Well, this is a first for me. I am writing this right now at about 30,000ft as we head up the coast of the UK onto Glasgow, Scotland, and then we’re headed over the North Atlantic.

It was bitter sweet to pack up and head home. Even though we really enjoyed the later half of our trip, it is time for us to go back home and back to our hum-drum lives. The most bitter sweet part, for me at least, is the early-freakin’-bird flight we’re booked on. We had to get up at 2:30am to get showers and head to the Great Hall at Thurnham to catch our cab ride to the airport at 5am. We packed just about everything up the night before and tried to get some sleep, but by the time we were done packing, it was already after midnight. Major league suckage.

But, we’re headed home now for what will turn out to be a most decidedly long day. We’re flying now, and with the time difference, we will land in Boston around noon. Then we have a little over 4 hours until our flight to JFK. After that, we have about a 3 hour car ride back to Jess’s dad’s house to pick up our car. After we pack the car, it’s a 15 minute drive to Phillipsburg to get Loki, and then a nice 90minute drive home. For those of you keeping score at home, here’s how it all breaks down. (times are in US) we Wake up today at 9:30pm (Friday) after getting about 90 minutes sleep. Then, we’re at Manchester airport for 3 hours, plane across the pond for 6, 4 hours at Logan, 40 minutes to JFK, 3 hours to Easton, 15 minutes to Phillipsburg, and 90 minutes home. That means that our day starts at 9:30pm and will end somewhere in the neighborhood of 11pm. Yeah…what fun. Don’t forget now, we have to unpack when we get home. Plus, Sunday is our only day off, so we get to go back to work bright and early on Monday morning. The worst part about vacation really is coming home.

I was planning on posting our photos on flickr when we got home, but that’s just not going to happen. I will be happy if we make the drive home tonight and don’t end up crashing at Jess’s mom’s house. But, my goal right now is to get home as quick and safe as possible.

I want to sleep in my own bed.

Plus, we have a date to go see ‘Harry Potter’ tomorrow. Can’t disappoint!

Yesterday, we went to Thirsk for the day and we had a wonderful day there. James Herriot’s house is basically Jess’s Graceland. She was ear to ear smiles the entire time and she was like a giddy kid the entire time.

The funny thing is that yesterday, we ended up taking the rail and the bus to everywhere we need to go, and it was yesterday that we finally figured out how the bus and rail system work over here. And of course, we are leaving tomorrow morning. Figures.

Last night after we got back, we had a few hours to kill before to we took the last bus back to Thurnham, so, we headed to what has become our favorite pub, Weatherspoon, and had a few drinks. Ok, let’s clarify that, I had the drinks and Jess had ice cream. I was decently drunk when we left there, but you can’t go to England and not get drunk in a pub, right? And I really like the bar keeps over here. When I ask for my drink of choice, they tell me to tell them when to stop putting the Pepsi into the vodka. That’s awesome so I can have the drink as strong or as weak as I want it. Let’s just say that I ordered my last drink 5 minutes before we had to leave for the bus, and the Pepsi in there was strictly for coloring. Ahh, that was a good night.

Today, we went into Lancaster for the last time to pick up souviners for everyone back home. Unfortunately, it’s been raining all day non-stop, and I got soaked to the bone. But, we did get something for everyone which is a good thing. I’m at the apartment right now drying off while Jess’s is going around taking some last pictures of the hall and surrounding area.

We’re leaving here on Saturday at 5am to head for the airport. That means that we’ll have to be packed and ready to go in about 10 hours. We’re still on the fence if we will try and sleep before we leave or just sleep on the plane. Who knows.

I will have to say that this trip has changed a lot about myself. After seeing how people live over here and what their daily routines are like, I know that my daily routine is going to change a bit. Nothing majorly radical, but I like the way certain things are done over here.

Truth be told, I am very sad that we’re leaving, but very glad we’re going home. It’s a weird situation to be in.

Well, I think that’s about it from over here in England. My next post will probably be sometime on Sunday from the comfort of home.

Cheers!

We are having a much better time today.

To be honest, we almost went home yesterday. Here’s why.

We are literally out in the middle of nowhere. We really wanted to go to London, but with the bus and rail schedules, we would only have about 6 hours in London. To us, 6 hours in London is nothing more than a tease. Considering that your average tour takes an hour, and getting from one place to another, we might be able to see 2 or 3 places if we really hurried. We did not want to do that. Add to the fact that since the US dollar is not almost worthless in International Exchange, we have gone through more money then we planned to. But, during our little talk last night about maybe just calling it quits and coming home, we decided to take ownership of this trip.

