Because life is short & the world is big
We hopped on a double-decker bus for a tour of Bath, England, a World Heritage city about an hour and a half west of London with stunning golden Georgian architecture, historic Roman Baths, an incredible Abbey, the homes of iconic authors Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, and too much more to recount. Then we hopped off and strolled around the historic city centre, finishing with some excellent craft beer. Join us!
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Here are links to many places mentioned in the video:
Here’s a treat for Jane Austen fans: Come meet Mr. Knightly, Mr. Darcy, and Lydia Bennett at the Jane Austen Centre!
Bath is a great literary city, and no trip here is complete without a visit to the Jane Austen Centre. This icon of British literature lived in Bath for four or five years, writing Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. She mentioned Bath in several other works as well.
Lisa takes you on a tour of the Jane Austen Centre, which offers you a snapshot of life during Regency times and explores how living in the magnificent city of Bath affected Jane Austen and her writing. Try your hand at writing using a quill pen and ink or have your photograph taken whilst dressed in our extensive selection of Regency dresses, bonnets and shawls. You can also visit the Regency Tea Room for a few scones and a trip into the past!
You can book your tickets online for about $18 at janeausten.co.uk/.
We visited the Roman Baths while in Bath, England, for our oldest child’s graduation, and gazed upon 2,000 years of history. We also gazed upon a few naked Romans! But Bob was upset that they wouldn’t let him soak in the medicinal water. The Roman Baths are one of the finest historic sites in Northern Europe, according to the Baths’ website, romanbaths.co.uk/.
“Once the site of one of the great religious spas of the ancient world, the people of Roman Britain came to the site to worship the goddess Sulis Minerva and bathe in the waters of the natural thermal springs, which still flow with hot water today,” says the website. “Today visitors can explore the Roman Baths complex, walk on the original Roman pavements and see the ruins of the Temple of Sulis Minerva.
“The museum collection, located next to the bathing complex, includes a gilt bronze head of the Goddess Sulis Minerva, and other Roman artifacts.”
The cost per person was about $23, and you buy your tickets in advance for a timed entry.
Enjoy Bob’s irreverent take on this ancient site!
When we took a Thames River Cruise from London to Greenwich last fall to see the Royal Meridien, we discovered the National Maritime Museum, one of a quartet of the Royal Museums in Greenwich. The others are the Royal Observatory Greenwich, where the Meridien resides, and two others that will have to wait till next time: the historic ship Cutty Sark and the Queen’s House.
The National Maritime Museum takes you on an exploration of British naval history and Imperial arrogance, with a ship simulator, nautical oddities, and interactive games. We loved the giant message in a bottle and the colorful exhibit of ship figureheads. Admission was free.
What a fun discovery! Greenwich deserves more than a day.
Enjoy the video!
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We took a Thames River Tour to Greenwich, England, which then surprised us with a bounty of attractions: The Cutty Sark, the Greenwich Market, the Royal Maritime Museum, and, of course, the Prime Meridien, where East meets West!
It’s a splurge, at 109 pounds ($145 US) a person (plus tips), so if you can’t afford to do it, join us on a Bateaux London dinner cruise on the Thames River! London at night is lit up like a Christmas tree, especially the bridges. (Forgive the background noise in spots, but a lot of other happy celebrants were also enjoying the night!)
London was a whirlwind of walking (averaging six miles a day), taking boat rides (on the Regent’s Canal, the Thames twice, and even a paddleboat on the Serpentine), running in Hyde Park, exploring markets (Camden Town was our favorite), and more.
Lisa enjoyed the theater on four occasions: Hamilton (excellent, again), Pretty Woman (okay but needing a little work), Back to the Future (surprisingly clever), and SIX (phenomenal).
We visited Greenwich and straddled the Prime Meridien.
We toured Tower Bridge.
We went to the top of the Walkie Talkie Building at sunset.
We embraced the iconic Madame Tussaud’s.
We climbed the Marble Arch Mound, and discovered a laser structure museum inside.
Lisa visited Kensington Palace.
