Vicki and I are back from England. Rampant paranoia meant I was cagey about saying we were gone until the house was re-occupied, so besides a few friends-only updates on Facebook, this is my first mention of it in a semi-public place.
Vicki is making a blog about the trip in minute detail, so I won’t go into the minute details here. A few highlights:
- I love driving in England. The cars have very tight and responsive steering, people drive assertively so you can trust that the guy ahead of you isn’t going to do something boneheaded like brake when he should be accelerating into a gap, and as a lefty, I love having the shifter on the left hand.
- Vicki and I both gravitated towards “old stuff”, so we spent much of the time looking at medieval cathedrals, Viking villages, and Roman forts. Very cool.
- The Lake District is beautiful. Not the stark natural beauty of Banff or Yosemite, but sort of a softer, more muted version of the same. (At one point I saw a hill that looked like a smaller version of Half Dome.)
- The ultimate nerdgasm confluence of all those things came together when we drove the road through Wrynose Pass and Hardnott Pass and came across Hardnott Fort, the best preserved Roman fort we’d seen in the entire trip.
What a great trip. I don’t understand why we don’t do this every year. (The bills haven’t come in yet, obviously.)