Planning for Adventure

For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with England. My sister, Jennifer, and I share this love of England/London. I don't think we were a bit surprised when my sister had her DNA done and we found out our heritage is almost 95% from the UK (mostly English but some Scottish and Irish too).  We love the history, the places, the accent, the culture etc. but we had never actually been to England!  It's been our dream for a long time to go to London and especially to go together.

A couple of years ago my sister told me that she and Chris were planning to go to Europe in 2018. Her plan was to visit Edinburgh, London, Paris (her #1 destination), Belgium and Amsterdam. I am thankful that my husband got on board with us going with them so that my sis and I could see London together. As it turned out, the dates we selected would be very close to our 30th wedding anniversary, so there you go, "Happy Anniversary" to me from Eric.

After much discussion Eric and I decided that we didn't want to go to as many places as Chris and Jen (just sounded too exhausting for us), so we decided to spend our two weeks in England. As it worked out, our first week would be spent in the countryside (in hindsight, best decision ever!) and one week would be in London (where we would meet up with Chris and Jen)

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Let the planning commence! We had over a year to plan for the trip. Did I tell you I'm a planner?? Well, my sister is even more of a planner than I am! We both did a lot of research for our trip. Read articles online, read books, watched travel videos, had lots of conversations, bought travel essentials, made lists of places we wanted to check out, etc.

We even practiced our packing! Before our trip to Vegas, Eric and I decided that we were going to start traveling with carry-on only. Vegas was a trial run for me as me traveling lightly wasn't really a concept I knew very well. We bought travel backpacks and packing cubes.

Osprey FarPoint 40 backpack

Packing for two weeks wasn't actually as hard as I thought it would be. A few changes of clothes, three pairs of shoes (maybe a bit too much but I hate having sore feet when there is a lot of walking to do so I wanted to switch out), raincoat (it's England!!), puffy jacket, personal item tote bag with neck pillow, kindle, snacks for flight, iphone, travel journal and I was pretty much ready to go!

Having never been so far away from home, on such a long flight and for two weeks, I was a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Would the trip overwhelm me? Would I  be exhausted? Would I be homesick? Would England live up to my expectations? I made up my mind that I was going to think of the whole thing as an adventure...no matter what happened, it was all part of the adventure. Relax and enjoy the moment.

With those thoughts in mind, we were off across the wild blue yonder, next stop, England!