We took a narrowboat ride on the Regent’s Canal.
We visited Camden Market.
We looked at art in the National Gallery.
We visited the Natural History Museum.
When we got back to Vermont, we literally collapsed from exhaustion.
We’ll be going back in April when we attend Aryk’s COVID-delayed graduation from Keele University. There’s still a lot left to see!
In September, we giddily embarked upon our first international trip since COVID brought us back from Mexico City, the latest destination in our traveling retirement, quite abruptly in March 2020. We took advantage of our oldest child, Aryk, restarting their education to carve out two weeks in England!
Aryk had deferred graduate school for a year due to the pandemic, but with two vaccines in their arm and a trove of masks in their suitcase, they were eager to begin pursuing their master’s degree in Creative Writing/Poetry at Bath Spa University in Bath, England.
So the three of us flew to the UK in mid-September. Lisa and Aryk headed to Bath, Lisa driving white-knuckled on the left side of the road to Aryk’s uni lodging, while Bob settled into a condo in London to explore for a few days on his own.
Bath is a stunning World Heritage City about two hours west of London. It has a lovely old center of town and a lively culture. While we were there, the city was hosting a major Children’s Literature Festival. We movedAryk into Student Castle, and did the shopping and exploring they needed, with little time left for sightseeing.
Bath is named after its Roman-built baths, and is renowned as a well-being destination. It’s located in the valley of the River Avon, a scenic, winding river with a path that I enjoyed during an early morning run.
Bath also hosts a scenic stretch of the 87-mile-long Kennet and Avon Canal, which runs from London to the Bristol Channel on the coast. I ran or walked on its dirt towpath several mornings. One day, Aryk and I happened upon it after shopping at Tesco Express just before sunset. The light on the buildings made from golden Bath stone was truly captivating.
Just as interesting to me was the narrowboats tethered along the canal, in which people lived. (Note the bikes lashed on top.)
These are working canals, albeit an incredibly slow mode of transportation, and I was fortunate to witness a narrowboat navigating an 18-foot-deep lock called the Bath Deep Lock, the second-deepest lock in the country. Watch my video on the Messy Suitcase YouTube channel! (And please subscribe while you’re there.)
I definitely plan to return to Bath for a tourism visit someday!
Happy Valentine’s Day! We wanted to celebrate the annual day of love by sharing the story of our love locks.
A couple of weeks ago, Bob and I attached a little gold padlock to the new Love Lock Bridge near the Riverwalk in San Antonio to lock our love forever, then kissed and took a selfie to mark the occasion. On our lock was written in Sharpie “RG & LH,” inside a hand-drawn heart pierced by Cupid’s arrow. The bridge was actually a chainlink fence along the San Antonio River, but it was covered with hundreds of locks of other couples declaring their undying love.
It was the 15th time we have declared our forever love by placing a lock on a bridge. Normally we are not super-sentimental people, but love locks are a ritual we have grown to cherish during our travels, leaving our mark on bridges and walls all over the United States, Europe and Mexico (so far).
It all started in the summer of 2016, when I was planning to accompany Gavin’s scout troop on a week in the romantic city of Paris. Before we left, Bob gave me a padlock and asked me to write our initials on it and hang it on the Pont des Arts Bridge, which was famous for having so many lovers’ padlocks affixed to it that it groaned under the weight, and authorities had had to cut them off. He had seen the bridge during a weekend he spent alone in Paris during a business trip, and thought it would be nice to have our own lock there.
Surprised and touched by this rare sentimentality, I happily obliged. After the troop set off for the next leg of their trip, Switzerland, I went down to the River Seine and searched for the love locks. The city had decommissioned the Pont des Arts Bridge in 2015 because of the weight of the locks, so I went to the Pont Neuf. It was covered with thousands of lovers’ padlocks tumbling down the banisters and onto the railings of the river walls beyond. Across the River Seine from where I stood was a magnificent view of the Louvre. I locked our padlock, blew a kiss to Bob across the ocean, and took pictures. I’m sure if the locks get too heavy, authorities will cut them off again. But until then, RG & LH will grace the Pont Neuf in Paris, the city of lovers.
