Trip Report - London and Southwest England
 

We are just back from Southern England and Northern Italy. I will post the Italy report separately. We are not foodies so I won't include much of that.

In London we stayed at the St. Athan's Hotel. This was a triple room with breakfast for £55 (almost a family hostel rate). E-mail [email protected]
The hotel is in the Bloomsbury neighborhood, convenient to the British Musuem the British Library and has good access (Euston St underground station).
Inside is minimal i.e. bath down the hall, no room phone, no room TV and no A/C, but it was a perfect place to get over jet lag in London.

Our flight from Atlanta arrived in Gatwick about 11:00 on Thursday. We took the Gatwick Express to Victoria Station and made our way to the hotel.
Our first stop was the British Museum (my wife's request).

We later got our tour bus worked out. We took a 24 hour pass with Big Bus which included a short boat trip on the Thames. The tour bus had a pick up stop about two blocks from our hotel.
So we did the tour bus thing Thursday pm and I struggled valiantly to stay awake (not totally successful).

On Friday am we saw the Bitish Library (with its two copies of the magna carta). We then got on the Big Bus again and completed our tour of London.

For the end of the afternoon we went to the Imperial War Museum (this is across the Thames from Victoria Station and is not to be confused with the new War Cabinet Room Museum). My wife has a degree in Musuem Operations and said this was the best museum that she had ever been in (since I have read a lot about WWII I liked the museum as well).

We had dinner in London at he home of a relative.

Saturday am we left London for Chippenham to see other relatives (my wife's sister, her English husband and their two children.) Our visit with them was our justification for this trip.

Our first daytrip from Chippenham was to Laycock. Laycock is a thirteenth century village owned almost entirely by the National Trust. There is an abbey in Laycock which has another copy of the magna carta.

Our second daytrip was to the hinge at Avebury. We selected Avebury over Stonehenge because at Stonehenge the rocks are unapproachable. At Avebury you can touch everything.

Our third daytrip was to Salisbury. Salisbury has a wonderful cathedral and lots of National Trust properties.
Salisbury almost holds our fourth and final opportunity to see the magna carta.

Our final daytrip was to Bath. We saw the Roman Baths, the royal crescent and toured their cathedral.

On Wednesday we flew Easyjet from Bristol to Venice. We heard that flights from US to Bristol had recently started (maybe American Airlines from somewhere near New York metro area).

If you are planning a trip to England, then you might study the offerings of the National Trust. In my opinion they do things very well. They have a website and sell printed guide books for maybe US$ 40 (maybe less).

Continental is the airline that has started non-stop service from Newark to Bristol. I was on the 9th flight, on 5/27.

I have a trip report on this board for my trip out to Cornwall, and a flight report on the "airline" forum.