Greetings, loyal (I hope) readers. It’s been a while—like since New Year’s Eve. I just wanted to give you a heads-up about some upcoming posts coming your way in late May and pretty much all of June.
Yes, it’s time to travel again. And what a trip we have planned. A full month in Europe will first take us to see two of our oldest and dearest friends, Paul & Gail, in Leeds, England. But before that, we get to try an entirely new airline that will take us from Seattle to Heathrow—Virgin Atlantic. We have never flown with them before, and to make it even more special, we have never (after more than 230 flights) flown on a 787 Dreamliner, but we will on this flight.
When we get to London, we will transfer to Kings Cross station for our train ride to Leeds. That should be fun. We are with Paul and Gail for a long weekend and then we are off on another train to the west coast of Scotland. Both Kathleen and I love everything about Scotland, and since we have spent a lot of time on the eastern coast (Edinburgh, Inverness, Stirling, etc.), we thought we needed to do the west side, including Glasgow, Oban and the Isle of Skye. Here’s what our route looks like.
Once we finish our Scotland journey, we grab a train back to London (actually Greenwich) for a couple of days. While we are there, we are going to do two things I am really looking forward to. First, we are traveling to Richmond to take a one-of-a-kind Ted Lasso tour. This tour goes to all of the places where they filmed my absolute favorite television show of all time. That night, we are back in the West End to see a new musical (that was nominated for an Olivier Award), Kathy and Stella Solve A Murder!
The next morning, we start the BIG second half of our journey, a Viking Ocean cruise down the Thames River to the North Sea to sail to Edinburgh, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, Scotland as well as Honningsvåg, Tromsø, Bodø, Geiranger and Bergen, Norway.
After the cruise and a day in Bergen, we fly back to London (via Copenhagen), where we will spend the night at an airport hotel before another ride on Virgin Atlantic’s 787 back to Seattle.
All this means lots of photography and, hopefully, my usual daily updates for the full month of June. So stand by. We leave on May 30th. I will check in again before we go.
Adventure is just bad planning. —Roald Amundsen