I asked Jess that since we’re not going to London, where else would she like to go if it were at all possible. She mentioned that she would love to go to Thirsk, a town literally across the country. I asked her why, and this is where James Herriot practiced being a country vet. She loves his books and the TV show based on him, so we checked out some rail information while we were at the internet café yesterday in Lancaster. As it turns out, it is only about a 3 hour trip via rail to Thirsk. So, we walked down to the Lancaster rail station and bought 2 tickets for tomorrow to go to Thirsk. She is like a giddy school girl right now.

As for me, I talked her into taking a guided tour of the Lake District today. It was an awesome trip! Our first stop was Castlerigg Stone Circle, which is an arrangement of stones, kinda like Stone Hedge, but only these are about 5,000 years old. Not only where the stones cool, but the scenery was out of this world. The views we had there was what I dreamt about seeing when I eventually made it to England. I took tons of pictures and they should be up on flickr either now or shortly after this gets posted. After there, we went to tour William Wordsworth’s house and his museum. And after that, we went on a very nice ferry ride across one of the lakes there. It was about 7 hours in total, and worth every pound!

After we got back, we got changed, and went for a swim in their indoor pool. Then we did the whole ‘resort thing’ and went into the whirlpool and then into the sauna. Well, at least I went into the sauna, it wasn’t quite Jess’s thing. After that, we went to dinner, and we just got back to the room now. We rented ‘Shaun of The Dead’ from the leisure center, and plan on watching that tonight. It’s one of our all time favorite movies, and it only seems fitting to watch it while we’re here in England.

As for me, I’m off to grab a cupcake fir desert, a glass of Diet Pepsi, and watch some TV before we have to go to bed. Our taxi picks us up tomorrow at 7:45am (2:45am US) for the train station.

Cheers!

This has been an interesting trip so far.

We arrived in Manchester on Sunday at 7:20AM. Once we got off the plane, we then proceeded through customs which was very quick and painless. After that we got our bags and headed to the rail station and the beginning of our journey. This is where things got a little hairy.

You see, we have, technically, 4 carry-on bags – Jess’s carry-on, Jess’s purse, camera bag and laptop bag. Now, we have all of this, plus 3 large suitcases all clocking in at around 53lbs a piece. Now, here we are, strapped down with our carry-ons, Jess leading the charge pulling her suitcase behind her, and me in tow pulling our other 2 suitcases. We needed to literally go down 1 level and then up another 3 to get to this railway station. It was a bit of a rough workout lugging everything thing through but we eventually made, it. In fact, by the time we got our rail tickets to Lancaster, the train was almost ready to leave. We hurried on board and got our tickets checked in. I was looking for a luggage compartment, but these trains didn’t have any. What they have is a little area by the door with 3 metal shelves for baggage. Thankfully, I managed to fit all of our bags in there. So, once the porter comes back around he asks us where we are going. We tell him that we are going to Lancaster. He looks at us and tells us we’ll need to get off at the Preston station for a train change. Great, but not that big of a deal. So, within about 10 minutes, we are off and running.

That is until about 3 stops later.

I forget the exact sequence, but I believe Preston was like the 6^th stop. At the 3^rd stop however, some engineers were working and weren’t done yet. So, the train could not pull into the station and we had to wait. We ended up sitting there for a little over 20 minutes. Now, keep in mind we have to connect with another train in Preston. Sounds like a familiar scenario, eh? So, we finally get going and we make it to Preston. I wrestle off the baggage and we look for our next train.

Oh, before I go any further, let me tell you something about English trains. They are not at all like American trains. For those of you used to riding the Merto, cherish it. To get off of these trains, you go through a very narrow door, you have to step down onto a very narrow metal step, and then traverse the 6in gap between the step and he station platform. That’s right, if you don’t make that gap, you’re in between the train and the landing platform. Lovely. So, we traverse the Gap of Doom and look at the train schedules. Nowhere does it tell you what train is going to Lancaster. So, Jess finds a porter and asks him where to go. He tells her we have to go to the other platform on the other side of the tracks. I look for a lift and there is none. All that’s available is a foot bridge that has 3 flights of stairs on each side.

I literally groaned out loud when I saw it.

I tell her to go on ahead with her one bag and find out what’s going on. It takes me a good 5 minutes to climb up these stairs. I finally get down and to the other side. Jess did find a porter and he thinks, yes, he thinks, that we should be taking the Glasgow train. Oh well, not much else we can do in a situation like this. So, when the Glasgow train arrives (about 20 minutes) we get on board, only to find it packed to capacity. I try and squish our luggage in with limited success, and we end up sitting in separate seats. Thank heavens we are the next stop. So, after a quick 15 minute train ride, I grab our shit and get the hell off of Death Train.