It was a grand, and small, gesture of love. It felt good. It made me think about why I had married this man, what we had experienced together, and how special our life was.
Three years later, we were visiting my brother Patrick in Hamburg, Germany, and walking along the Elbe River when we saw another bridge covered with lovers’ locks. We didn’t realize the tradition had expanded beyond Paris. Since we were leaving the country the next day, we went and found a hardware store to buy a lock, wrote RG & LH with a Sharpie and enlisted Patrick to hang it for us. A few weeks later, he sent a photo of our lock on the bridge. (Thanks, Pat!)
And with that, we were off, searching for love lock bridges, or creating our own, everywhere we went, together or apart. While on a five-week tour through Europe, we hung locks everywhere.
In London, we strolled across the pedestrian Jubilee Bridge and listened to a street musician playing Caribbean steel drums while we snapped our padlock in a spot all its own and kissed above the Thames River.
After a long day of sightseeing as a family in Rome, when Gavin’s and my feet were aching from miles of walking, Bob trekked back in the rain to hang a lock over the Tiber River.
Farther south in Sorrento, on a solo weekend trip while I was off doing genealogy searching with some Italian cousins, Bob discovered an iron fence with love locks along the Mediterranean coastline about a mile from his hotel during his morning run. He spent the afternoon searching for a padlock and a Sharpie, but a torrential downpour forced him to wait to return until the next morning, when a break in the rain gave him time to quickly walk there and fix the lock in place before heading for the train station.
In Greece, during a daylong boat trip, Hydra, an idyllic fishing village where bleached-white houses climb up the mountainside from the azure Mediterranean, offered herself as an entrancingly scenic host to our love lock.
The tradition continued when we returned to North America. First, we affixed a love lock to a bridge in Ludlow, Vermont, where we have our second home.
Then we headed down to live in Mexico for the first six months of 2019. During a two-night on break the road trip south, we took the streetcar to hang a lock on a chain-link fence in New Orleans, under a banner that read Love Locks NOLA in front of the Eiffel Society, a club built from parts of a former Eiffel Tower eatery.
When we came to Mexico in January 2019, the first city we stayed in was Leon, where we found the Puente Del Amor (love locks bridge) at one end of the Causeway of Heroes, a wide pedestrian walkway that serves as the gateway into the old city. After spending an afternoon looking for ferreterias (hardware stores) to buy a padlock, we put our lock through the padlock of another lock at the top. The bridge looked down upon a highway, with mountains in the distance.
We never found a good spot in Tlaquepaque, where we lived for four months, or Guadalajara, the city next door. But we visited beautiful Lake Chapala, half an hour south, for a day trip and walked out to the end of a fishing pier to hang our lock on a rusted turquoise railing overlooking Mexico’s largest freshwater lake. On the way, we had been stopped by announcers for a local radio station who were broadcasting live, and thus posed for the obligatory selfie in our new orange Guadalajara T-shirts.
By far the most interesting place to hang our lock was the magical town of Guanajuato, where there’s an alley so narrow that people can kiss from across two balconies. There’s a tragic legend of a young man who was killed for stealing a kiss from the daughter of a rich man. We put up our lock and kissed across the alley. (Fortunately, Bob survived.)
We lived in Vermont during summer 2019, and took a couple of trips to Montreal, Canada, hanging one lock on a bridge overlooking Gay Village and the other on a small bridge in the main pedestrian area along the St. Lawrence River, looking out at a huge Ferris Wheel.
When we visited The Farm, the family homestead in the mountains of Central Pennsylvania where Lisa’s paternal grandmother grew up, we hung a love lock from the rusty metal rope that secures the entrance to the old lane.
We were occasionally thwarted in our efforts. In the beach town of Cambrils, Spain, there was no official Love Locks bridge, so we scouted the promenade along the ocean but never found a spot where we could thread a padlock. There was an official Love Locks spot in Barcelona, but we didn’t have time to visit it. We have looked several times while in Burlington, VT, but have not yet found a spot for a padlock.
