Planning

I spent some time yesterday solidifying plans for our trip to the United Kingdom in 7 weeks.  I thought I would share as we plan, because as long as we have the internet, I'll be sharing as we go along on the trip, I'm sure.  


First, we'll arrive at London's Gatwick Airport first thing in the morning.  We chose this airport because it's actually outside of London, and we're saving London for the end of the trip, although if there are still riots going on we will probably avoid it as much of possible.  Right now we're basically planning a driving tour that avoids major cities.  It seems safer and is what we really wanted to do anyway.  So we'll be renting a car and heading 30 miles down the road to our first stop:  Brighton.  I was so excited to find that so far, everything we want to see is so close to each other.  I realized that this was really a small island, but it's amazing that you can see so much of a country in such a short amount of time.  I'm definitely used to 4, 5, or 8 hour drives to places just in the southeast United States.


So we'll explore Brighton a bit and then head down the road to Portsmouth.  I'm really happy about driving down the coast of England on our first day.  After a little research I found that Portsmouth had a few things I was interested in seeing.  It is the birth place of Charles Dickens, has a dockyard with three very important ships in England's history, including the Trafalgar.  There is also a D-Day museum that I thought would be interesting.  It would be neat to see memorabilia and WWII history from another perspective.


From Portsmouth it's just a few more miles down the road to Southampton, the port where the Titanic set sail.  Jane Austen also lived there for a few years with her brother, Frank, who was in the Royal Navy.  


At this point, we may end up spending the night in Southampton and traveling eight miles up the road the next day to Winchester.  That little road trip from Brighton to Winchester is a whopping 1 hour and 45 minutes.  It's so exciting to know we'll be able to see a lot that first day without a lot of travel time.  So after our coastal tour, the second day will be devoted to dear Jane Austen.  She is buried in the beautiful Winchester Cathedral, and the surrounding Hampshire countryside contains the home where she lived with her mother and sister, as well as the church where her father served.  I think it will take at least a day and a half to two days to do all of these things.


But by the end of the third day we may be driving up the road one hour to Oxford.  We'll definitely be a couple of days there, and then we'll head an hour and a half west to Bath.  From there, KJ wants to drive through Wales from whence the Pugh name comes, and this post is becoming long, so we'll stop there for now.  But it has been extremely thrilling to put a little flesh on these plans of the imagination.  


Oh, and here's a couple more shots of Claire.