DAYTRIPPIN IN THE UK

PLAN AHEAD WHEN TRAVELING WITH KIDS… and get them on the same page.

In London this summer we stayed in a great stacked up 4 level house in Notting Hill. We stayed with friends who’d been there 6 months, they knew the lay of the land, thus a lot of the travel guesswork was filtered out. They’re total foodies, have great personal style(s), and really got into the culture of living in London. My point… we all felt comfortable, even our 6-year old Ziggy, and we all had a great urban vacation.

After the kids went to bed and we’d had a drink or whatever, Nick, my friend & I would kinda plan out the next day… We’d chat about what we wanted to do and click around.. sometimes emailing each other from bed.  To engage the kids, I’d pick random bits of fact and fiction about where we were going/what we were seeing… and tell them stories, have them draw or look for things, etc… We kept a journal with drawings of places we went and glue & pasted tickets, brochures, etc in it. We were prepared with scavenger hunts, folkloric stories for long car/train rides, Kinder Eggs (crap toy+chocolate=  a BIG winner for the 6year set).  We had lists of stuff to look for and talked about stuff like the differences between DRUIDS, who could have built Stonehenge and DROIDS, who in Star-Wars-speak also could have built Stonehenge.  Hobbit feat were a big topic of conversation ever since I printed out photos of Hobbit Homes (ie: Shakespeare’s birth home in Stratford), and all the Shires (which are so perverse, we all got involved)… Cockshire, Dickershire, etc.. In Brussels we had goals… a little guy peeing outside, moules frites, waffles, cherry beer, the question of weather people speak Dutch or French more, comic book museum, TinTin and what the hell they call his dog, (Milou or Snowy??).  We all love food so eating at great restaurants was a huge part of travel.

So, for example, a great day trip to Stonehenge… rent a car and driver, if you can- or get a car and drive yourself, and in a day, you can visit Bath too.

Stonehenge is a collection of huge and oddly shaped rocks. It’s one of the most famous sites in the world, and we engaged our kids (and ourselves) with a discussion about how the monolyths got to the site of Stonehenge… rocks from Wales carried 200 miles thousands of years ago…

Archaeologists had believed that the iconic stone monument was erected around 2500 BC. One recent theory, however, has suggested that the first stones were not erected until 2400-2200 BC, whilst another suggests that bluestones may have been erected at the site as early as 3000 BC. The surrounding circular  earth bank and ditch, the earliest phase of the monument, has been dated to about 3100 BC.

We read our kids the story of The Sword and the Stone on the way… then talked about Merlin who’s the inspiration for wizard characters, like Gandalf the White, Albus Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, and Qui-Gon Jinn (AKA.. all the cool white hair/beard dudes we all know and love).

Stonehenge, has an otherworldly energy. We grabbed meat pies there, and went to Bath… a wonderful hour long ride through the Cotswolds.  The visual here is rolling hills, sheep, rolling hills, baby castle, rolling hills, sheep & cows, amazing estate, old barn, rolling hills, ancient Roman village. Really.

I also should give credit where credit is due AND offer a very easy solution for a huge problem. My iPhone is a great travel companion… from Tube (and Metro) maps, Google walking maps, Money Converter, games, iPod, etc… it just f**king sucked that it ran out of batteries after about 6 hours. SO… get the battery booster cover! It’s $50 well worth it.

Roman Bath tour with kids audio tour was fun. Disappointment at the “21st Century answer to the Roman Baths”… the Thermae Spa- no kids… so we brought our bathing suits in vain. But Bath was cute to walk around have a coffee and then visit Jamie Oliver’s Italian, which in American English translates to, Wolfgang Puck Cafe.  We skipped the Jane Austen Museum. I really thought Nick would want to buy his wife, Emma something from Bath’s Austenmania (she lived there for, like, 4 years of her life, for God’s sake)… but we had to edit. We knew to look for The Circus… the 3 Crescents of Georgian Housing, a old bridge, and other stuff… in the car we worked on British Slang… the letter zed, bloody ___, bloke, knackered, telly, lift, etc…

Got back to London late and tired around 11.  The kids were all knackered too.

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