July is upon us, and Olympics fever is starting to build. I’ve been planning a trip to the UK for more than a year, and it’s hard to believe I leave two weeks from today. The seed for the trip was planted sometime last year when we met Neil and Melanie in Paris, and after learning they’d be in the UK for the next three years, I thought there wouldn’t be a better opportunity to attend an Olympic Games than now, with a good friend and a place to stay in the host city. Luckily, Neil wasn’t offended by me inviting myself, and probably thought I wasn’t serious, so he said OK, and I started planning.
Tickets went on sale back in the spring of 2011, and in the first round of the lottery, I applied for about $1000 worth of tickets, and I got exactly two, worth about eighty bucks. It was enough to start thinking about going, but not enough to make it worthwhile. A few weeks later, another opportunity came up, and I grabbed a few more, for events including fencing, table tennis, and handball. Why not go for the events you rarely catch on TV, I thought; they’re also cheaper and less in demand than the marquee events. In February of this year, another batch went on sale, and I purchased a few more tickets, for diving and water polo, as well as my only medal round tickets, for the gold medal match in men’s table tennis.
After a few days in London, I’ll head out on a week-long trip around England and Wales. On our first visit in 1985, we spent a good deal of time in Wales, at least in my memory, but I haven’t visited much since then. I’ve also been making a list of somewhat out-of-the-way locations I’ve wanted to visit and haven’t yet, and I’ll be throwing as many of those onto the schedule as I can fit. Steam railways, museums, castles, and breweries feature heavily on the list.
This will be my tenth trip to the UK over the last 27 years, though tallying up these trips, the numbers seem impossibly low. It’s a lot of trips to the same place, by far my most oft-visited place outside the U.S. (and beating most inside the U.S., too) but still, I feel like I’ve visited many more times than that. As I get closer to heading off to London again, I’m going to take a look back at these previous trips.
Our 1985 trip to Europe is the stuff of family legend. It was my first trip outside the U.S., and included time in Germany and Scandinavia as well as Great Britain. We spent time in London, visiting the Cabinet War Rooms, Hamley’s toy store, and Hyde Park (a few of the more vivid memories). We traveled around England and Wales, as well, from Caterham to Chipping Campden, from Bath to Chepstow.
We stayed in bed and breakfasts, visiting strange and wonderful little towns, and the trip helped both create and feed my abiding Anglophilia. Adolescent pursuits of reading Sherlock Holmes, collecting British stamps, and obsessing over Peter Sellers and Monty Python all came from this trip, and despite the fact that it included a visit the worst restaurant we’d ever been to and the infamous spanking at the Sally Lunn in Bath (don’t ask), I’ve spent my life since the 1985 trip looking for the next opportunity to return.
As Scott and I began to absorb British music and culture from faraway Alaska, we made plans for a number of potential trips over the years, but it wouldn’t be until college, ten years later, that I would return to the U.K.
