Useful Planning Resources

• The Great Britain book in the Eyewitness Travel Guides series: We love this series of guidebooks, as they are filled with beautiful photos and illustrations in addition to loads of descriptions of attractions and a useful travel tips section in the back. The only downside is that it’s a hefty book, so you might want to leave it at home when you actually go on your trip.
• Rick Steves’ Great Britain: This guide may not give you a comprehensive list of attractions or lodgings and restaurants, but it provides detailed, personal walkthroughs of many of the top attractions and points you toward some not-so-famous attractions as well. It also gives practical advice, such as providing you with different suggested itineraries for a particular region depending on how much time you have or giving you tips on how to save time/money and recommendations on where to eat.
• National Trust Web site: Many of the historical attractions in England are owned and operated by the National Trust, and the organization’s Web site offers some good resources for planning your visits, such as suggested itineraries and theme tours.

Attractions

See my post reviewing the places we visited on our September 2010 trip to England. The main piece of advice I’d give is to definitely make sure you spend some time in the countryside, not just in London or other big cities. London has impressive museums and buildings, but beyond those attractions, it is in many ways your typical big city — lots of traffic, big department stores, lots of stylishly dressed people hurrying to and fro, bad air, and warnings about people snatching women’s purses. The countryside, on the other hand, really shows you something that you can’t find just anywhere else. Plus, it’s amazingly beautiful and charming.

If you are planning to see a lot of different attractions in a few days, you might look into getting the Great British Heritage Pass. The pass is good for either 4, 7, 15, or 30 days (more days = more expensive) and covers a huge list of attractions all around England. It worked out well for us, as we paid about $185 for two seven-day passes and saved about $40. The bulk of the savings came at three expensive attractions: Warwick Castle (overpriced), the Shakespeare houses (way overpriced), and Chatsworth House (well worth the price). There is also a London pass that works on the same principle, but since many of the top attractions in the city are free, paying for that pass didn’t make sense for us.

What to Pack/Carry Around

• As little as possible: Travel light. You’ll be thankful for it when you find yourself in a Tube station that has not yet been made handicap-accessible and have to lug your bags up two flights of steps. Hauling two big suitcases through the Tube station provided more weight-lifting than I had done in years. Find a lodging option that has or is near laundry facilities and save yourself some luggage space.
• Comfortable shoes: England is very walkable, and you will be doing a lot of walking.
• Water: When you go out for your day of sightseeing, bring a bottle of water with you. For a country where the tap water is safe to drink, England has a confounding lack of public drinking fountains. I can probably count on one hand (and definitely two) the number of drinking fountains we came across during our two-and-a-half weeks in England. Even when we went into a mall, we didn’t see a drinking fountain.
• Umbrella/rain jacket: For about half of our stay in England, the weather fluctuated between sunshine and light drizzle, often in a matter of 30 minutes.
• A change holder: Guys, unless you want a big pile of coins clanging around in your pants pocket, bring something to hold change in (or do what I did — give it to your wife/significant other who carries a purse). The smallest bill is a 5-pound note, and you almost never get change back in bill form. Those one-pound coins add up quickly.

Transportation

Heathrow Airport

We flew into Terminal 3, which I believe is the international terminal. Be aware that the customs line takes a long time. We stood in that line for about an hour, and it’s a good 10- to 15-minute walk through the terminal to the train and bus station. Throw in the fact that the runway at Heathrow is often backed up, and it’s a good idea to to leave at least two hours between your flight’s arrival time and your ground transportation from the airport. When we were leaving England, it took about an hour to get through all the checks and into the gate area.

To and from Heathrow Airport

There is no shortage of ground transportation options to and from Heathrow. At the start of our trip, we took a coach from Heathrow Airport to Bath, and at the end of the trip, we took the Heathrow Express train from London out to Heathrow. The Heathrow Express was very comfortable, convenient, frequent (once every 15 minutes), and fast (only 15 minutes from Paddington Station). I would definitely recommend it if you are going between the airport and London.

London Underground

We took the Tube everywhere during our week in London, and it was very convenient. Every place we needed to go in London could be reached with no more than two line changes and within 15-20 minutes total. There was always some engineering work being done that led to some line/station closures, but it never foiled our plans since most stations, especially the high-traffic ones, can be reached by multiple lines. When you go into a station, make sure to check out the message boards at the entrance that list the service disruptions planned for that day and keep an ear open for announcements about closures.

