"...It's Like a Whirlwind Inside of my Head...": I Traveled to England/The Netherlands! (Part 1: Port Sunlight, Liverpool, Bristol, Bath)

August 19, 2016, I married my best friend in the whole world! It was a beautiful and really fun day and I still look back on it quite fondly. At the time though, we were far too busy to go on the honeymoon that we really wanted. I was just beginning student teaching so that I could finish my degree and Jack was beginning his last year of college and needed to be there for the first day of classes in order to stay enrolled. So we decided to postpone our honeymoon until we could do it the way we wanted to without cutting corners. In July 2018, we were ready to embark on this journey!

This will be a series of blog posts as we traveled for a total of two weeks and managed to pack a lot into this trip. Instead of separating these posts into days (Day 1, Day 2, etc.), I will separate it by cities we visited because we moved around so frequently. I'll be sure to publish each post in the order we visited so that you can still see how everything went in chronological order. Enjoy the ride!

Minneapolis to Reykjavik to Port Sunlight/Liverpool

We left the evening of July 6 and were just buzzing with excitement. Jack and I had traveled just the two of us before (see our San Diego and the Grand Canyon trip), but we had stayed within the U.S. and faced different challenges. We had never traveled to other countries just the two of us before. I had traveled alone or with Jack and his dad. It's different when you have to rely on just one other person. Our first destination was England, but we had to change planes in Reykjavik, Iceland. I have never needed to change planes before, but since we were flying with IcelandAir, they always reroute through Reykjavik. So we arrived at London Heathrow the next morning and right away we boarded the train to get to a place called Port Sunlight just outside of Liverpool.

I had been to England once before on a solo trip when I studied abroad, but I did not leave London. This time we had the added challenge of figuring out how to take the trains. Luckily, I had some practice in Boston for how to take intercity trains, so I wasn't very nervous for this. Once we were on the train, we could rest and watch beautiful England rush by us through the window.

We needed to get to Chester in order to get a train to bring us into Port Sunlight (which would also be the same train that could take us into Liverpool when we were ready). At this point, we had been traveling for 24+ hours and we were TIRED as you might imagine. We got a little turned around about where our AirBnB was, but we eventually found it and all was well. It was a super cute place! We booked just a room in someone's house, but since they were in London watching the World Cup with friends, we ended up having the whole place to ourselves! So we took long showers without worrying about holding someone else up. It was glorious to go to sleep in a bed that night instead of on a plane or a train.

The next morning, our adventures began. Because of jetlag, we woke up quite early. We got ready for the day and walked down by the river. There are walking paths there and there were already a bunch of runners out and about. Weather was nice and the sun was out. It was a really nice way to ease into the day and our time abroad.

Once we had woken up a little and gotten a good walk in, we walked back into Port Sunlight and caught the train that would take us into the heart of Liverpool. We decided to go to Liverpool for Beatles reasons, but really, we didn't do a lot of Beatles things, which I was a little surprised by, but definitely didn't mind. Liverpool has more to offer than just the Beatles. Although, there were plenty of Beatles things to do whether you went to the Beatles museum or not. We didn't go to that museum, but we found art from John and Yoko in the Liverpool museum (which I'll talk about a little more below) and there were all sorts of little homages to each of them around the city.

Jack and I had a lot of fun just walking around the city. We found ourselves in Liverpool's Chinatown (apparently Liverpool is home to the biggest Chinese population in the UK!), saw the oldest church in Liverpool and a really neat Catholic church that honestly, I thought was a Church of Scientology, it was so space-agey. We were also on the hunt for Lambananas (their pictures are around this paragraph!). Lambananas were created as one of the symbols of Liverpool because as a port city, Liverpool was a big part of commerce. Their biggest imports/exports were lambs and bananas. And voila! The Lambanana was born (not literally, but now they're the Peanuts statues of Liverpool decorated in all sorts of ways).

We also walked through Jack and I are museum people, so we also walked through the Museum of Liverpool and the Merseyside Maritime Museum. The Museum of Liverpool was really neat because it helped us get to know some of the background of Liverpool. This place has a rich history in docking and has survived beyond that time because now the city's specialty is (if memory serves me right), biomedical engineering. I think my favorite part of the museum was talking about Scouse, or the unique way they speak in the Liverpool area. It's English, but it's like a totally different language and I find that fascinating! Also in this museum, there was a giant timeline depicting Liverpool's long history... but there were also artifacts to accompany it so you can see history come alive! I think one of the more unique exhibits in the museum was the exhibit showing John and Yoko's art. They took photos together and Yoko did some experimental video... it was really weird and I saw a lot more of both of their butts than I ever intended to see. But it seems like they found happiness together. There was also a part talking about John's death and there was a video of his children talking about him years after the fact. That's was heartbreaking to see.

This was our only full day in Liverpool. We moved around a lot in the UK so only spent about 2 days in each place we stayed. We weren't about to rush out of there just yet though. We hadn't even explored Port Sunlight, where our AirBnB was. So the next day, we packed up, checked out of our AirBnB and rolled our suitcases over to the couple of museums that were in town. We were really happy that both places we wanted to visit would hold our bags for us. It just made everything that much easier.

Our first stop was the Lady Lever Art Gallery. This was something Jack was more interested in. I was walking around trying to find the art I found the funniest (because I'm a child... sorry...). There were a number of wonderful statues and some interesting paintings though. We also had lunch here and continued our exploration of interesting British take-away food. In Liverpool, I found a cheese and coleslaw sandwich that sounded super weird, but was actually quite good. At Lady Lever, I tried Dandelion and Burdock soda (I think Jack and I each got a different flavor and took a sip of each other's). To quote the journal I kept of our travels, "England likes to put flowers in a lot of things, it seems." But honestly, this was just the beginning of our culinary adventures while in the UK. More on that when we get to Bristol.

