bath to Bakewell (Peak District)
No. 1 Royal Crescent museum in Bath
drive to Bakewell and check in to Airbnb
Day 9: Bakewell
Old House Museum
Bakewell Treasure Trail
Dinner at The Woodyard
Day 10: Bakewell
walk to Chatsworth House (bus back)
Try Bakewell Pudding
Day 11: Bakewell to Dublin!
Okay, so now for the ambitious part where I get into how we put the itinerary together and planned the trip in general.
Deciding where to go
The main decision here was whether to spend all of our time in London (with maybe some day trips to Stonehenge, et. al.) or to split the time between two or more different areas. And, as you can see, we opted for the latter. This was partially because staying in London was just far more expensive than anywhere else, but mostly because we didn’t know when we’d be back and we wanted to see as much as we could. Or as much as we could without packing up and going somewhere new every night, at any rate, because that’s not how we like to travel.
We did still spend five nights in London, which gave us a good amount of time to settle in, get over our jet lag, and hit a lot of highlights. Then we did two nights in Bath, with a stop on the way to see Stonehenge (which Dave REALLY wanted to do) and then three nights in Bakewell, in the Peak District. I can’t remember how we landed on the Peak District. I think I wanted something a little less obvious (and maybe less crowded) than, say, the Lake District or the Cotswolds, and I thought it might position us better for getting to Dublin after (although I’m not sure it really did). But, really, the kids and I had never been to England at all and Dave had been only briefly in college, so we could have gone pretty much anywhere and had plenty to do and see. As it was, we were really happy with all three of our stops and with how much time we allowed for each one.
Transportation: Getting there and getting around
I always expect living right by the busiest airport in the world to mean lots of cheap, direct flights, but it doesn’t seem to work out that way most of the time. For example, it was MUCH cheaper for us to fly out of Boston to Ireland or England than it would have been to fly straight from Atlanta. Our trip over ended up being three separate flights: Atlanta to Boston, Boston to Dublin, then finally Dublin to London. This was a lot of flights.
I was very nervous about my first transAtlantic flight, but it turned out to be no big deal. It was very smooth, and I caught up on some Doctor Who. The flight to Boston was much bumpier and less pleasant.
Getting around London via the tube is super easy and efficient. We landed at London City Airport–a tiny airport that you probably won’t see unless you’re taking a short flight from, say, Dublin like we were–and took the Docklands Light Rail first to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and then on to London. Our rental house was close to two different Underground stations, so it was very easy to get wherever we needed to go. Very often there was a train arriving right when we got to the station; I don’t think we ever waited more than ten minutes, and usually it was much less. It was definitely the best and easiest to navigate public transportation system I’ve ever used.
We rented a car at Heathrow when we left London. Dave lost his license (and credit card) on, we would discover eventually, the very first flight to Boston. We managed to have a replacement sent while we were in Dublin, so he drove in Ireland, but it was all me in England. I can say confidently that if I had known that was going to happen, we would have stayed in London the whole time and not rented a car at all. But I did fine! I didn’t hit anything or anyone (except the curb a few times the first day)! The wrong side of the road and car thing is not the hardest thing to deal with; it’s the tiny roads you often encounter in small towns and rural areas. That and the smaller than I’d like parking lots and spaces (I’m a nervous parker under the best of circumstances).
But the single worst part was driving in Bath at the end of my first day of driving. I had triumphantly taken us all to Stonehenge and then most of the way to Bath without incident. Then we took a wrong turn just before we got into Bath. “This CAN’T be right!” I shrieked as I started driving down a road about the width of the average bike path in the US. It was not right. We had to get turned around and make a very tricky turn to get headed in the right direction again, and it was all downhill from there. First I somehow managed to activate a setting on the rental car that prevented the car from going over 20 miles per hour, only it took me a long time to figure out that it was that and not just a suddenly broken car, so the people behind me LOVED that. Then we got into Bath itself, which is a very old city with a maze of tiny one way roads and a ton of traffic. We were just trying to find the carpark where we were going to leave the car while we were staying there, but it took way longer than it should have owing to our less than direct route. We finally made it, and I was very, very happy.
So narrow roads and all that aside, renting a car great if you want to see areas outside of London. We considered getting around with public transportation, but there really wasn’t a reasonable (time or money-wise) way to, for example, get from London to Stonehenge and then on to Bath. If you’re coming from the US or Canada, everything in England will feel very close together. I was nervous about gas prices in Europe, but honestly, between how short the drives were and how fuel-efficient the cars were (even the big 8 passenger van we had in England), it wasn’t a big deal at all. We pre-paid 70something pounds for the rental car in England and wished we hadn’t because we ended up using only about half a tank in the 5 days we had it (we were told it would save money to do it that way if we returned it with less than a quarter of a tank). We used it exclusively for traveling between towns; once we got to our destination we parked and explored mostly on foot.
