UK - 2023

A vacation must come to an end. How else can you have another one? With that amazing thought, I thought I'd share our exit from Great Britain a.k.a. The United Kingdom. We left our hotel after breakfast, and dragged our suitcases a half mile to the bus depot, where we boarded the air Express to Heathrow. We had reserved seats in row 3. The bus never really got full. More half of the passengers got off in Bristol. From there to London Heathrow airport was non-stop on the M4 highway. My friend, Carl, took a similar bus from Oxford to LHR two weeks ago. The trip was uneventful. We arrived about 3 pm, retrieved our suitcases and set off to find a Hoppa bus. These buses constantly circle the airport perimeter picking and dropping off passengers at hotels. It costs £6 each. We found the bus stop, and waited at least 40 minutes for a bus. Then we sat on the bus waiting for our hotel to appear. It did, eventually. The whole process took much longer than we anticipated. After checking in at...

Cardiff is the capitol of Wales. Wales is a country with its own parliament. In fact, we saw the Parliament building on Sunday morning. The people of Wales speak Welsh. It is not like English. Here are two good written examples of the difference: I'm not sure I ever heard Welsh spoken. Everyone who spoke with us spoke in English of course. We did have some good discussions with folks about climate change, the Beatles and music from that era.  We spent 3 nights in Cardiff. We stayed at a small hotel called Parador44. It was clean, delightful, although lacking a closet. It had the biggest bed that I had slept on all month! We both slept well. Our first full day was spent in the Cardiff Bay. This is really a fresh water lake. The river is controlled by locks. There are two water taxi companies that travel up and down the river at half hour intervals. The trip was delightful.  Notice the swans on the water, in the photo below. Our second day, we explored more o...

We took the train from Bath to Bristol. It was a very short trip. Bristol is to the west of Bath, on the Bristol Channel. There is a Maritime museum here that features the story and restoration of the SS Great Britain. You will read more about this shortly. These first photos were taken on our first day, as we explored the area across from our hotel.  Where old docks were located, the city has created a tourist attraction as well as an educational center about science and global warming.  The pedestrian footbridge has "love locks" fastened everywhere! We went out to find some dinner. We discovered a street with many pubs.  They all had seating outdoors in the back.  We could look down the street and see hundreds of people outside enjoying the sunshine. The next day, we spent most of the day at the Maritime Museum, checking out the SS Great Britain.  This ship was the first to have an iron hull and was propelled by steam with a direct shaft propeller.  This ...