If you are going to be in London for more than a day or two, I would definitely recommend getting an Oyster card, which gives you lower fare than if you pay by cash. We averaged at least three Tube rides a day for our six days in London, we ended up each putting about 25 pounds into our pay-as-you-go Oyster cards, including the initial $3 for the card itself. The card also works for a number of other systems, such as trains, buses, and boats. You can top up the card with cash or credit card at one of the auto-ticketing machines at any Tube station, but some of these machines might not be able to read American credit cards, in which case you would need to go to the ticket window.

Be aware that many Tube stations are not handicap-accessible as you have to go down several flights of steps to get to the platform and there are no elevators. London is in the process of upgrading more and more stations to address this problem, probably because the Olympics are coming to town. The steps-free stations are marked on Tube maps, and you can pick up a copy at any Tube station to help you plan.

Trains

There are frequent train services to many of the major and not -so-major cities and towns, making it easy to get around England by railroad. We took the train from Stratford-upon-Avon into London and from London to the small town of Dorking, which lies an hour outside the city. The trains themselves were nice. The seats were comfortable, and the cars were pretty sparsely populated outside of rush hour. The signage at the stations and on the trains, though, were kind of hit-or-miss depending on which line we were taking. At the station in Stratford-upon-Avon, for instance, we couldn’t find any signs telling us what train is at which platform, but the stations and trains on our trip to Dorking had excellent signage. In any case, the staff at the stations and on the trains were very helpful. The conductor on the first leg of our trip from Stratford-upon-Avon, for instance, detailed for us the different connections we needed to take because of a service disruption on our route.

We observed that locals seem to use the trains more as a commuter system, and the luggage space reflected this. The overhead racks were so small that we couldn’t even fit a full duffle bag up there. There were some floor racks at the end of the car for large luggage, but they didn’t hold that many pieces. Most of the people on the train only carried a briefcase or backpack. Fortunately, since these trains seem to be rarely packed, you can most likely find some empty seats on which you can stow your suitcases.

The operation of the train system also seemed kind of Laissez-faire. Only on one of the five trains we took did someone come around to check tickets, and at quite a few stations, you could literally walk from the streets onto the platform and then onto a train without showing a ticket. On the plus side, if you miss a connection, no sweat. Most tickets are “Anytime” tickets, which means you can ride the trains on that route at any time that day, and there are usually at least one train per hour for a route. It really is much more like a subway system in the aspect that once you get into a train station, you can switch lines as much as you need until you exit a station.

A few things to keep in mind when booking your train:

• Often a trip will require changing trains, and sometimes part of that journey will be made via bus. When you search for tickets online at the National Rail Web site, be sure to look at the details for your journey to see how many train changes it includes and whether there are any bus rides involved.
• You can order tickets online, but unless you live in the UK, you won’t be able to have them mailed to you in advance. Your only option is to choose pickup at a train station. However, some train lines don’t have automated ticket machines at Heathrow Airport. For instance, we originally wanted to take a train from Heathrow to Bath, and we found a route for that. However, when we were in the process of booking the trip, we found out that the first leg of the journey is a bus ride from Heathrow to Reading, where we would then take the train to Bath. The problem was that the company that’s running the train from Reading to Bath doesn’t have a ticketing machine at Heathrow, and we needed to have that ticket in hand to be able to get on the bus at Heathrow. We opted for a coach ride all the way to Bath instead, and it took only an extra half hour or so.
• To collect your tickets from an auto-ticketing machine, you need the confirmation number for your order and the credit card with which you purchased the tickets. Some of these machines may not read American credit cards, in which case you would need to go to the ticketing window and ask for help.
• Before you go to the train station, check the National Rail Web site to see if there are any disruptions and changes caused by engineering work. Our journey from Stratford-upon-Avon to London, for instance, went from one train change to three train changes plus a little bus ride thanks to engineering work. But then a staff member at the station told us an alternate route that took us into a different station in London, which was just as well and saved us a little bit of time, and we were able to cut out one train change and the bus ride.

