Salisbury Cathedral

Absolutely spectacular.

Pictures will not do the cathedral in Salisbury justice. The building is almost 800 years old and is definitely the biggest church I have ever been to. Yesterday, we went to the 840 year-old St. Mary’s Church in Melton Mowbray and thought it was amazing. Today, we visited the famous Salisbury Cathedral and discovered what amazing really is. Unless I see a better cathedral while in England, I’m going to have you put Salisbury Cathedral on your must-see list.

As a bonus, it houses one of the 4 copies of the Magna Carta, the best preserved of the 4.

As a double bonus, Salisbury Cathedral isn’t just a tourist sight, it is a working church. Stay there until 5:30 and partake in their evensong service. Every evening. The singing was magnificent.
We went to Avebury Stones and Stonehenge today, and Salisbury Cathedral was my favorite part.

Stonehenge vs. Avebury Stones

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a strange race of people: the Druids

No one knows who they were or what they were doing
But their legacy remains
Hewn into the living rock
Of Stonehenge
— “Stonehenge” by Spïnal Tap

Two henges, or stone circles, lie in Wiltshire, England. Stonehenge is by far the most famous, well-known throughout the world. When our kids found out we were taking them to England, the first place they mentioned they wanted to go was Stonehenge. Avebury Stones, however, are a much larger arrangement than Stonehenge (14 times the size, according to one of the guides). We visited both today.

(I know someone is going to complain that a henge is not a stone circle, and that I’ve misdefined the term in this blog. They are, technically, correct, but the correct definition does not materially change the substance of this post. Avebury Stones and Stonehenge are both stone circles and henges.)

(I know, someone somewhere is going to point out that, technically, Stonehenge is not a henge at all. They are right, too, but for the purposes of family-friendly travel, it is an unnecessary distinction.)

At Stonehenge, you park a mile or two from the monument at the visitors’ center, and take a trolley to the stones. You do get a preview of them driving in on the A303, but they really are worth visiting in person, rather than just doing the driveby. Melinda can fill in the details about how to organize tickets, since she arranged all that. I just drove and enjoyed.

At Stonehenge, they provide little audio things that you can hang around your neck and give you commentary and explanations as you walk around the monument. These are helpful, because without them, you may not notice the numerous barrows in the surrounding countryside, and you’ll miss interesting discoveries like that of the Stonehenge Archer. At the visitor center, they also have a mock-up of a neolithic village, where you can go in the huts and see how comfortably people of Stonehenge lived.

And finally, for the military buffs among you, there were frequent flybys of military helicopters from the nearby army base: I saw a Chinook, a Blackhawk, and an Apache buzz us while we were there.

However, the main drawback of Stonehenge is that visitors cannot walk among the stones and touch them. Not so at Avebury. Avebury is far less crowded, and you can park at the carpark and walk right up to the stones, which are spread out around the village of Avebury.

Because of the size of the Avebury stone circle, it is not possible to get a view of the whole circle at once. This is where Stonehenge’s compactness is good for the tourist. However, because it is less famous, the Avebury Stones have fewer visitors and fewer rules. You are absolutely free to touch the stones and climb on some of them. (Perhaps you are permitted to climb on all of them, but most of them are not practical to climb on.) You can tromp all through the fields, going from stone to stone — just watch out for the sheep dung; there are sheep grazing in those very same fields. Surely it must be remarkable for the residents of Avebury who have actual big, massive standing stones in their back yards. Some of the best views of the Avebury stones can be found by climbing to the top of the henge and looking down on them.

So which is better?

• Avebury is bigger, but bigger isn’t always better when you’re trying to fit everything into a photograph.
• Stonehenge was more lovingly crafted. The builders of Stonehenge shaped their stones and actually put a lot more work into balancing the lintels (the top stones) on the uprights.
• You can walk right up to and touch and climb on the Avebury Stones. Bring a picnic and enjoy the country. Can’t do that at Stonehenge, surrounded by thousands of people, as it is.
• More traffic approaching Stonehenge. Apparently, everyone who visits England visits Stonehenge. Most visitors have not heard of the stone circle at Avebury.

