Summer Travel Plans

Over the course of the last ten days, Andrew and I—and everyone else—have made our travel plans for the summer.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Andrew and I consulted with his brother in Denver about summer travel. We consulted with my sister about summer travel while we were visiting my family in Oklahoma (one of our graduation gifts to my sister is a summer trip). We have been consulting with Andrew’s parents, too, about summer travel. They are keen to go somewhere.

We have continued to consult with everyone about travel plans, nonstop, for the last ten days, and on Sunday we made our decision.

The outcome of the consultations: we will take only one trip this summer, but we will make it a significant one, and all six of us will go together. Our destination will be Southern England.

Andrew’s brother, who loves Great Britain, will be delighted with this vacation, even though he has already seen practically everything we plan to visit (and seen everything more than once in the case of most attractions).

My sister initially seemed cool on the idea of Southern England, but when she started reading about what we might visit there, she became more and more enthused to the point that now she is ready to leave tonight.

Andrew’s parents look forward to a couple of weeks in Southern England, both because they have not visited Southern England in many, many years and because they heard about the many interesting Southern England travel experiences Alex and Andrew enjoyed in years past. They will be able to experience these pleasures themselves this year with their sons, with the added advantage of not having to worry about hotels and transportation and such, since Alex and Andrew—those two old travel pros—will take care of all the planning.

I will be delighted to visit Southern England, because I have never visited any part of the U.K. except for London.

Andrew is perfectly happy to visit Southern England again—he says he is content to visit everything a second or third or fourth time, and that I will love everything we plan to visit, and that my sister will love everything, too. He also says that his parents will enjoy this vacation very, very much, and that Southern England is perhaps the best destination we could have chosen for our time period, the first two weeks in August, when it will be better to be in the English countryside than in London.

We will depart Thursday evening, July 31. We will spend eighteen full days in the U.K., and fly home on Tuesday, August 19.

Andrew and I have been assigned the responsibility of confirming opening days and times, as well as researching the histories, of the many sights on our list. We will do that over the next month or so. We will enjoy doing that.

We will visit abbeys, cathedrals, churches, castles, museums, towns and villages, historic attractions, and see a great deal of the English countryside.

It should be a lot of fun.