London, Manchester, Brighton, and Everything In-between

Top of the morning to ya!

Here is the long awaited blog post about my trip to England! Now, before you get all excited about hearing the tale of some dazzling trip where two adorable Americans skip across the pond and have a magical adventure in the land of the triple H's (Harry Styles, Harry Potter, and Prince Harry), there was one, teeny, tiny, insignificant detail I have to mention before we can get to the good stuff...

Our flight out there got cancelled. Yep, you heard me right. Our flight from Denver to Reykjavik, where we were supposed to catch a connecting flight to Heathrow, which was supposed to depart on thursday, May 28th at 5:20 pm, got cancelled.

I'll spare you all the gory details, but basically Kaitie (my best friend who was going with me to England) and I were going to miss at least one full day of our trip. Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but when your trip is only seven days long to start, missing one day cuts your trip down by almost 15%, and that first day in England was supposed to be spent meeting with my University (see previous blog post), with our second day there being spent sight seeing around London. 

I ended up spending two hours on hold with Icelandair before finally reaching someone and getting Kaitie and I booked on a United flight to Chicago where we would connect to British Airways, destined to get into Heathrow at 10am on Friday, May 30th. 

Well, now that we have that done, let's move on to the good stuff, shall we?

London Day 1

London is one of the most amazing cities in the world, and is by far the largest city I've ever been to. Our flight landed at around ten in the morning to a typical English sky. After working our way through Heathrow and down to the tube (and having to get just a teeny amount of help getting through the automatic gates the first time), we were successfully on the Picadilly line bound for Cockfosters (bless you, Britain). 

After transferring lines, we made our way down to southwest London where our Airbnb accommodations were. Sidenote: Booking our accommodations through Airbnb was one of the greatest decisions Kaitie and I made on this trip. We met some of the most amazing people and stayed in some truly incredible places. If you're ever needing places to stay while traveling I highly recommend Airbnb. 

Anyway...

We worked our way through the lovely borough of Wimbeldon/Putney in search of Jo's flat where we would be staying for the night. After successfully navigating our way there (without the use of google maps I might add), we freshened up a bit, petted Jo's kitties, and went right back out to head to our scheduled meeting with the University of Roehampton.

Roehampton was just a hop, skip, and a jump (tube ride, walk, bus ride) from Jo's place. As I stated in my last blog post, the campus of the University was stunning and beautiful and I could have spent hours wandering around the grounds, that is, if I wasn't so dog tired from traveling all through the night. Despite that, we had a lovely tour and chat with our guide, who was the first to inform us in England how much they like American accents over there.

After the tour we hopped on another bus and worked our way towards Wandsworth and the Southside shopping centre. After wandering about for a bit, we settled down to eat our first proper meal in the UK: Nandos!!

If you've never had Nandos, you should probably make your way to one as soon as possible. The atmosphere is fun, it's loud and crowded, and the Peri-Peri chicken is delicious. Also at the Southside shopping centre I had my first encounter with Boots, and it was the beginning of a beautiful (and expensive) friendship.

The University of Roehampton grounds. Beautiful.

London Day 2

After having a relaxing morning chatting with Jo and eating toast with marmalade, we worked our way into north-central London in order to catch our train from Euston station to head to Manchester. When we were on the tube, I realized that our train would be stopping at Baker Street station. After begging just a little bit, I managed to get Kaitie to agree to detour for a little bit so that I could see 221B Baker Street. Stepping out of the tube station in downtown London compared to southwest London was incredible. The sun was shining, the streets were busy, and it was exactly what I hoped London would be. We followed the signs to 221B, took our requisite pictures, purchased the requisite keychain for my sister (at an ungodly price of 5 pounds), and made it back to the tube and on to Euston station with time to spare.

Manchester Day 1

I'm starting to realize that I'm not very good at condensing these posts, so instead of typing every detail about our time in Manchester (which is an awesomely incredible city by the way), I'll try to sum things up a little more.

Train arrives at Manchester Picadilly. Get off train. Notice abundance of children in One Direction shirts. Notice beauty of Manchester Picadilly. Leave train station. Cross bridge. Get lost a little bit. Find hotel. Check in to hotel. Find room. Drop off bags. Leave hotel. Wander about. Find street market. Buy some cool stuff at street market. Have first encounter with Mancoonian accent. Get asked if we're American. Say yes. Wander around the incredible city that is Manchester for several hours. Buy stuff at Lush (!!!). Buy stuff at chocolate store (!!!!!!!!). Get asked several times if we're "ol' right". Say yes. Find our way back to hotel. Leave again. Find place to eat dinner. Turns out to be pizza place. Get sat next to some children wearing One Direction shirts. Chat with cute waiter. Cute waiter starts playing One Direction over restaurant speakers. Jam along silently while sipping coke. Enjoy pizza with fried egg on top. Tip cute waiter. Leave restaurant. Find Tesco Express. Buy maoams and wine gums. Back to hotel. Try wine gums. Decide maoams are better. Sleep. End of day Manchester day 1.

