scintilla #1 – A First

I’m doing The Scintilla Project, which means I may actually make more than one entry a month. Here’s Entry The First, which is for the First Prompt:
Prompt B: Life is a series of firsts. Talk about one of your most important firsts. What did you learn? Was it something you incorporated into your life as a result? 

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to go to England. The UK has been at the very top of my list since I was a child and obsessed with Scotland thanks to the tales of my long-ago ancestor who a)met the king on the road and refused to salute him or b) was a horse thief on the run or c) perhaps both; resulting in d) sudden immigration to the US, ending with me growing up in North Carolina watching all the British TV I could get my hands on.

A year ago last October, my best friend and I finally did it. We went to England. It was a big first for both of us, and we’d talked about it for years. Neither of us had ever been overseas. Having never been overseas, and having never undertaken such a massive journey, it was a little scary to contemplate. There was also money to consider and neither of us have any, so for ages we just kept saying “We’ll go next year! We’ll go next year!” Until we finally realized that all those next years had turned into ten years and if we were going, we needed to GO. We’d both had some startling reminders that we are in fact mortals and might not be around forever, impossible as that seemed. SO. We started making actual plans that went beyond “we need to make plans!” stage. (A little sidenote: my husband also loves England. He loves it and is dying to experience it, but is a truly terrible traveler, and wants to go when he can stay for months and hike the Lake District. Which means it’s going to be awhile before he goes too. But he was our biggest cheerleader from afar.)

Kim has a timeshare. She’s had it for 20 years and can’t get rid of it. Timeshares are great big wasteful money-slurping pits of financial ruin. But you can trade your Orlando week for a week overseas! If you want to stay in a…. canal boat! Yes, we booked a week in a canal boat, because that’s all we could get. A canal boat in the countryside near Nottingham. For the other week, we of course had to experience London, so we booked our first week through AirBnB, reserving a couple of rooms with a woman who lives in Stratford. And we rented a car for the second week, so that we could drive around and see the sights.

It was tremendously exciting planning the trip, but tremendously scary too since the more you think about it, the more things you realize can go wrong. Really really wrong. Missed flights! Stolen valuables! Lost passports! Passports which never arrive due to the new TSA rules resulting in a passport taking, oh, decades to process! Crashed cars due to renting a stick-shift and driving it all over England on the wrong (to us) side of the road! The AirBnB landlady being a raving lunatic who would chop us to bits and bury our bodies in the garden! Oh, the possibilities of disaster are endless!!

And of course things did go wrong. For starters, Kim brought the most enormous suitcase in the history of suitcases, and it was also over the weight limit. Although she learned pretty much immediately how NOT to pack for an overseas trip, she also had to pay for that mistake for two weeks as she lugged it around in airports and up and down staircases and all over the Tube. But now she knows and it’s funny in retrospect. Well, to me it’s funny. We also got lost every time we turned around in London, had a harrowing first day in the car driving to the marina in which we got lost again and experienced Roundabout Hell, endured a Canal Boat Tutorial in the freezing cold which mostly went “blah blah blah destroy the boat blah blah blah gazillions of dollars blah blah blah insanely complicated blah blah blah hit the lock and capsize blah blah blah hit other fantastically expensive boats blah blah blah your substantial deposit covers nothing!!!” and also got lost a few million times in the lovely English countryside as our BFF the GPS repeated “recalculating recalculating recalculating…”

And all the things that went wrong were nothing but fodder for great stories. It was the best.trip.EVER. We walked non-stop in London, saw touristy things like the Tower of London, the London Eye, the Globe Theatre, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Portabello Road market, Harrods , Kew Gardens, the stables at Buckingham Palace. We saw Wicked at the Victoria Apollo, ate in pubs, drank lovely pints of beer daily, walked across Tower Bridge and back across London Bridge, rode the tube, rode a ferry to Greenwich. The terrace house where we stayed in Stratford was cozy and comfortable, included two cats, and our hosts immediately felt like old friends. We got to live like Londoners for a week.  Then we got to experience the countryside the next week. We chickened out of travelling in the canal boat, but it was lots of fun to sleep on. We drove down to Wiltshire – I was magically transformed into a fearless England Driver and even understood the roundabouts!  We spent two nights in a cheap old gorgeous hotel in Clevedon, on a cliff above the bay that looked across to Wales. We went to Bath, to the Glastonbury Tor, to Avebury and Stonehenge, and saw four of the famous mysterious White Horses, including the most famous and most mysterious Uffington Horse. We got lost a few more times, met an old friend for the first time in Nottingham and another in London, I took over 3000 pictures.

And I have missed England every day since I left. It felt like home. But… we are going back!! We can’t do it until summer of 2013, but we’re already making plans.  And now it’s NOT scary and intimidating. Now I think, OMG, we actually DID all that amazing stuff— we flew to London, we navigated a huge city on foot and on the tube, we stayed with strangers, we asked shockingly kind Londoners for directions (and often didn’t even have to ask; strangers would see us staring at our map and ask us if they could help), we rented a car and drove it in a foreign-backwards-from-us country, we stayed in a canal boat on the River Trent, we learned to use pounds and pence, we… we… we were AMAZING!!! And now we’ve learned how capable we are and doing it again is not a bit scary and intimidating. Doing it again is high anticipation. 

View out my Stratford window: 

Phone booths in Greenwich:

London at night:  

Kim’s Tube picture – much better than any of mine!

Our boat: 

Avebury:

The Glastonbury Tor: 

Bath: