This has been official for a couple of months and many already know, but I’m finally writing a blog about it – in the summer of 2020, the Traveling Kirbies will return to England! This will be our first overseas trip since moving to Washington in 2016; we traveled to Argentina right before the move and we have technically traveled internationally on two trips to Canada, but we are excited to head back to Europe in June.
We determined quite a while back that we wanted this trip to be to England. There were a couple of reasons for this decision. First, since we haven’t been overseas since 2016, traveling somewhere that English is the native language will help ease the kids back into this type of travel. Second, we haven’t been to England since 2010 – and that was only for two nights. Once we had decided on a destination, I began to research the cost of flights to determine how much we would need to save and then budget ourselves accordingly. So this past summer I began to look at flights for June, 2020, just as they were coming available. Surprisingly enough, I found a deal where we were able to buy the tickets for all four of us non-stop from SeaTac to Heathrow on Virgin Atlantic for the same price Emily and I paid for just two of us from Orlando to Gatwick in 2008. With that price, we were able to go ahead and buy the plane tickets back in August. It then took us four months to figure out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do once we get there (hence the delay in blogging about it).
The Process
There were many reasons why it took us awhile to figure out where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. The first was life itself; between planning two birthday parties, starting the school year, getting ready for Halloween (which is a lot more involved now that we have to plan out costumes and such), and doing our jobs, we rarely sat and talked about it.
The biggest part of the decision equation was deciding how much we wanted to repeat from our 2008 trip and how much we wanted to add new. In 2008, we spent a month in the UK staying in York, Edinburgh, Manchester, Llandudno (in North Wales), Chipping Campden (in the Cotswolds), Cambridge, and London. Of course we knew right off that would stay in London again – how could you not? But we were unsure whether we wanted to repeat some of the other cities and sights from 2008 so that the kids could experience them, or if we wanted to have an entirely new experience for all four of us.
The first part of the puzzle to solve was thinking through our accommodations. Now that there are four of us, we try and avoid hotel room stays when possible because the kids go to bed so much earlier than we do. AirBnBs have worked out nicely for us, but they generally want stays that are 3-4 days at the shortest. This timeframe works for us because we like to stay in one place for a bit rather than moving from place to place on a daily basis. When we put the minimum stay requirements together with our total of 15 days (not counting travel days), it means that, with a stay in London, we would likely only stay in two other locations somewhere else in England.
So the sum of all that means we decided we won’t be heading back to Scotland or Wales because they are too far away from other options and we’ve already been there (at least to parts of both countries at any rate). We have also talked about wanting to go to Devon and Cornwall on our return, but those too are quite a bit out of the way from most of the rest of the country, so they would preclude being able to go very far north. The same would be true for heading down to Dover, Canterbury, and the far southeast coast.
Anticipated Itinerary
So, after figuring out what parts of the country we didn’t think we could make it to, we have finally put together an itinerary that we think will work:
- Fly into London via Heathrow, work through London on trains and head up to York.
- Spend a few days in York and visit sights such as the Jorvik Viking Center, the York Castle Museum, the York Minster, the Yorkshire Museum, and hopefully the Pizza Hut that started us on our decade-plus journey of cultural awareness.
- Drive to Ironbridge Gorge via Warwick Castle and Knights Village.
- Spend some time in Ironbridge Gorge including visiting Blist’s Hill Victorian Town, the Museum of the Gorge, and of course, the Ironbridge itself. This stop will need to be a two night stop and likely in a hotel, but given the timing and location, it seems to make the most sense.
- Drive to Oxford and spend some time in the Cotswolds including Harry Potter sights, Blenheim Palace, and some other villages in the area.
- Travel to London via Windsor and visit Legoland Windsor on the way (guess who is behind this stop…).
- End the trip in London visiting lots of sights including the London Eye, the Tower of London (including the Ceremony of the Keys), the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, and the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour.
It is still early and we haven’t begun to book accommodations, but in general we think this will work out. It gives us a nice mix of showing kids things we loved seeing in 2008 while also creating new experiences together as a family.
June is coming quickly and we are excited for our next adventure!
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