Thanksgiving: Several Hours in a Lobby Eating Fruit Rollups (aka Winning)

Okay, no more teapot posts, however, as a quick preface...  I'd like to inform my dear readers that I just made the purchase of black currant, ginseng and vanilla tea.  Not that you all care.

I pick Boyfriend up from our wee Lancaster train station midday, just in time to drop him off at my flat so I could go to my British Romanticism class, where my old British professor challenged my third-wave feminist attitudes on writing. HAH, picked the wrong girl for that!

I race back to the flat, Boyfriend had insisted we fly to Ireland the same day he arrived ("Oh, might as well get all the flying out of the way, even though you are probably one hundred percent right about flying the next day, but whatever!"  Okay, fine he didn't say the last part), so we had a small window of time to catch a train in order to check in for the flight.

Needless to say, there was a lot of running through the airport, and me saying, "Hey, we should totally sign up for the Amazing Race!" and immediately retracting that statement after sprinting up a flight of stairs.
As you can imagine, because it is my life, we missed the flight.  And all the hotels were booked... Except Travel Lodge: the cheapest, ugliest looking accommodation we've ever seen.

At the crack of dawn on Wednesday, we awake, and get on the 8 AM flight to Ireland!

"You both look so happy!" Happy, mom, yes, we are happy.  Also delirious from sleep exhaustion and just relieved we managed to not screw up this flight

Dublin Town Center: you can also see the Spire Monument in this picture (the giant spike)

Dublin was a pretty cool city.  We did a lot of shopping and I even got to author-stalk James Joyce!  Boyfriend humored me and got me a few trinkets from the James Joyce Center!  I think Larry Stewart and Mazen Naous from the COW would applaud me.

That night, we walked to the Guinness Factory, where Boyfriend took some excellent pictures from the Gravity bar after we had our free pints of Ireland's greatest beer.  Afterwards, we stayed out fairly late (I know his post says 3 AM, but we were definitely in bed by eleven...latest) taking pictures of the lit up city and eating Irish McDonald's chicken nuggets on the bench overlooking River Liffey.

Boyfriend in Merchant's Arch

Photographer in action

And what good would one of my stories be if yet another thing didn't go wrong?

Stupid Dublin ATMs ate my money and left me with 20 worthless American dollars.  So the next morning, I had to call AAA back in America to sort it all out (I was surprised Mom hadn't all made them want to quit their jobs by then).  Boyfriend and I, completely exhausted from running around Dublin, decided to head back to Lancaster.  But first, we needed to get to the ferry.

Boyfriend: "Oh, it's no problem, my super awesome iPhone says that it's just past the river by the Dublin Docks.  We can walk that.  My iPhone hasn't been wrong about anything either."

So I prepared myself for a very long journey:

Yes, I am a dork, thanks for noticing.  And yes, water does come in that ridiculously sized bottle here.

US TWO HOURS LATER

"Boyfriend, we're idiots."

"Yup."

 Oh, and our backpacks weighed like thirty pounds from our Christmas shopping (yes, families, we love you just that much).  We finally made it and then proceeded to spend approximately six hours in the lobby of the ferry waiting room, and mind you, this was on Real Thanksgiving.  But that's okay, because it was pretty hysterical and we were too thrilled to have found the ferry to care.  Also, I made him play ISpy with me as well as micro-manage his game of Solitaire.

But we made it onto the ferry, and the stormy sea made us both a bit motion sick.

Spirits still high despite wanting to throw up

At midnight, we were in Holyhead, Northern Wales!  I've never been to Wales, and even at night it was absolutely beautiful.  I'd live there if it had a Chipotle and didn't have such chilled winds.

I believe this was our favorite part: Holyhead.  It was beyond any beautiful words:

Boyfriend photobombing my lovely picture

Sooner or later, we found ourselves back in Lancaster!  Which everyone will have to wait for that post, so there.

Cheers!

The Saga of Locating Jane Austen's House: Part II

And everyone thought I was going to post about Ireland, but HAH!  I'm just like a bad TV show on the CW, you all will just have to wait.

Waking up in London is possibly the greatest feeling I've had.  The first few seconds pertain to you realizing you are in a hostel bed that resembles a sleeping pod from some cheesy sci-fi film, but the seconds following it are more like: "Wow, I'm in London, England."

Neither of us had much confidence in this adventure to Jane's house, especially after getting to the train station and figuring out that to get to Alton (where her house is), it is an hour and a half train ride.  But we get to Alton.  Oh boy, do we get to Alton.

Reads: "A family lives here, please don't break our windows" Alton made me feel like I was going to get mugged at any second.

Oh, yeah, I was totally going to go into the sketchy alleyway with the murderous looking garage, thanks for the sign, dude!

Yes, we passed these things, and yes, we were terrified.  Halfway through the town, we were guilted into having lunch at a restaurant that resembled my Great Aunt Jo's condo in Florida.  Full of trinkets, cat figurines, and pictures of old ladies.  However, we did get directions to the real house.

