This weekend may have been the busiest, craziest, weekend of my time in England.
I managed to squeeze in three separate day trips in many different directions and only have a few blisters and a slight cold as a result, but I can’t complain about what I experienced.
Lincoln was a school-sponsored trip that everyone had to go on and ended up being the most cold I have ever been. Not only were the tours of the castle and Romans areas outside, they were on snow and ice and the wind was blowing constantly. By the end I was happy to be able to feel my fingers.
The positive was my Baker art history education coming in handy at the Lincoln Cathedral and getting to discuss the arches, buttresses, stained glass, and sculptures that I wrote about in a term paper just a few semesters ago. I finally got to look up and realize I knew what Dr. Knappe was talking about.
My experience in Liverpool was not that of a tourist thanks to a friend of mine from the area meeting Liz Jordan and me for a drink at a café with him and his friends. We spent hours talking and hanging out with them. They are from Norwich. That was more fun than any museum would have been. I also got a chance to reminisce over camp days and talk about how excited we were to go back to camp in June.
We also learned that their only impressions of Americans were the ones at their universities that they only saw doing laundry and talking about laundry. It was only appropriate that Liz followed up this comment by discussing how she really needed to do laundry which led to a 10-minute discussion on laundry in general. Basically, if you run out of socks or underwear then it is a sign.
The last day of the weekend consisted of an amazing trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, the home of William Shakespeare. My meet-a-family is wonderful and the opportunity to visit Stratford was one of the most important places on my England checklist.
The only plans for the day were to make sure we saw the Shakespeare houses and his grave, and after that the day became dedicated to exploring. I was lucky enough to travel with Jackie Albin and see some of the most amazing sites and have an amazing relaxing day.
This was also a day in which the sun came out, I haven’t seen the sun in at least a week, and the weather was perfect. It was almost hard to believe we were in England after the rainy and cloudy two days before.
All in all, if I could compare these cities to their counterparts in the United States, I would say London is to New York as Stratford is to Chicago and Liverpool is to Kansas City. Lincoln is difficult to describe and is more of a smaller area in comparison to the other two locations.
If I could recommend one place to visit in England, it would definitely be Stratford-upon-Avon.
