Traveling with my father

Obviously this post is coming a little late. The end of my time abroad went in an absolute blur. On May 19 I took the last of my final exams. Fingers crossed that it went well. I won't know until at least July 3; that goes for all of my classes. I believe it was the night of May 19 when I hopped on a bus to Heathrow Airport.

But it is not what you think.

I was not going to Heathrow to get on an airplane. Rather, I was going to meet my father, who was coming to spend my final week in England with me, traveling. Up to that point I had actually seen very little of England itself. I pretty thoroughly explored London, obviously, and the area around Egham. I had also been to Brighton. I had been to Wales (2x), and Scotland; but that is not England. I had been to Italy, Switzerland, and France; but that was not England. So Dad insisted that we would rent a car and drive around England.

Yep. Rent a car.

So we did. Luckily we had a GPS, so the navigation part was a lot easier, and we could focus a lot more on driving. In other words Dad could focus more on driving and I could focus more on telling him that he was driving on the wrong side of the road.

He actually fared very well, and we got to see an awful lot. The trip hit the following locations in a whirlwind week:
-Stonehenge and Avebury
-Bath
-Oxford
-Forest of Dean (on the border with Wales; we visited some people Dad had met when he was working in Holland during the stone age)
-Lincoln
-York
-One last day in Egham. One last trip to Tesco. One last trip to the Happy Man. One last sticky toffee pudding.

Avebury standing stone and two ugly guys
(pic at top of page is Lincoln Cathedral)

The trip was a great success. We stayed in bed and breakfasts scattered across the country, except for the one night we spent with the Phelps, Dad's friends, who were generous enough to host us on about one day's notice when we got stuck without a place to stay (we hadn't anticipated that it was a bank holiday weekend when we were traveling). We saw a whole lot of stuff, were stalked by references to Bill Bryson, ate some good food, didn't die while driving. It was all good.

The trip's end was thus: we spent our last night at RHUL, and took the bus to the airport in the morning (we had dropped the rental off the day prior, and taken the bus to RHUL). Of course, we had to catch the very first bus of the day, which came at some ungodly hour like 5:17 am. That is obviously not the approximation I made it out to be. As if that were not early enough, we had to walk across campus to the bus stop to begin with... carrying four suitcases. Oh, yeah, and to make sure the university left a bitter taste in my mouth, housing refused to let me check out of my room the night before leaving. I had to go sign the paperwork in the morning as I was leaving. So at 4:30 am I found myself talking to this night security guy at the "reception." The process that was so important for me to do in the morning as opposed to at night? Sign a piece of paper. Honestly.

Nevertheless, we caught our bus, navigated the gargantuan airport (largely due to the fact that I had navigated the same route a week earlier as I went to retrieve my father upon his arrival), and boarded our plane without issue. I was entertained in flight with the likes of Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino, and the comedy Paul Blart: Mall Cop (okay... maybe I wasn't so entertained). And that was it.