Quarantine is driving me nuts. It has been almost 6 months of really only going out to the grocery store. It has given me perspective on the things I want to get done in life. Aside from meeting a great guy and getting married possibly outside. (I have not decided yet. Botanical Gardens? A destination wedding?) I have plenty of time to decide. But I will say this quarantine has put a spotlight on all the traveling I was going do. So in the way that feels cathartic to me, I am totally going to tell you guys all the places I want to go and what I want to do there. This is, of course, a purely hypothetical itinerary. But I am blogging it to a world since I am giving my friends a break at reading a bulleted list of mine every other day. Indulge me a bit here. Since I plan to turn this blog into a travel blog eventually.

I was in the process of paying for a dream trip to the UK for 2019. I put a bunch of money down but I ended up not going because I had some life events come up. Now that I am passed all of that, taking the trip is still on my list. I have a few coworkers that lived in the UK and they had a lot of tips when it comes to what to do in each country.

The United Kingdom

Now I am one of those let’s do the touristy things tourists but I also want to see things that I can’t google. (Which I know is hard nowadays.) I found a tour group that traveled all over the UK… and their trek seems like a great way to start out.

This would be a 12 day trip and that is great for me because I plan to try and take in all these countries have to offer. So starting with London, England, these are the things I want to do, in no particular order:

Touristy Things

• Trafalgar Square
• St. Paul’s Cathedral
• Big Ben
• The London Eye
• Tower Bridge
• Tower of London
• Buckingham Palace (Watch the changing of the guard.)
• St. James’s Park
• Houses of Parliament
• Shakespeare’s Globe Theater

Non-Touristy Things

• Jack the Ripper Tour with ‘Ripper-Vision’ in London or the Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes Tour of Haunted London

• Covent Garden
• Sky Garden
• Kensington Gardens

• Downton Abbey and Oxford Tour from London Including Highclere Castle (although they are doing a tour of the Downton Abbey set here in the states… but hell I will do both. If you want to do this and aren’t planning on heading to the UK… click this link https://www.downtonexhibition.com/

• Private Tour: ‘Sherlock’ London Filming Locations by Black Cab

• Sherlock Holmes BBC Series and Traditional Locations – A Very Small Group Tour

The next stop on this group tour is Scotland. I have to say I love the idea of Scotland based on two things OUTLANDER… I know. A time travel romance where she falls for red-headed Scot… If you haven’t read the books or seen the show… you have time for both lol. And secondly my supervisor… who was born there. He gives this tour two thumbs up as a way to do your first visit to the UK. So no worries.

So after packing up in London, we board a train bound for Edinburgh. This phrase jumped out at me when I read the brochure. “Journey by train through the English countryside and past the lochs and hills of Scotland.”  So here is my list of things I want to do in Scotland.

Touristy Things

• The elegant Georgian-style New Town and the Royal Mile
• Edinburgh Castle

• Palace of Holyroodhouse

• Calton Hill

• Inchcolm Abbey and Island

• Princes Street Gardens

• Dundas Castle

• Loch Ness

Non-Touristy Things

One of the things that is not on this particular tour is a trip to Inverness. (Where Claire falls through time in Outlander.) I could take a train and still do it but Inverness is about a 4-hour ride… and doesn’t leave much time for exploration. There is another tour that is just the highlights of Scotland a stop in Inverness… which means I will have to figure out where to fit that in. This other Scotland group tour has this addition:

The nerd in me would love to do this day… but there may be only so much I can add to my trip. For my non-touristy list… I have:

• Edinburgh Harry Potter Walking Tour

• Edinburgh Zoo

• St. Mary’s Cathedral

• University of Edinburgh

• Ingliston Racing Circuit

• Culloden Battlefield
• Inverness
•  Jacobite cruise

For the highlights of the UK tour… after Edinburgh, we head out to Liverpool. I am not sure I ever thought of visiting the home of the Beatles… but seeing it on the list has me excited about it. Luckily, they don’t have anything planned on this day so I get to list what I would do for an evening in Liverpool. Too bad we would only be there one day. I have no room to make a separate list.

• Half-Day Peaky Blinders Tour of Liverpool

• The Ultimate Beatles Tour Experience in Liverpool

• Liverpool: 50-Minute Mersey River Cruise

• Liverpool Imperial Tour

• Liverpool History and Culture Audio Tour: Rock out along the River Mersey provided by VoiceMap Liverpool

• Land Rover Experience – Liverpool

Supposedly we hop on a ferry and head to Dublin. We get to travel through northern Wales and stop in the village of Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch. (What a name. Goodness.) And head over to Dublin. There are a number of things that I would like to go to in Dublin… (I have seen Leap Year. It inspired me to check out the Irish countryside. If you haven’t seen it, check out my first quarantine blog on it. In Dublin, I plan to head to:

• Phoenix Park
•  St. Patrick’s Cathedral
•  St Stephen’s Green
• Merrion Square
• Trinity College
• Grafton Street
•  Temple Bar district

We head over to County Kerry and continue making our way through the Emerald Isle. There will be plenty of photo opportunities and I am totally about that. I have a love of old school architecture. So this is the place to be for my love. There will be plenty of photos. I also plan on going to see:

• Rock of Cashel
• Blarney Castle
• Lakes of Killarney in Killarney National Park
• villages that line the Ring of Kerry including the village of Sneem, “The Knot in the Ring”

The final day of this group trip ends in Limerick. We can’t leave Ireland without visiting the Cliffs of Moher. (I always envision sitting my family down and setting up a projector and making them view all of my pictures. I bought myself a travel camera.)

• Bunratty Castle and Folk Park
• The Burren

• King John’s Castle

• Terra Nova Fairy Garden

• St. Saviour’s Dominican Church

• O’Connell Statue

• People’s Park

In the end, this is the trip I have been planning to take for many years. It floats around in the back of my mind. It is definitely going to happen but being in quarantine leaves a lot of time to plan a few things out. I used to try and gather people to go with me. No one I know is as excited about this as me. (Which is usually the case…) I do know that I will be going either way.

So until next time, don’t steal my trip and I shall post again.