And then we dropped off the rental car at the Manchester airport after leaving Bakewell and took three trains and a ferry to get to Dublin. We went back and forth about the ferry vs. flying to Dublin, but finally decided that it would be fun to take the ferry and save a little money over flying and that we were really getting plenty of airplane time in on this trip already. I’ll try to do a separate post about our Rail Sail experience. To sum up: the ferry itself was great, but the transportation on either end was a little logistically challenging.
Surviving the first day:
If you fly from the US to England, you’ll very likely arrive early in the morning, which is to say in the middle of the night according to your body. And this after a very long, tiring day of travel. We didn’t feel like doing anything except sleeping when we landed, but we couldn’t check in to our Airbnb for several more hours. We picked the National Maritime Museum for our first day activity for a few reasons: it was more or less on the way from the airport and wouldn’t add a lot of extra travel time; it was free, so we wouldn’t feel like we’d wasted a lot of money if we were too tired to enjoy it; it was something that we’d like to see but didn’t consider an absolute must see–so, again, we wouldn’t feel like we’d missed out by being too tired to explore thoroughly. This worked well for us. We sort of wandered aimlessly through the museum, saw some cool stuff through an exhausted fog, and spent a long time at the little restaurant drinking coffee and hot chocolate.
We left as soon as we could to get to our Airbnb close to check in time, and then Gus and Abe immediately fell asleep on the couch:
But we managed to wake them up after a little while, head out to the store for some dinner stuff (I think we did rotisserie chickens that first night), and keep everyone up until around 8 so we could get back on schedule. Which mostly worked. The first couple of days we were still pretty tired, though.
Oh! Ideally you’ll sleep on the plane to make that first day a little easier. But our plane from Boston took off around 6 PM, which isn’t really our bedtime, and landed around midnight our time (which is closer to our bedtime). So it wasn’t really the best window for sleep. Some of us slept a little, but certainly no one got in anything resembling a night’s sleep. Here’s what my Fitbit looked like that week; see if you can spot which night we traveled and which night was our first in London!
Where we stayed:
Finding places to stay with six people, particularly in Europe, is not always easy. I didn’t get very far into looking at hotels in London before realizing the prices for the two or even three rooms we’d need were out of reach. So an Airbnb it was! You can spend plenty on an Airbnb, too, though. We kept things relatively affordable by expanding our search outside of the typical tourist areas (while still making sure to find somewhere with good transportation options).
We ended up staying in a townhouse in Kennington (not Kensington! Important distinction when it comes to price!) It was in a nice neighborhood that was convenient to everything but not at all touristy. We could walk to some things (Westminster Abbey/Big Ben, the London Eye), or it was a 5 minute walk to the closest Tube station (or a 10 minute walk to Vauxhall, which was sometimes more convenient, depending on our destination) for anything else. Plenty of shopping and restaurants in the area. And the house itself was lovely, with 3 bedrooms, laundry, and a full kitchen. It came in under $300/night after all the fees.
View from the window:
For Bath, we made good use of our Chase Sapphire credit card points and booked a 2 bedroom apartment at the Halcyon Hotel. We loved it here: great central location, everything within easy walking distance, nice apartment, and it came with a “breakfast hamper” which means there was tons of food that was refreshed every day (cereal, muffins, coffee, milk, orange juice, eggs, bacon…it was magical!) This was our view:
Couple of things to note: there are several flights of stairs to walk up to get to the apartment. That’s how you get that view! There’s no dedicated parking, but there is a car park with long term parking a few blocks away. It’s 15 pounds/day, so be sure to factor that in to pricing if you’re planning to drive. And lastly, there’s no office onsite, so you’ll need to make sure to let them know when you’re planning to check in so they can make arrangements to let you in. We were running late (see above re: getting lost on the way to Bath) and had no data on our phones, so we didn’t see the e-mail they sent about how to get in once we missed our check-in window. This caused a bit of panic, but eventually we found someone at the bar downstairs who was able to help us out.
Then it was back to Airbnb-ing it in Bakewell. That’s actually how we wound up in Bakewell: I searched for Airbnbs that would fit all of us in the Peak District and Bakewell had the best one I found. This was again very centrally located and and easy walk to anything in the town. It was a tiny little place spread over 3 floors, but everything we needed for the few days we stayed. And it was only $130/night including fees!
