Recently, we went on vacation with Fi. It was our first real traveling experience in a foreign country with her (not counting Germany last spring when we spent a week sitting on Krista’s couch and eating bread). And also the longest; we left home on June 24 and did not return until July 12. Now we are back and it’s time to blog it all so that I do not forget what we actually did. So here goes:
We flew Virgin Atlantic Airlines from LAX to Heathrow. The flight was scheduled to leave at 5:30pm, then 5pm, then didn’t leave until after 6pm. The airport was a zoo. The flight was completely full, but there were many children on it, so we were confident Fi would have some playmates even though she generally does not interact with other children very much. She played with a little girl named Amina in the airport, but we never saw her again once we were on the plane. In fact, all the kids disappeared. I think they all went to sleep, unlike Fi, who stayed awake for most of the flight. It began with the delay. That meant that dinner was delayed. Then the lights were not turned off until it was about 9:30 or 10pm Pacific Standard Time. In other words, far past Fi’s normal bedtime. Then no one around us was going to sleep. And The seats were in two’s, so Fi and I were next to each other and John behind, making her think Daddy was somewhere else. Then she was overtired and just couldn’t sleep in her seat (why, or why did we not bring a car seat on the plane?!?), then it was finally dark, but NO ONE on the plane was sleeping and it was too late (seriously, everyone was in a party mood and chatting and watching movies). So I spent the majority of my time on the flight walking around the plane with Fi and rocking her in the rear galley. Thank goodness the galley was shaped just right so that I had space to pace with her and not be in anyone’s way. And the flight attendants were very nice, let us have lots of juice and water, and even brought me a blanket when it got cold. Fi fell asleep about an hour and a half before landing and I was able to take a 45 minute nap.
You may think that this experience was awful and a bad start to a trip, but it wasn’t really. First, Fi was not ill-behaved. The first few hours on the plane were great. When we first sat down I brought out the tape and some old wrapping paper, and we spent some time wrapping and taping her books, a new hobby she developed shortly before out trip. Then we played with stickers, coloring books, MagnaDoodle, Connect Four, and lots of other stuff. She was having a great time until she was overtired and the lights were still on. So I simply took her to the rear galley near the toilets. And different people came and talked to us, and I sang little songs, and she was ok. And my fears of deep vein thrombosis were also put to rest. Also, because she did not sleep on the plane, she had no problems napping or going to bed at her usual time, and we never had any issues with adjusting to the new time zone. In fact, we all slept about 10 hours the first and second nights.
When we arrived, we got our rental car, the awesome Seat Leon (50+mpg).
Fi fell asleep in her car seat right around her usual nap time and slept for about as long as her usual nap. We drove out to Cotswolds. We arrived at our first hotel after driving around in circles because there are many little B roads (England and Scotland have M-roads that are motorways much like our freeways, A roads that are like our highways and smaller than the M roads, and B roads, that are smaller than the A roads and not on the Hertz rental car map). We eventually found our way to Moreton-in-Marsh and the Redesdale Arms Hotel, where we had a very warm welcome, and really nice room, and a delicious dinner that we almost fell asleep while eating, so the let us take it to our room. We went to bed early and rose the next morning feeling like new people.
Here we are walking around before dinner, feeling very tired, and here is the GINORMOUS fish and chips that was my dinner:
Moreton-in-Marsh is nothing to write home about, but it was well situated for our explorations of the rest of the Cotswold experience.
Here are John and Fi in the morning, on our own little private garden at the hotel:
The Cotswolds is a really neat little area northwest of Oxford. It’s very old, dating back to the 1600’s, and very quiet. There were not many tourists even though we were there during a weekend, and those we did see were old enough to be our grandparents and mostly sort of local. We drove around the countryside, past fields of yellow mustard, to a charming little town called Chipping Camden, where we walked along the public footpath through sheep paddocks. The footpaths crisscross the whole country. These particular paths can take a person from the Cotswolds all the way to Bath. We did not go that far for many reasons, not the least being that Fi was afraid of the sheep. The weather was beautiful, sunny, and warm, a perfect beginning to our UK adventure.
Some friendly horses came to say hello and I learned that all the towns in the area were connect by footpath.
Chipping Camden, where we had a nice lunch and found a garden behind a wall and Fi ran around.
I think this is the town of Broadway, but I don’t remember. Fi fell asleep and we drove around for a couple of hours, until we decided to go to Sudley Castle, the final resting place of Katherine Parr, sixth wife of Henry VIII.
Fi had fun running around Sudley’s gardens. We went inside a little, but Sudley is actually someone’s home, so most of the castle is off limits.
A tree-lady, literally.
There was a play area for kids, a theme we saw many times over in the UK.
The biggest mega-fort ever. It was as tall as a several story building, but or kids.
We returned to Moreton for dinner and went to sleep early in preparation for our drive to the Lake District. I will describe that in my next post.
A note about the photos (for my friends who have cameras and will be thinking that the photos are really washed out). I took my Nikon D40 with a 18-200 zoom lens instead of my D7000 with the 50mm fixed lens, even though the D7000 and the 50mm lens are better than the D40. My reason was that the D40 weighs a lot less than the D7000 and the zoom lens is more versatile than the fixed lens. However, apparently the last time I used it I was photographing something indoors with low light and no flash, because about half way through the trip I realized that my ISO was set to 1600 (highest camera will go) and I had exposure compensation of +1.7 or something like that. And I was also shooting in RAW. I kept telling John that something was wrong with the meter on my camera because it kept telling me that my photos were going to be underexposed, yet they were really washed out. So most of these photos are not well exposed and the sky always looks funny. You will see when I post the photos of our hike in the Cairngorms in Scotland when I noticed my settings were off because the sky was washed out and turquoise in one photo and then blue and beautiful in the next. My saving grace is that the photos from the first half of the trip are in RAW, so if I ever have the energy to edit them, I may be able to fix some of the problems, but until then, I’m sorry for the washed out or oddly colored photos, and that everything looks grey, even though it wasn’t.
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