After the intense and in-depth six months I spent in the UK in 1995, I was ready to return at the next opportunity. My chance arose when I went to Poland in the Spring of 1997 to do research for my thesis, on the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski. My flight took me through London, and on the way back, I stopped over for a few days. This was of course in the days before widespread digital cameras and hyper-documented lives, so I don’t know exactly how long I spent there, or everything that I did. I have nine photos in a photo album, which must have been whatever was left on a 36-exposure roll filled mostly with photos of Warsaw apartment blocks. I hung out with my friend Paula from Amherst, who was studying in London at the time, and I went up to Cambridge to revisit the old haunts, and have tea at the Orchard Tea Garden in Grantchester.

After graduating, I moved to Connecticut and started teaching. A job meant vacation time, and a school job meant spring break, so in 1999, I enlisted my roommate Steve to come on a two-week trip to England, one which would end up covering even more ground than my longer 1995 stay.

We rented a little red Peugeot, and for two weeks in March, 1999, we went everywhere, from Hastings, Dover, and Canterbury on the south coast, all the way up to Glasgow. We stopped in Bath, we drove through Wales, we visited the Lake District and Hadrian’s Wall, we stopped in Liverpool and York, and wandered around Loch Lomond and southern Scotland.

It was a great trip, the first in which I got to know the real length and breadth of the countryside, and its beer output. It was my first experience driving on the left, which was also a lot of fun. I was never in love with hostel rooms crowded full of snoring backpackers, but that’s the way we did it, and it worked.