I really liked the Port Sunlight Museum. It's small, which was rather nice, but Port Sunlight has a really interesting history. The entire town was built around a soap factory. Port Sunlight is a model for how to treat employees. The houses in Port Sunlight were built to house the workers at the factory and their families, if they had any. The house where we were staying was one of them, but we got to walk through a house set up like the time when the factory was at its peak. It was also set up for a small family.

Port Sunlight/Liverpool to Bristol/Bath

That was our last bit of Port Light I'm sad to say... from there, we hopped on a couple trains that eventually took us to Bristol. Our AirBnB was a little ways from the station and since we didn't know where we were going, we took a taxi there the first time. I got so excited to be in a British car that I asked the driver if I could sit in the front and see what it was like to be on the left side of the car with no steering wheel. It was weird! And I decided that I don't really want to drive in a UK city. There were some confusing things that just made me sure I would get myself into an accident if I were driving.

Honestly, we didn't see much of Bristol, but it still served a unique purpose for us. Our first night, we unpacked and we looked up places to go to dinner. We picked a place that served Asian cuisine of some kind, which sounded good and wasn't take-away. But we had uncovered a gold mine. When we walked to the place where we wanted to get dinner, we saw that our place was in a shipping container and there were piles of shipping containers that all had their own restaurants. And oh boy, were these restaurants incredible. We only ate at a small fraction of the restaurants, but if we had a week, we could have worked through them. We had duck pancakes and bao at the first place and then the next night, we had Greek gyro burgers, oregano fries, and Greek soda... SO GOOD. Bristol was our foodie playground... and we didn't even have to actively try to be foodies, the city came to us in this respect.

But we did find yummy things outside of these wonderful shipping container restaurants. We went and got crepes at a stand and another night, we went to this ridiculous ice cream and waffle place. It was incredibly sweet and at times felt like too much, but it was delicious. Let's just say though, I'm glad that we were doing as much walking as we were doing. I think someone would have needed to roll me home otherwise. It was also neat though because we got to sit and watch some of the World Cup while we were there. It was exciting because at the time, England was still in the running (again, if memory serves me right), so we had a clear team to root for! But boy, when they were out of the running for the World Cup... that was a doozy...

We went to Bath next. We tried to find an AirBnB in Bath, but I can't remember if the problem was cost (Bath is a very popular city, so you spend a pretty penny if you want to stay within the city) or availability. As we would find out later, we were there on the day the University was hosting their graduation. So it might have been a combination of the two with all of the families that were flooding the city.

In Bath, we wanted to go and see the Roman Baths and the Abbey that was right next door. Bath is called that because of the Roman Baths. These are unique because it was like being back in Italy for a time. But the baths are so cool! The heart and soul of them is the spring and thermal activity it's built over. So all of the water is warm all the time! It's glorious! They have a couple really warm pool where people would swim/bathe, a cold room, steam rooms for the men and women... it's an incredible set-up! And it wasn't just for bathing, it was a place where people would go for healing and for socializing as well. It was believed that the hot water had healing properties and that fully submerging yourself could help with certain ailments. I wish doctors prescribed just sitting in a warm bath more often.

Once we were done in the Roman Baths, we went just a short distance away to Bath Abbey and went inside. It's a really beautiful church with an ornate ceiling. But our visit didn't end up being a simple "let's go visit a cool church" type of visit. We stumbled into an organ recital. So we stopped and sat in the pew, admired the church from where we were and listened to the organists play and give us (basically) a free concert. I love it when we travel and stumble into random things like this. Traveling is for exploring and discovering things that you just can't plan and this is one of those moments where I really feel like this happened. I have a video and if I can get it to play, I'll post it here so you can listen to the organ music too.

Our day in Bath was not complete! We knew that we needed to come back because we were leaving for a tour from Bath the next day, so we wanted to find that. But also, Bath is just a really cute town and so even just walking through the streets was a real treat. But we also wanted to visit the Jane Austen Centre since it was nearby (and I had seen pictures from former classmates who got to visit for a J-Term class while we were still in college). The Jane Austen Centre is the right amount of hokey and neat. It's mostly a place about Jane Austen's life and what life was like to live during the Regency period. So it wasn't about bringing the books to life necessarily, although there is a lot of crossover between Austen's life and what she wrote about. I don't know if I need to go back necessarily should I find myself in Bath again, but it was well worth a visit this time around and was very interesting!

After the Jane Austen Centre, we just went and walked around the city centre. We noticed that there were a number of owls around. It turns out this is Bath's version of the Twin Cities Peanuts characters (except theirs changes every year). There are owls all over the city decorated in dozens of ways. I believe you can buy these owls and all of that money goes to charity. But it became like a scavenger hunt of sorts trying to find these owls. I think my favorite owls are the blue owl (first photo on the left) outside of a glass art shop because the feathers on the back of the owl were made of glass probably made in their shop. I thought that was amazing and that no other place in Bath could have made an owl quite like this one. My other favorite was the owl with paintings of books on it (last photo on the left). I don't know if the books featured on this owl were all English authors... they very well might have been... or if it was just featuring books, but it was a beautifully done owl. Really, any owl is a friend of mine. They are gorgeous and so creative.

We walked through the small park that was next to the river and just used that as a place to decompress for a short while. It was a very full day in Bath, but I think this was one of our favorite places we had visited so far (as really, this was only the beginning of our trip if you think about it. But we would be bath the next day, however briefly, even though we wouldn't be exploring Bath, but heading off to Stonehenge via purple van.