Our only issue was that tiny parking space you see right in front of the house. I didn’t think there was any way to fit the big van we’d rented in it (and there was a smallish gate opening to get into the parking area and other cars parked right across from that space). Our host came over to make sure we’d gotten settled and direct us to some free on street parking at the edge of town….and when he did this he swung expertly into that tiny space in his big SUV like it was nothing at all! But I’m not experienced with UK parking, so I was happy to leave it outside of town and walk. There did not seem to be any overnight paid parking available anywhere in Bakewell (there are several car parks, but as far as we could tell they all prohibited overnight parking), which was a little frustrating.
How we plan:
I’ve given you the final itinerary meaning what we actually did. But, of course, it bears little resemblance to the first draft itinerary or, in fact, to the proposed itinerary the day we arrived in London. I’m an obsessive planner, and I love nothing more than spending winter evenings planning every detail of summer trips. But I believe that the key to being a happy obsessive planner is being flexible when it comes to the actual execution of said obsessive plans.
A bit more about what the whole process looks like (I’ll focus on London, for simplicity’s sake): First I made a list of all the things I wanted to see in London, divided into “must sees” and “maybes.” Then Dave broke out the map (virtually speaking) and we started to group things together by geographic area and figure out what things it would make sense to do on the same day. Then we added potential restaurants in the area for each day. Dave likes spreadsheets, so he put all of this into a spreadsheet. I don’t like spreadsheets (at least not making them), so I did a more narrative day by day with more extensive notes about each day’s plan. Then when we got to London everything went totally out the window! Just kidding. But things did get moved around quite a bit depending on our moods and the weather, and we ended up doing way less than what we had on the itinerary (the itinerary is intentionally more aspirational than realistic).
How the obsessive planning worked out for us/what we’d change:
We were all pretty happy with our London experience. I wish we’d managed to see more but 1. I always wish we’d managed to see more and 2. We were really tired the first couple of days. Beyond that, a few fairly random notes:
*The British Museum was one of the first things we did, and we weren’t quite prepared for how SUPER crowded it was. We were also worried that everything in London was going to be that crowded and relieved to find out that was not the case. In retrospect, we might have saved the British Museum for later in the trip when we were a little more well rested and able to get an earlier start to beat the crowds. Going later in the afternoon might have been another option.
*We had tickets (free) for the Sky Garden, which we’d planned to see as an alternative to the very pricey London Eye. We’d booked the tickets weeks in advance, but when the day arrived it was rainy and cold; we’d spent the morning shivering at the Tower of London and just wanted to get inside…so we skipped it, reasoning we likely wouldn’t be able to see much anyway through the clouds. I have some regrets about not seeing London from up high, but given that the tickets needed to be booked in advance, I’m not sure how we could have done things differently.
*The Victoria and Albert was the surprise hit in London. It was like a way less crowded British Museum! It was a last minute addition to the itinerary; originally we’d planned on doing the Natural History Museum instead, but Gus really doesn’t like taxidermy, so we thought this might be a better plan.
*We did the Tower of London all wrong. We somehow ended up going on the most miserable day of the trip, weather-wise, which made things unpleasant. And then we had big plans to get there right when it opened, only we went on a Monday when it opened an hour later than usual, which meant pretty much everyone got there at the same time and the lines and crowds were huge.
A few kid-specific tips:
*You’ll note that our itinerary was pretty museum-heavy. But we found that nearly every museum in London had some way or other to make for kid-friendly visits. I’ll talk more about specifics as I get to individual posts, but, for example: the British Museum has scavenger hunts you can print out before you come. The Tower of London has an app you can download with “missions” to complete while you’re there. The Victoria and Albert has great backpacks you can check out with tons of activities in them. And most places we encountered with audio tours had a kid or family friendly option (Westminster Abbey, Stonehenge, the Roman Baths).
*I mentioned that we did several Treasure Trails in the itinerary. I came across these in some blog post or other pre-trip and ordered a few because they weren’t too expensive. These are scavenger hunts that take you all over a town or part of a city solving clues. I wasn’t sure how much we’d get into them, but they turned out to be a great addition to the trip. I always feel like we should spend more time just wandering around when we’re in new cities, and this was kind of a way to do that but with a little direction so it didn’t feel aimless (which equals fewer complain-y kids) and so that we were actually seeing very cool stuff–little tucked away streets, pretty parks, etc. The theming (a treasure hunt! a spy mission!) was VERY loose, but no one much cared. Super fun. I wish I could find something similar for everywhere we visit!
*In the UK, Ireland, and Canada, we’ve found family rates at museums and attractions to be very common. Make sure to check for these wherever you go! And if your kids are too old to be kids for admission purposes, most places at least have a student rate.
I’ll end this (very long!) post here. Much more to come about specific places we went!
Any questions about things I’ve left out? Any planning tips of your own you’d like to share?
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