Driving

Oh boy, driving. Having driven around England for 10 days, I’m of two minds on the subject:

• Why you shouldn’t drive: The streets are ridiculously narrow, especially by American standards, and the traffic patterns can be confusing. In the cities, parking can be hard to find and expensive. Also, renting a car is expensive and gas is super-expensive (about three times the cost in the U.S.).
• Why you should drive: There are parts of the beautiful countryside that are more easily reached by car, especially in the Cotswolds. Also, driving does take you to a lot of cute small towns and past scenic landscapes, as long as you manage to not clip too many hedgerows. It also gives you the flexibility to visit a number of different places in one day rather than be limited by the schedule of a tour bus or spend a chunk of time waiting for public transportation between towns.

My verdict? If you are planning to spend most of your time in one or two cities/towns and only make a couple one-day excursions that cover one or two places, you probably can and should do without a car. The cities and towns we visited were all very walkable and generally had pretty good public transportation systems to get you around within the city limits. Take a train or join a bus tour for your one-day excursions.

On the other hand, if you plan to spend a good amount of time hopping from one place to another, especially within the same day, then a car becomes more important. For instance, having a car of our own allowed us to leave at 5:30 a.m. to catch Stonehenge at sunrise, then drive to Avebury, Lacock, and Glastonbury Tor all within the same day, something that probably would be difficult to pull off through just public transportation or via a bus tour. During our trip, once we were situated in a town, such as in Bath or Stratford-upon-Avon, we never used the car except for trips going outside the town.

If you are going to rent a car, here are some tips:

• GET A SMALL CAR!!! We opted for a Ford Focus, and I was very glad we didn’t get anything bigger. The roads in England, especially in small towns and in the countryside, are very narrow. Imagine a one-lane, one-way American street with a small shoulder, add about a foot or two to that, and you have a typical two-way, two-lane road in England. A small car also comes in handy when negotiating the super-narrow parking spots in England. Seriously, if you are fat, you would have trouble getting out of your car because you won’t be able to open your door more than a quarter of the way without hitting the car next to you.
• Get GPS, preferably with voice directions. It’s about 10 pounds a day if you rent a unit from the car-rental company, but I bought an England/Ireland map for my Tom Tom for $50, and it more than paid for itself in the first two days alone. The usual benefits of a GPS unit are amplified when you are driving in unfamiliar traffic patterns, on narrow roads with breakneck bends, and on streets where the street signs are not easily spotted. During my entire week of driving in England, I didn’t look for even one street name, partly because I was too busy trying to stay off the curb and partly because the street signs were never in the same place from one intersection to the next. I just turned when my GPS told me to turn. The best thing about my GPS was that it gave very clear instructions for roundabouts, and believe me, you’ll need it.
• Speaking of roundabouts, remember: Stop and yield to traffic coming from your right at every roundabout. If you are going left or going straight through a roundabout, you should generally stay in the far left lane. If you are turning right, you should be in the right lane until after the second exit (which goes straight through the roundabout) and then signal and get into the left lane and exit left at the third exit.
• Get insurance: Check to see if your credit card company offers insurance for renting a car overseas (and whether you feel it’s enough). If not, you can also look into buying a vacation car-rental insurance policy from some place such as Travel Guard, where you can get $35,000 of coverage for 10 days for about $100. If you have insurance, be sure to decline the much more expensive CDW from the rental company when you are filling out the paperwork at the counter.
• Watch out for speed cameras. General speed limits are 30 mph within cities and 70 mph on the motorway, but keep a close eye on speed-limit signs and signs indicating the presence of speed cameras. From what we’ve read, cops in England don’t usually lie in ambush waiting for speeders. Instead, that dirty work is left to cameras, and if those catch you speeding, they’ll send you a ticket through your rental-car company. And these cameras must work well, because every time we saw a speed-camera sign, all the cars around us, even those that were flying down the road a few seconds earlier, immediately put on the brakes and slowed to exactly the speed limit (no going 5 or 10 mph over the limit here).
• There will be times when you absolutely will have to pull over to the side of the road and wait for oncoming traffic to pass before continuing. Some of these roads are unofficially designed to work that way, especially those with on-street parking that turns an already-narrow two-lane road into a super-narrow 1.5-lane road. While driving in the Cotswolds, we went down two-way roads that could only fit one car and had wider shoulders every few hundred yards so that people can pull off to one side and yield to oncoming traffic. Oh, and there will be times when you need to scrape some hedgerows to avoid oncoming cars.
• Don’t feel the need to go as fast as the speed limit. It’s positively suicidal to be going 60 mph down some of these narrow two-lane country roads with hairpin turns where you have no vision of what’s coming at you on the other side of the curve and no way of knowing if oncoming traffic is veering into your lane to get around parked cars or cyclists. So just drive at the speed that you are comfortable with. Fortunately, most of the drivers we encountered were relatively defensive and generally gave us a wide berth, whether out of courtesy or fear.
• Avoid driving in cities as much as you can. Parking is a pain and so is traffic. Besides, it’s far easier to walk or take public transportation within the city anyway.
• Before you go, read up on the rules. Most of the signs are relatively easy to figure out, but it helps to understand the traffic patterns. Directgov.uk has an online version of the highway code, which explains all these things.