Directions that led us down a sidewalkless highway:

Just in case I wasn't going to be shot in Alton, I can now become roadkill on the highway!

Cars and motorbikes zoomed past us at sixty mph, but we were determined.  Finally, we get to Chawton, the ACTUAL town that her house is in.  A beautiful, southern England town that was what I had exactly pictured this county to look like.  Thatched roofs, cobblestone streets, perfectly trimmed hedges, and horse farms with horses wearing adorable blankets.

Totally worth the eight near death experiences, now everyone be jealous please

The house was amazing.  It was worth all of the trials and tribulations.  I saw her writing desk where she edited Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abby, and Sense and Sensibility, and she lived in this house with her sister and mother towards the end of her life.  I also was able to see all of the costumes that the actors wore in the film renditions of most all of the movies!

Afterwards, we went down we went to go see the church she and her mother and sister went to, and it is were Mrs. Austen and Jane's sister is buried (Jane's tomb is in Winchester and was not buried with her mother and sister at this church unfortunately).

This is the giant house that the Austen women often went to visit a family friend.  It was bought and filled with historical furniture but was closed during this hour of the day.

Uh, Jane Austen went here, NO BIG DEAL

Cassandra (Jane's sister) and Mrs. Austen's graves

Completely satisfied with our author-stalking, we ended up home around ten or eleven.  It was one of those trips were it's "all about the story" (as some of my other Wooster friends have already figured out), but it ended up to be in my top three adventures.

When I got home, it was Sunday, and The Boyfriend was coming on Tuesday, so now that I'm all caught up I suppose I can write about our Ireland trip.

...Or my awesome new teapot I bought for seven pounds (yeah, I can write a whole blog post about that).

Just kidding.

Cheers!

Technically, Google Maps Don't Lie

Quite a bit of adventures have taken place, and I swear it that I shall write all of them down for my adoring fans (hah).

Opening on an early morning in Lancaster, bus stop.  The day is November 19, 2011 and the air is cold and unforgiving.  Enter: Annie and Caitlin, two Americans with one simple goal: author-stalking.  No, EXTREME author-stalking.
Basically, Caitlin and I went to London for round II.  It's my brilliant idea to catch the bus early but we ended up waiting thirty minutes in the freezing morning air. 

Two and a half hours later, we step off the train and into LONDON, the greatest city in the world (next to Edinburgh).  Then, it's off to the home of one of stars of British Romanticism poetry: John Keats.

The house was very intriguing.  Keats' didn't have any surviving family members through most of his young life so whatever was left of his legacy remains in this quaint house.  Like copies of his death mask.  Gross.

Then, we decide to step it up to the biggest celebrity of the Romanticism period: JANE AUSTEN.  And hold on, because this story gets pretty wild.

THE SAGA OF LOCATING JANE AUSTEN'S HOUSE: PART I

Spirits high and still full from lunch at an adorable cafe in Keats' hometown, Caitlin and I set onward to find the Austen House, located in Winchester, London.  A thirty minute ride on the tube later, (with an immense amount of changes, thank you) we arrive in Winchester.  We walk around, searching high and low, pretty lost, trying to find Jane's house.  The map gets us back on track and leads us into a newly developed area.  Finally, we ask for directions.

Us: "Excuse me, can you tell us where Jane Austen's house is?"
Girl: clueless "Jane...Austen?"
Us: exchange of mortified glances
Girl: "There's a listing of all the houses over there, sorry I can't help"

Wait.  What?  We look around.  The freshly built apartment buildings have signs that read: Keats' house ("What?  We were just there!  These are apartments!"), Shelley's house, and other glorified writers of the Romanticism period, tacked up on cheesy signs against the white walls of the complex.
Oh, god.  We have directions to an apartment projects area!

Yes, the apartments that stood before us were probably built in 2008, rented out on the cheap, and named after famous writers.  Jane Austen's house in Winchester isn't her real house, in fact, the only thing that remains in Winchester of Jane's are the "supposed" area where she stayed when she was extremely ill and her final resting place.

Determined not to waste the rest of the day, we hit up the touristy landmarks.  I'm sure as you all have expected from a blog called "The England Traveler", here's Big Ben:

The London Eye at night

Then, we decided to go find the hostel because it gets depressingly black at 4-4:30 PM.  This is the next issue we run into: the Holland Park Hostel is IN the park, however, by the time we got there, the park was closed, thus we were wandering this new part of London for about an hour.

The creep-tastic street we had to walk on to get to the youth hostel

We FINALLY found it after hiking through the narrow park-streets for forever.  After dropping off all of our heavy bags, we got onto the tube and went to Queensway, which is were both of us had orientation.  It was strange to be back and to actually know where everything was.  Exhausted, we hit the hay early, with great intentions of actually finding Austen's REAL house the next day.

Stay tuned, there's PART II to come!

Cheers (for now)!