My recommendation is to visit both. They are not too far apart, and we had the fortunate happenstance of seeing one of the famous Wiltshire White Horses carved into the hillside on the drive from Avebury to Stonehenge. They are different experiences, and we left Avebury thinking Stonehenge could hardly be better (seeing as you couldn’t walk right up to the Stonehenge stones), but we were wrong, because Stonehenge was just as good.

If you have to visit just one, definitely visit Stonehenge. Stonehenge’s compactness makes it a much more spectacular sight, and when your friends back home ask if you visited Stonehenge, you’re going to want to say yes.

English food

England is widely ridiculed for its food. After 4 days here, I can agree with its critics: England’s food isn’t much. It’s not bad, but it’s really not good, either. You can get any type of food here, and it’s not like they ruin a spaghetti bolognese or anything, it’s just not great.

Their specialty appears to be meat pies: pork, beef, fish. I’ve tried ’em; they’re not bad (they’re just not all that good).

That’s why, when you’re traveling in England, you’re not missing much by renting a cottage with a kitchen so you can cook for yourself. You will also save money that way, too.

Navigating English roads

England does not have the system of interstate highways that we are used to in the US, that make traveling long distances so easy. Unfortunately, every few miles, the highway is broken up with roundabout circles. At a small scale, these are easy to navigate. Unfortunately, on the English highways, some of the circles are large, sometimes with 4 or 5 lanes entering from each side, and you must choose the correct lane or else you won’t be able to exit the roundabout where you want. One of my first experiences with this was up in Oxford, where I was in a lane too far to the left, and therefore had to exit the circle before my desired exit. We have also taken a lane too far to the right, though that turned out better, since we just took an extra turn around the roundabout, turning a full 360 and tried again.

As you approach a circle, you must plan carefully where you want to exit and figure out which lane you want to be in. A few general rules of thumb:

• If you will be exiting the circle at the first exit, choose the left lane.
• If you will be exiting the circle at the last exit, choose the right lane.

Unfortunately, not every circle has a corresponding entry lane for each exit, so then it is just a matter of being very alert and trying to figure it out as you approach. If you have another adult along as a navigator, she can help, but don’t get too upset if she cannot give you the directions you require, since she will be as confused as you. If you take a wrong turn, laugh about it and enjoy the view.

I know in another post I suggested you might want to save a little money on your car rental by renting a manual transmission. However, I strongly recommend that you pay the extra money to get GPS in your rental. England is not like the US, where you get on a freeway and follow it to your chosen exit. It would have taken us twice as long to get around without a GPS, since we would have taken lots of wrong turns and gotten lost. The GPS not only saved us from taking a lot of wrong turns, it helped a lot in figuring out which exit to take out of a roundabout, and when we did take a wrong turn, it directed us back on track to our destination. We had prepared for driving in England by printing out directions in Google Maps, but these only help so long as you follow them exactly. Once you go off-track, you are lost.

One surprise to me was that distances and speeds are measured in miles and miles per hour, instead of kilometers and km/h. I had been led to believe that America was the last hold-out against the metric system, but apparently, the customary system is alive and well in England. The top speed limit I encountered in England was 70 mph, so driving speeds are comparable to those in the US. However, I am under the impression that speed limits are more strictly enforced in England than they are in most of the US, since most cars stayed at the speed limit.

Also, if you’re driving the nice English country roads — and I recommend that you do, since they are beautiful — remember that many of them predate the invention of the automobile, and have since been paved, but not widened. Some one-lane roads require you to pull over when you meet oncoming traffic so you can pass each other. In general, drivers are quite polite in this matter, and you should be, too. This situation can also occur on some two-lane roads where cars are parked alongside.

Driving on the other side

If you’re worried about driving in England, driving on the other side of the road, it is not as difficult to adapt as you might fear.You will be seated on the other side of the car, which serves as a reminder that things are different, and since you will be on alert and wary due to the differences, you probably won’t be driving “unconsciously” as you might back home.

As a result, driving is more work in England, but you should remain safe.