Outside the Manchester City Hall

Manchester Day 2

This was the day. The day this whole trip had been planned around. The day we had been waiting for for over 200 days. We had our tickets, we had our outfits, we had traveled across the fricken Atlantic Ocean. It was time for the One Direction concert.

Okay okay, so that might be an exaggeration, but this concert was the one solid item on our itinerary. And we had purchased the tickets last year... the concert had been a long time coming.

And seriously, the concert was amazing!! I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I am a massive One Direction fan. I have been ever since I first heard What Makes You Beautiful on the radio years ago, and honestly I don't care how old I am or any of that stuff. I like their music, I like those five guys, and that's all there is to it.

We were able to walk to Manchester City stadium from where we were staying, and ended up waiting in line with thousands of other girls in very un-Manchester like weather (it was hot!). We ended up talking to a couple people while waiting, the first two girls had thick Scottish brogues, which were kind of hard to understand to be honest, the second group of girls found the fact that we were American extremely entertaining and ended up sticking by us for most of the night. Well, it was the fact that we were American and also probably the fact that Kaitie was in a unicorn onsie...

Before the concert. Thanks to Nancy, our host in Manchester for taking this pic!

United is better...

I won't spend too long on the actual concert, I'll just say that it was one of the best nights of my life. There was a moment when I stood back and looked around and realized that I was actually there, in Manchester, in Etihad Stadium with my best friend seeing my favorite band. It was a moment I will remember forever.

My five favorite boys

 Manchester, London, Brighton

The day after the concert was spent on trains. A train from Manchester back to London, then switching train stations (via tube of course) and then from London to Brighton. By the time we made it to Brighton we had traveled over half the country and were pretty tired, that is until we saw the view from our hotel room.

The view of the Brighton Pier from our hotel room

Brighton is such a beautiful city, and in such a different way than London or Manchester. London is bright, loud, overwhelming. Manchester is vibrant, exciting, youthful. Brighton is subtle, quiet, serene. We spent our first night in Brighton meandering along the pier and admiring the beauty of the English Channel.

Brighton Day 2

Our second day in Brighton, we were up early to get out and explore The Lanes, which had been recommended to us by multiple people who were originally from Brighton. The Lanes, as we came to find out, are a series of streets from the old city that have been left and became a variety of shops. The Lanes are narrow and winding with beautiful old architecture and an incredible selection of shops. We spent several hours getting lost within the lanes, and eventually popped out right outside the Queens royal gardens down there.

After spending the morning out shopping, we wandered back to the pier to get some fish and chips (best decision ever) and some crepes for dessert. 

After that we wandered back towards our hotel along the pebbly beach. At some point we decided to sit down and just enjoy the waves crashing into the rocks. It was cold, windy, and one of my favorite parts of the trip.

London (again)

Back to London! We only had a few hours (three to be exact) to spend in London this go-around, so we had to be strategic with where we went. We ended up in Waterloo Station, locked up our bags, wandered outside the train station, turned a corner and saw this:

Seriously, I love London. Naturally, we started walking towards the eye, and from there, this is your view:

Have I mentioned how much I love London? Parliament was breathtaking to view. After walking across the bridge we were confronted with enormous crowds outside Parliament. Turns out that day was opening day for parliament and the Queen had been by minutes before we got there. Drat! Despite not seeing the queen, we got to see many of the cars of foreign diplomats and we able to stand for a while and simply admire this amazing building.

From Big Ben we walked around Westminster Abbey and made our way to Trafalgar Square. For being such a big city, the Brits put quite a few of the major tourist attractions within easy walking distance from each other. We easily saw all these sites and made it back to our luggage within three hours. We even had time to stop and buy more maoams! From Waterloo it was another tube ride to our hotel out by Heathrow, and that, sadly, was the end of our last full day in England. The next morning we were up and out of the hotel and on a plane bound for Iceland and then home to Denver. 

Well, That's Just About Everything

So, guess I didn't do a very good job with that whole "keeping this shorter" thing. There was just so much I wanted to say about this trip! But now it's time to finish things up. In closing, I would like to thank my incredible friend Kaitie, for putting up with me on this trip and letting me drag her into every single Boots we saw and for being willing to traipse around England with me in the first place. And to you, the reader, if you have made it this far, thank you once again for reading my rambling thoughts, I hope it wasn't too much talk about food and One Direction.

Cheers!

ALSO, as you may have noticed, this post contained a few British pop-culture references. Well, mostly just references from Love Actually. What can I say, I love the Brits. Okay, I'm done now. Bye!