Oh, boy, do I know about this. Six (ye gods, SIX?) years ago, I decided to do a month in the UK. I spent a bit over a week in London, with day trips to Oxford (where Steve Wright, a Doper at the time, showed me around Oxford and took me punting!), Sutton Hoo (near Ipswich/Woodbridge, and **GorillaMan **showed me around Woodbridge, introduced me to beer (I didn’t like it) and Yorkshire Pudding (I liked that)), Dover, and a special tour group that took me to Avebury, the West Kennet Long Barrow, and Stonehenge … and we got to go INSIDE the circle, too, which most tourists aren’t allowed to these days. And I shouldn’t forget that the Londopers took me on a pub crawl my first day in the UK, as well as tour guiding me around a bit of London and walking me right through a sidewalk book fair. Check the NADSboards, a lot of the Londopers, past and present, hang out there.
After I left London, I spent
[ul]
[li]a couple days in Bath, [/li][li]a couple days in Cornwall (near Tintagel), [/li][li]a brief couple hours in Exeter on the way to [/li][li]a couple days in Hay-on-Wye (there was a week long book festival, very famous, it’s May 27-June 6 this year), [/li][li]a couple days in Conwy (I REALLY recommend that. It’s the most complete medieval walled city remaining in Europe. There’s also the Smallest House in Great Britain in the city proper, Plas Mawr, a restored early Elizabethan house, and Bodnant Gardens are a quick bus ride away), [/li][li]a couple days in Edinburgh (another Doper showed me around there!), [/li][li]a day up in Inverness, including a half-day tour up to Urquahart Castle and a boat ride back on Loch Ness, [/li][li]a couple days in Durham, where I was lucky enough to catch a local to Newcastle so I could take a special bus that traveled Hadrian’s Wall), [/li][li]a brief stop in York (TOO brief, damnit), and then back to London.[/li][/ul]
I’d hoped to get to Ireland, but there’s too much to see!
Anyway. Advice. You can easily spend a week in London just visiting museums and historic sites. I highly recommend getting the tour ticket that lets you ride all three tour lines, as it lets you travel a large part of the city. There’s a LOT of overlap, obviously, but the buses are easy to spot and there’s one coming by frequently. Also, it got me a short trip on the Thames by boat. The riverside view is nice! I also recommend a trip on the London Eye, if you’ve never ridden it. It helps to not be afraid of heights and open spaces on that one.
British Rails sells (or sold) a ticket that you have to purchase BEFORE YOU ARRIVE IN ENGLAND that lets you ride any British Rail train for a certain number of days (the more you spend, the more days you get). They don’t have to be consecutive, and you can ride as many trains as you like in the 24-hour period. This is how I managed to get to so many places. Buying that one ticket rather than multiples allowed me to get from London to Bath to Cornwall to Exeter to Hay on Wye to Conwy to Edinburgh to Inverness to Durham to York to London. I did pay separately for the trips out to Dover, Woodbridge, and Oxford, as I recall, but it wasn’t bad.
Taxi drivers are your friends.
Bed & Breakfasts are great for fairly inexpensive accommodations and the food is almost always fantastic. Some (like the ones I stayed in in Cornwall and Wales) also include evening meals because they’re either a bit out of the way (I stayed in Rowen, not Conwy) or the town just isn’t that big (Tintagel).
Take several camera memory cards with you. I wound up having to cull I took so many pictures, which meant I lost all the pictures I took of the Eye’s support structure.
The Tourists Office is great at finding you places to stay if you haven’t found them already and booked ahead. Be aware that there IS a fee for this service. Also be aware that if you want non-smoking accommodations you have to tell them this, and remind them, and then call the B&B anyway to make sure the message got through. At any rate, lots of the B&Bs are online these days and you can make reservations online, too.
If your cell phone can’t go international, it is not a bad idea to get the cheapest phone any of the mobile networks sells on a pay-as-you-go basis. You can top up at pretty much every grocery, and probably lots of other places as well.
The Staffordshire Hoard has recently gone on display up in, I think, the Birmingham area. It’s a much more extensive gold haul than Sutton Hoo, but it isn’t a … coherent one, if you take my meaning. The Sutton Hoo ship burial treasures, btw, are split between the British Museum in London and the Sutton Hoo site.
Note that the rail line between Manchester and Edinburgh passes the Cadbury factory. If I’d known that at the time, I’d have looked to see if they did tours.
Two weeks won’t be enough. A month certainly wasn’t, and I want very much to go back.