Perhaps the one issue I have had with left-side driving was on a previous trip to Australia, where the turning signal and wiper controls were switched; this resulted in a few times when I wanted to signal a turn where I instead turned on the wipers! Our car in England does not have the controls flipped, so this has not been a problem in England.

A few tips, which should be obvious:

• Don’t be afraid to drive a little slower than everyone else, even on a 2-lane road with a convoy behind you.
• The countryside is beautiful, but don’t get distracted.

A final note about driving manual transmission: Rental of vehicles with automatic transmission costs more than that of those with manual transmission. Therefore, you might choose to save money by renting a car with manual transmission. If you are comfortable driving a stick (and only if you are comfortable, of course), don’t be too afraid to rent a manual transmission to save yourself some money. You may be concerned that it will be difficult to operate with your left hand, but I have not found that to be a problem at all. I myself had not driven a manual car in over 11 years, and settled into driving the manual transmission without a problem.

Selecting Luggage

This year, we switched to suitcases with external wheels. I was skeptical about this switch, because I remember the old days — the ’70s and ’80s, when wheeled luggage first came out — the cases (and these were the days of hard cases) with external wheels were more likely to have wheel damage. Forty years on, however, I’m going to assume those problems have been ironed out. External wheels, just by their nature — they’re sticking out — are more likely to be damaged than internal wheels, but I am now assuming that the chances of such damage now are so minuscule that the advantages of external wheels outweighs their disadvantages.

And what are the advantages of external wheels?

A single person can more easily carry two suitcases on external wheels than internal wheels.

The reason for this is that internally wheeled suitcases, in order to be steerable, can have only 2 wheels, since the wheels themselves cannot swivel. In order to wheel a 2-wheeled case, a hard handle telescopes out the top (usually; I have also used suitcases where the handle folds out from the edge), which the owner grasps in order to tilt the case and carry behind him or her. When suitcases had the wheels along the narrow axis, they were unstable, so in the last quarter century, most internal wheels have been placed along the wide axis to provide a more stable base. This means to wheel 2 at a time, you have 2 wide cases in tow behind. Not impossible, but unwieldy.

External wheels can swivel, meaning the suitcase can have 4 wheels and balance on its wheels. Such a suitcase can be pushed or pulled even by your kids, so when flying with children, external wheels are preferred.

Will the external wheels hold up to international travel, or will they succumb to the fate of so many such suitcases 40 years ago? I’m assuming (hoping) that they will hold up, but if they don’t, you will read about it here, on Family Friendly Travel.

Parking

Unless you can get a relative or friend to drive you to the airport, chances are you will be parking in long-term parking. These are usually open-air lots. At some airports, a shuttle bus will be required to take you to the airport from the long-term parking lot; at others, you will be able to walk. Either way, it is always further to travel from the long-term parking lot to the airline check-in, so depending on the size of the family and the amount of luggage you have, you may prefer to drop off the family and luggage at the terminal and then just have the driver go and park the car and return to the terminal by shuttle or on foot. This may or may not take longer, depending on the age and self-sufficiency of your children, and how difficult it is to corral and coordinate the family’s movement over longer distances with luggage. I do not have a recommendation as to which approach to take, as it depends on your situation.

In our case, I dropped the family off at the terminal with all but one of our suitcases, and then parked. I kept one of the suitcases for myself because it would be easier for Melinda and the kids to move inside with one fewer case, and it was no problem for me to carry (or wheel) a single case from the parking lot.

When I parked, I double-checked that all windows of the van were closed tight and that the doors were locked, and then I took a picture of my car and its surroundings (I included in the picture one of the airport signs to orient myself to the location) to assist me in finding it when we return at the end of the vacation. Chances are, I won’t need the picture — we’re only going for 3 weeks — but with a smart phone that takes pictures, it costs me absolutely nothing to take the picture, so there was no downside.