We are now at the Lancaster Rail Station. We actually planned most of this out in advance. There’s a bus line that goes right from the train station to the Lancaster Bus terminal, and then we take another bus to Thurnham. That is, that was the original plan. The plan we made for when we arrived on Saturday. But, because of the delay at JFK, it was now Sunday. And guess what kids? Yep, that’s right! That bus doesn’t run on Sundays! Give yourself a golden star! So, no knowing where the hell we are, we call a taxi and try to get to the bus station. When the driver arrives, we ask him how far Thurnham is from here. As it turns out, we are only about 20 minutes away. So, we have him just drive us directly to Thrunham Hall.

Keep in mind, we got off the plane at about 7:20am. We finally arrive and check in, and get to our room at about 12:15pm. What a crazy journey.

So, once I get there I do what every self-respecting geek would do – I fire up my laptop and check for a decent WIFI signal. I find 1 very weak signal and it was encrypted. It was so weak in fact that I was only picking up the SSID, and wasn’t even getting any signal at all from it. I read through the paperwork, and found out that if you had a laptop, to contact the reception desk and they would tell you how to get online. So, I do just that. That’s when they tell me their internet has been down for a few days and they’re not sure when it will be back up. Great…

So here I am in England, out in the middle of what I would call at home ‘bumble-fuck-land’, with no WIFI or land line internet. I have to email everyone to let them know we made it, and change our outgoing flight, and no way to do it.

Great….

We spent the day in Lancaster yesterday. It was a pretty nice city. We spend some time at the arcades – their word for ‘mall’ – and we even got to take a tour of Lancaster Castle. The castle was pretty neat. It’s still in use today as a prison and court house. There was no court that day, so we got to see about 1/5 of the castle, the maximum open to the public. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside the castle due to it being a modern prison and courthouse. I did however, take some picture of the outside of the castle. In fact, we’re going to go back to Lancaster before we leave and I want to take some more of the original entrance.

We also got to visit St. Mary’s Church, which is right next door to the castle. It’s an old medieval church, and was really cool. Although there were no signs inside stating that photography was prohibited, it just didn’t feel right to be taking pictures in there. I did however, take a few pictures of the outside. Very cool

My initial feelings about England have been mixed so far. Some of that may honestly be influenced by the fact that I started getting sick the evening before we left. But in all honesty, I was not impressed when we got here. Granted, when we got here I was really jet lagged and feeling like hammered shit. I had always heard about ‘jet lag’ but never thought it would really affect me. Man was I wrong.

Here’s how it worked.

We took off from Boston at about 8:10pm. Now, we had about a 6 hour flight to Manchester. Now, being normal people on vacation, we slept in that day until about 9am. Yes, 9am to me is now sleeping in. I know that’s sad but that not really the point of this diatribe. So, we’ve been up since 9am, and took off at 8:10pm on a 6 hour flight. That means that the flight will arrive at 2:10am. Now, I’m very comfortable with that. But, we now have to take into account the fact that by magical powers only known to great men like Merlin of Arthur’s Court, we have suddenly gone forward in time by 5 hours. Now instead of being 2:10am, it is now 7:10am, and the start of a brand new fucking day. So, in reference to the last post, we finally got settled into our room a little after noon. Now, that’s noon here, but that’s 7am in our time, which means that we have been up for 22 fucking hours straight. Granted, we did get about 2 hours of sleep on the plane, but how a normal human being is expected to sleep in a tiny little seat like that that really doesn’t recline is beyond me. So, we are both starving at this point, so we go to the restaurant for lunch. We have a nice lunch and get back to the room around 2ish. It’s at this point that Jess throws up the white flag and needs to take a nap. I tell her that I will stay up to make sure she doesn’t sleep too long. She wants to sleep a maximum of 2 hours. So, I sit up, write a little diddy on my laptop, and then start to fall asleep myself. Anyone who has been up for over 24 hours (we’ve been up for 25 by now) know that time really gets warped. So I look at the clock thinking that Jess has been asleep for at least an hour and only 15 minutes have gone by. I finally throw in the towel and set the alarm clock for 4pm and hop into bed. That was a great nap.

We wake up and are starving. Considering that we paid about £18 for lunch ($33), we did not want to pay that again for dinner or breakfast. So, we ended buying some basic provisions (groceries) for the reception desk. We got a frozen pizza for dinner, and eggs, bacon, sausage, bread and cereal for breakfasts. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought we would come 3,000 miles to eat frozen pizza.

But it was good, and we went right to be afterwards and slept for another 13 hours.