He will be around at the time, he has no excuse
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Going on a family vacation to Britain, any advice on what to see.
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Most of the posters are missing the point about this being a RAIL based trip, which means that you are governed by
timetables - it is not not the journey length but the time waiting for connections that is the biggest pain
left luggage- you have to take it with you, unless you stay in places for more than 1 night
and places in the coutryside are hell to visit; except the best views of the British countryside are from trains"An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop" - Excession
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Lets see, what have we got in Kent, if you visit Canterbury Cathedral and Leeds castle and enjoy them, you might find it worth visiting Hever castle aswell.
Dover (as in the white cliffs of) castle and Deal castle are fairly interesting but I wouldn't go out of my way for them.One day Canada will rule the world, and then we'll all be sorry.
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Originally posted by Starchild
You're traveling across the UK by train? Brave man.
..except Aberystwyth, but that is impossible to access from anywhere
I would suggest to you:
1) Most of the places that have already been suggested, though Stonehenge is vastly overrated and there's this one roundabout near it that seems to cause traffic to jam for miles around in the middle of nowhere.
2) Wales, especially the mountains. I'd recommend stopping in Conwy (briefly) then taking that line that heads from Llandudno towards Blaenau-Ffestinog (sp?). Sleep somewhere along that line at a B&B, then the next day take a bus through the mountains, possibly doing some hiking. Then return to visiting other stuff. Do this once you are getting pretty tired of seeing castles, cathedrals, churches, etc. (Note: I recommend Conwy because of it's castle, but it's not worth a trip by itself.)
Also getting to Ireland may be cheaper by air than by sea. (Although to achieve this, I flew out of Belfast to Liverpool at 7am on a Sunday. Don't do that.)"The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
-Joan Robinson
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Originally posted by Buck Birdseed
Yeah but then I think York is crap, 'cause I lived there. It kinda taints your viewpoint, I suppose.
But OTOH York is really quite crap (dubious-vintage heavily restored city walls, awful brutally-architectured cathedral, artificial viking "experience", ugly medieval town centre, ugly part of the country, boring people, awful commerce. Pros: some good drinking holes.) and Newcastle is actually really nice, at least for a day trip. Best place I ever visited while in Britain I think.
The Jorvik Centre is no more nor less 'artificial' than any other attempt to reconstruct a historical past- from the pilgrim settler villages in America to the son et lumiere shows at the Pyramids, or the honey feasts in Rotorua.
I owuld also suggest some other often overlooked sites- Buxton is extermely pretty, with a stunning Georgian crescent, and Bakewell (home of the famous tarts) has some lovely churches dating from Anglo-Saxon times, as well as being surrounded by gorgeous scenery.
If you go to Dublin it does have rather more than the vast Guinness brewery to offer, but it tends to be as pricey if not pricier than London in some respects. Glasgow will repay the effort of visiting with the Rennie Mackintosh heritage alone worth the journey.Vive la liberte. Noor Inayat Khan, Dachau.
...patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone. Edith Cavell, 1915
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Don't forget a visit to Essex, the only county where every one is actually a hairdresser named Sharon from Basildon.Exult in your existence, because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only one species, and only a minority of that species; but there lies hope. [...] Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence [and the] gift of revulsion against its implications.
-Richard Dawkins
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somerset has some lovely countryside and good beer (and cider ). mike h is bang on, places like yorkshire and somerset are very, very different, but they're still unmistakably english.
if you make it to wales, then go to the gower (nr. swansea) some of the nicest beaches in the country, the brecon beacons are well worth a visit, even though you're with the family, there is one more thing about wales you should try. welsh girls."The Christian way has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found to be hard and left untried" - GK Chesterton.
"The most obvious predicition about the future is that it will be mostly like the past" - Alain de Botton
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