Using Google Maps to plan your itinerary

Initial planning with Google Maps Engine

When we were in the initial planning stage — we knew we were going to England, and had some ideas of what we would do there, but didn’t have the complete plan laid out — we bought a couple of travel books:

• Lonely Planet’s Discover Great Britain
• Cadogan Guides’s Take the Kids: England

We also got AAA’s TravelBook Europe, and, quite possibly the most helpful of all, Melinda joined the National Trust and received their 2014 Handbook. The National Trust is worthy of a separate blogpost. These books are not expensive, and while not wholly helpful (they cannot do your daily planning for you), flipping through them, we were able to get ideas of places to visit while in country.

To help in travel planning, we wanted to plot the places on a map, so we could identify clusters of places that we could visit on the same day. Initially, I had obtained a map of the United Kingdom from my local AAA store and we had thought to circle, flag, or somehow mark places of interest. However, the AAA map is very detailed and England very dense, so it proved difficult to make our marks stand out.

Google has an alternative to its standard Maps interface (maps.google.com) called Google Maps Engine, mapsengine.google.com. With Google Maps Engine, you can create custom maps, so I created one for our England trip, called “England 2014,” and we began plotting on it any place we came across that we might be interested in. Google Maps Engine is not a panacea; some of its pros and cons:

• It does allow you to create custom maps.
• You can mark different places of interest with different icons. We initially marked potential lodgings — this was before we had even decided where we would stay while in England — with a house-looking icon, and since I had some interest in historical battlegrounds, I marked them with an appropriate symbol, but the majority of our places marked were with the standard Google upside-down teardrop. The different icons did make it helpful to identify whether something was really a place of interest as opposed to a place to stay, and it helped us rule out Norfolk as a place to stay, despite our having found some very nice and historic accommodations there; we would have had nothing to do there.
• You cannot print! It would have been a whole lot more useful if we could have printed our resulting map, so Melinda and I could look through maps together and make marks on the paper. In the end, while we used the custom map to identify clusters of POA’s (places of interest), it was not a one-stop shop for trip planning.

Once we had used Google Maps Engine to help us decide where to stay, we then printed out a blank calendar and started penciling in where we would go and what we would do on specific days. This is where identifying the clusters on Google Maps Engine was helpful, but it did not substitute for the books and guides previously mentioned.

For example, we had an idea that on one day we would visit Bath. We actually hadn’t marked very many things in the vicinity of Bath on our map, so we referred to our books, which were generally arranged geographically, and identified Wells, Cheddar Gorge, Glastonbury Tor, and Glastonbury Abbey as places of interest in the vicinity of Bath. So we marked on our calendar for July 1, “Bath, Wells, Cheddar Gorge, Glastonbury Tor, Glastonbury Abbey.”

As an aside, being the nerd that I am, I had thought to create a spreadsheet with the travel times between each POA, and then possibly write a program to plan the ideal order for visiting our places. I abandoned that relatively early, though, for two reasons:

1. It was going to take longer to put the grid together and write the program than it would to just eyeball it.
2. It would have taken the fun and collaboration out of the planning. Part of the fun of traveling is planning it!

Route planning with Google Maps

Route planning is where Google Maps shines. Once we had decided where we would go on a particular day, I could plan our actual routes and print and save directions.

The Google Maps interface really makes it easy to add waypoints on the route and experiment with different orders of stops. For example, our aforementioned Bath day is probably our longest day. (Stonehenge day will also be a very long day.) I could experiment with different orders of hitting the places to find the best route.

When using the Chrome web browser, when you print through the browser’s print dialog, it gives you the option of saving the printout instead as a PDF to Google Docs (if you have an account and have logged into Chrome with the same account). So not only did I print all our routes, I also saved them as PDFs, which I then downloaded to my iPad for good measure. Google Maps also allows you to save your maps with routes and directions to a short, succinct URL.

Google Maps on the iPad

Planning and using Google Maps is best done on a real computer, not an iPad. On my iPad (which I use to compose this blog), I have the Google Maps app installed, but it tended to get in the way, since the web version of Google Maps, which has more features, kept wanting to jump me into the app. And even the web version that you see in the browser on the iPad is not as good as that on a real computer.

However, Google Maps for the iPad does allow you to save areas of maps offline. I have saved some areas of England to my iPad, and I am hopeful that that will come in handy as we’re navigating through the English countryside.