Cycling and Walking

The English countryside is made for sightseeing on fewer than four wheels. If you have the time and are physically up to it, renting a bike is a great way to see some beautiful landscapes and adorable towns and villages. You can also go for a hike along one of many public footpaths that take you through private fields and backyards. I would recommend against biking in a busy city like London, where there’s just too much pedestrian and motor traffic for you to actually enjoy the ride.

Dining

• When eating in a restaurant, don’t feel bad about not tipping. It’s simply not expected here unless you receive amazing service.
• At a pub, you generally just sit wherever you want and order at the bar (though a couple of the pubs we went in had waiters greeting people and taking their orders).
• Water is not automatically served. You have to ask for tap water.
• Often, you will be tended to by more than one waiter as there doesn’t seem to be a one-waiter-per-table arrangement here. However, you often have to pro-actively flag someone down, especially when you want your check. I don’t think it’s a case of waiters ignoring you or being too busy, but rather that they don’t want to seem to rush you out the door. For instance, in one restaurant in London, the waitstaff was attentive throughout the meal. But when we were clearly done with our food and just sitting there, no one came to ask us if we would like the check, even though there was only one other occupied table in the restaurant and four waiters were standing around. We eventually had to wave to them to ask for the check.
• Our food blog has posts on the highlights and lowlights from our culinary experiences in England.

Useful Mobile Apps

• Tube Map: While you can simply pick up a paper Tube map at any Underground station, this app gives you a nice route planner, as well as live status updates for the lines you need to take on your route. The status update needs an Internet connection, but the map and the route planner don’t, which is handy.
• Pocket London: There are a lot of map apps for London, but this one is focused on the attractions, and they are marked more prominently on the map and are thus easier to find. The app also provides an index of attractions for easy browsing, and each entry includes an introduction about the attraction and a “Map” button to show it on the map. The app also offers several themed tours. And the whole thing is accessible offline.
• City Walks apps: I downloaded the lite version for the London, Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Oxford apps in this series, mainly because they provide offline maps. Each app also includes a number of themed tours of the cities.
• UK Map: Another offline map app, but the advantage with this one is that you buy only one app and then you can download map tiles for whatever area of England you want instead of having to download/buy several apps. It’s particularly useful for areas of England that are outside the main cities and towns and are therefore not likely to be included in city-specific map apps. One drawback is that it seemed to be a bit of a battery hog, as my iPod’s battery got drained pretty quickly while we were using this app a lot to navigate around the town of Dorking.

Miscellaneous

• Roll with the more laid-back attitude, even from businesses dealing with customers.
• When in doubt or in a rush, call instead of e-mail. In my dealings with various merchants and B&Bs in making reservations for the trip, I found that many were not the speediest in returning e-mails, but they were always very nice and helpful on the phone.
• Be aware that some attractions are not handicap-friendly, especially the older monuments. Check their Web sites or call in advance to be certain.
• Remember: You are almost always on CCTV, so behave.
• When staying in a B&B or a homestay, be a good guest and remember to turn off the lights and unused power outlets when you leave. The Brits seem to be very conscious in this respect, and all the power sockets have an On/Off switch that shuts them off and prevents them from leaking power.