Vacation Planning

~ Laura

I’m a little burnt at the moment. I finally pushed out two articles of drama off my desk yesterday morning. I’ve been happening at the same as the end-of-the-school year half days and music performances and thank you notes. With the college kid home, I’m back to having to cook pounds and pounds of food every night. And my insomnia has been ridiculous lately.

So, I haven’t been in top blogging shape. Sorry. No writing about schools or politics today. I can’t take it. Instead, I’m going to bore you with talk of our upcoming vacation.

With Steve on the speaker phone, we spent the morning coming up with an itinerary for our upcoming trip to the UK — three days in London, three days in Edinburgh, three days in Inverness.

The London trip will be all the usual stuff, but it will be fun to do it with our kids. It’s our first family trip to Europe. So, it will be the Queen’s house, Big Ben, and all that. I want to show the boys the dead knights at the Temple Church and the genius of Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s. I want to walk through street markets and buy some meat pasties.

We’re going to be a lot more random when we get to Scotland, but we’ll definitely hit some whiskey distilleries and roam through small towns in Highlands. We’re renting a car, so we’ll be very mobile. And we’re staying in Airbnbs for the first time.

I hope the places that we booked in Edinburgh and outside Inverness are as awesome in real life, as they are on the Airbnb website. We’ll get much needed space; because there’s no way that all four of us want to squeeze into a double queen bed hotel room anymore. They cost the same as a hotel. And they are so, so, so cute. OMG. I can’t even deal.

[Ian’s calling me to take him to swim lessons. More later.]

Published by Laura

22 thoughts on “Vacation Planning”

  1. Oh, sounds wonderful! London and Edinburgh are so awesome. My friends spent a semester in Edinburgh (one was on a Fulbright) and had a fabulous time. I’m jealous.

    Sounds like you need to teach that college kid how to cook for himself!

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    1. Well, he’s on his own for breakfast, lunch, and pre-class dinner. I cook dinner for all four of us, like always. I just need to double the quantities now that he’s home.

      Neither boy can gain weight. 130 pounds. Ugh. And here’s me plugging away my meals into a fucking app every day.

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  2. Have a great trip. We just got back from a whirlwind tour of Canada, which was much nicer that I thought it would be.

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      1. Toronto, then Montreal, and then Quebec City. And then drove back through (without stopping) the Adirondacks because I’d never seen them. I like that Quebec City and Montreal both had the European habit of having many absurdly old houses still used as standard housing.

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      2. We were in Montreal last August and loved it. We loved that everyone was bilingual, and also that there were no assumptions made about what language to use with us.

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      4. Quebec City is very nice, but it is much more of a tourist place than Montreal. You should definitely see it, but you’ll see it with people getting off tour buses and not many locals who aren’t employed to serve tourists.

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  3. Laura wrote, “there’s no way that all four of us want to squeeze into a double queen bed hotel room anymore.”

    HA HA NO!

    My husband just came back from a month in England. The big kids flew over after their school ended (first independent flight ever!) and spent a week with him doing Oxford, Bath, and one London day. They did lots and lots of museums, with an emphasis on antiquities. The locals were very hospitable.

    This is an unusually travel-heavy year for us, as it’s normally just “go see grandmas and grandpas.” We are all going to WA for a week and I am on grandma duty. We haven’t done that before, but duty calls. There will be a couple nights in Seattle.

    My oldest and I are also going to be spending a week in July enjoying the flesh pots of Fargo, ND:

    https://northdakotajcl.wixsite.com/2019njcl

    C is a big Latin nerd, she’s never been to the national convention before, and she’s applying to college soon, so this is a good time.

    We’re back in school by mid-August, so it goes really fast.

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    1. A Latin nerd, how nice. Maybe you can persuade her to study Greek in college: “a musical and prolific language that gives a soul to the objects of sense and a body to the abstractions of philosophy,” as Gibbon said. Also the language in which the life and words of our Lord were recorded, though that wouldn’t have cut much ice with Gibbon. In many ways, the most valuable thing I learned in school.

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      1. y81 said,

        “Maybe you can persuade her to study Greek in college”

        It’s not at all out of the question.

        I’m just nervous about accidentally enabling a classics major.

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  4. Bike tour starting next week. Down the Main, probably from Schweinfurt all the way to where it joins the Rhein at Mainz. Leisurely pace, too. Changing the starting point from Bamberg becuase of train connections shaves two stages from the trip, so we will not have to hurry at all.

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    2. I have been in Schweinfurt. 🙂 My husband’s cousins live near there and run a kitchen design business in the town.

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    1. OOoh. Westminster Abbey is already on the list. I bet the boys would love the mining museum. Let me figure that out…

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  6. I’m having a lovely vacation in Manhasset, NY. Not. I’m actually back in a hospital with my mom, who is having some BP/cardiac issues and fell and hit her noggin and thus now has neuro issues as well. We need to break her out of here within 36 hours so she can make it to my niece’s graduation. FTR, I effing hate everything about North Shore Hospital. I also hate the LIE and Old Country Road.
    Meanwhile, my son is on a bus on the way home from what looked like an amazing 5 day cruise to Bermuda (the band kids go once every 4 years to perform and get adjudicated and have fun).

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      1. She got a surprise discharge last night. Right now she is miserable from caffeine withdrawal. She has been ordered to give up caffeine, cigarettes, and alcohol, which, together with cake, comprised her 4 basic food groups. It’s like living with a bear (I am here till Monday as she needs 24-7 care, being a fall risk).

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