Part of the tradition of the Love Locks is to throw the keys into the river to seal your eternal love, but we don’t do that because we don’t think it’s good for the health of the fish or the river. Thus we still hold all the keys to each other’s hearts.
Click on each pin to see an image of the lock in its home!
We have just arrived in Mexico City and are looking for a place to hang our 16th lock. We’ll keep you posted!
Enjoy the video of our love locks experiences on the Messy Suitcase YouTube Channel. Happy Valentine’s Day!
(We leave for Mexico soon, so we have to quickly churn out some of the European blogs we have in the can.)
One of the things we did in almost every city we visited in Europe was to take one of the Hop-on, Hop-off (hoHo) buses. We did it in Barcelona, London and Athens. I had a great time on them. Here’s the story!
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| View of the playa from the Barcelona HoHo |
When we got back to the starting point we walked with Lexie back to our apartment to give her a little break, and Lisa and I went back and took Route 2, which took us up onto the mountain, past the Olympic facilities, and then stopping at a Decathlon store for a little shopping before finishing well after dark.
We thought the HoHo buses were a great way to get an overall orientation of Barcelona, since we only had a couple of days. They allowed us to pick and choose where we would get off, and gave us ideas for what we wanted to explore in future days.
In London, Lexie and I again took the HoHo while Lisa went to the Warner Brothers Harry Potter studio. We started on top of the double-decker bus, as that always gives the best views, but it was just a little chilly for that and we eventually moved down inside. Since we had already been to the London Eye and were planning on doing something the following day with Lisa, Lexie and I essentially used the HoHo as a HoSo (Hop-on, Stay-on). We did get off in some now-forgotten neighborhood to have delicious fish and chips for lunch, and eventually got off at Buckingham Palace to walk around a bit.
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| Grand view from the top of the London HoHo |
The London routes are pretty long and the literature told us that the routes would take over 4 hours in total, but by now it was getting close to 5:30. We were planning on staying on for another 15 minutes or so to meet up with Lisa in Trafalgar Square, but we were unceremoniously booted off the bus at Green Park and were told that the buses stopped running at that time. This was quite the shock to us since we had only days earlier ridden the Barcelona buses to well past 8 PM. Nonetheless, we were off the bus, and at rush hour, forcing Lexie and me to take a long walk to Trafalgar Square, essentially ruining our nice relaxing day of butt sitting and sightseeing. Nowhere in the literature did it mention the early stopping time, again a contrast with the Barcelona buses. I was quite mad, but there wasn’t anything we could do (except warn you!).
Rome has HoHos and it was our plan to take them. However, once we got there, examined their routes and did some research, we realized that they weren’t as convenient as Barcelona and London and didn’t get as close to some of the major tourist destinations as we would have liked due to city congestion and restrictions. Instead, we took the Metro and walked. Other than the information we might have heard during the tour, we don’t feel like we really missed out on anything.
The HoHo was just a block from our hotel in Athens, so we hopped on again the first day and got a great overview of the city. We saw some places we wanted to get off and visit in more depth. After going around the route, Lexie returned to the room and Lisa and I went around again so we could get off at the Olympic Stadium and walk to the Temple of Zeus, where we got some excellent sunset pictures. We finally made our way back to the hotel by walking through the Plaka, an old neighborhood with excellent shopping.
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| Rushing by Hadrian’s Arch on the Athens HoHo |
The next day we used the HoHo as transportation to get us to the National Archaeological Museum. It is considered one of the greatest museums in the world and contains the richest collection of artifacts from Greek antiquity worldwide. Given its reputation, we were surprised at how few people were actually in the museum. We stayed for several hours before getting tired and hungry and recatching the HoHo to get us back to our hotel.
In summary, we loved the HoHos. Sure, they’re touristy. But they are also a great way to get around, get an overview of a new city and get an idea of places you’d like to go back to and spend more time getting to know.
