trips beyond London
 

We are planning a trip to London for July. We have 12 days to spend. Besides all there is to see in London, we want to see the highlights at; Leeds/Canterbury, Bath, Stonehenge, Salisbury, Oxford, Stratford, Blenheim Palace, Warwick. We know we can take tours (EvanEvans) from London out to these places daily. EvanEvans also offers an overnight in Bath or Stratford, each returning to london the next day. We would love to find a tour that takes us out of London for several overnights at a couple of these towns (without having to come back to london to start another one. In other words, we travel to Bath, visiting sites along the way, spend the night, visit Bath the following day and travel on to say Stratford visiting sites along the way, etc, etc. Any suggestions?

I remeber British Airways has some custom vacations in Britain that you can design. So what you do is book hotel at the town of your choice. They also have tours or excursions at those places.

It isn't cheap, but will do what you want to do.

Good luck!

From www.globusjourneys.com site, there is tour called the best of Southern England to most placees on your list. But I am afraid I don't know anything about the tour;besides the land price seems a bit high.

If you don't mind doing on you own,you could base on Oxford two nights for Stratford,Blenheim Place and Warwick. Staying at Bath another 2 nights for Salisbury and Stonehenge,all could easily be reached by public transportation.

From London,you could visit Leeds/Canterbury as day trips easliy.

You've come to the board full of people who are usually do-it-yourselfers rather than joining tours.

We had a car and spent two nights in Stratford (with a trip to Warwick), two in Hay-on-Wye (Wales), and two nights in Bath, passing by Stonehenge and Salisbury on the way back to London. Went thru Oxford on the way to Stratford, but couldn't find anyplace to park, should have listened to the advice to use the park-and-ride!

Learning to drive on the "wrong" side of the road is interesting, but IMHO worth it, as you then had all sorts of flexibility. For instance, we had a child in our group who is an animal lover so we made stops at the National Raptor Center in Hereford and at a countryside wildlife park in the Cotswolds based in an old manor (with rhinos on the front lawn)!

Hi
there is/was a bus route that goes from Bath to Stratford, it was called the X55 Cotswold link. Can anyone confirm that it's still in service?

You could take the above suggestion of picking a couple of main towns outside of London and daytripping from each, even if you don't want to drive.

You could stay in Salisbury, Bath, Statford, and Oxford, returning to London (or going straight to an airport) at the end.

we went to Warwick Castle, it was just great.

Astral Tours has some good itineraries for daystrips out of London. My family is doing a private special access tour of Stonehenge in May. We're also going to Avebury, Old Sarnum and Salisbury. You may want to take a look at their website.