After an incredibly emotional goodbye to Spain, my friend Jemma and I embarked on our very last adventure: The United Kingdom.
Jemma’s family lives in the UK, so she is spending the next month visiting various family members, and I was invited to tag along for a week before going home to the States.
We flew into Heathrow and got picked up by a car service (very fancy, I know). Our driver was this cute little old man, and while Jemma went to stop at an ATM, I was standing waiting with him and he looked me up and down and said, in the most British accent you can possibly imagine, “you look right dreadful, love.” I mean, he wasn’t wrong. I had only slept about 3 hours in the past 24 hours, so “dreadful” was a pretty accurate description of my current state. It was absolutely hilarious, and I just laughed and said “yeah, I do don’t I!”
We somehow piled all of our luggage into the car, and drove about two hours to West Sussex, to a city called Chichester. Jemma’s Aunt Susan and Uncle Basil live in a cottage in Ichenor, a part of Chichester. It is a rural, sleepy little village in the English countryside. Their cottage (if you can call it that, it was huge and absolutely gorgeous) was about a 10-minute walk down a quiet, windy road to an inlet, and about a 15-minute drive to downtown Chichester.
Jemma’s aunt is a local politician, and we were invited to join her aunt and uncle at their yacht club for some sort of fancy gala. We got all dressed up in our cocktail dresses and heels and walked to the yacht club, and we found that we brought down the average guest age by about 40 years. Even though it was an older crowd, we still had a good time talking to everyone. Everyone there owns a boat or a yacht, and most of them have sailed around the world at least once, so they all had amazing stories. Of course, being the only Americans there, we answered many questions about political things, like our healthcare system, taxes, and the oompah loompah we have in the white house.
The dinner was amazing. The first course was lobster bisque, followed by venison, and for dessert there was chocolate cake with a shot of orange liquor. We were also served some really amazing wine, so it was a win. It was fun getting all dressed up and acting fancy for a night.
The next morning, Jemma’s cousin (who is in his 30s) dropped off his three kids, Sebastian, Harriet and Arabella. They are 5, 8 and 11, respectively. Jemma and I babysat them for the day. We took them to a local coffee shop called the Quarter Deck, decorated some Christmas decorations, watched their favorite YouTube videos, played hide and seek, and helped with some homework. It was such a fun day, and at the end of the day they drew us little pictures and wrote us notes saying they loved us. I honestly wanted to adopt them.
That night, Susan made an amazing venison stew for dinner. I had never had venison before this trip, but I like it, it’s really healthy and has good flavor. For dessert we had something called Banoffee pie, which is just banana and toffee. So good. We had started drinking wine with Susan at about 2pm, and that continued well into the night. People in Europe have such a different view of alcohol, which has been really interesting to learn about. Drinking isn’t seen as as much of a bad thing, but more of a regular social thing. Even little Harriet and Arabella knew all about different kinds of wine, because their parents taught them. It isn’t seen as a taboo thing, which is really nice.
We spent the next day exploring downtown Chichester. First we walked about 10 minutes down the road to an inlet, with beautiful views of the water.
Then, Susan took us downtown and showed us around the building where she works, the district city council, which was really cool to see! She then left us, and Jemma and I spent the afternoon wandering around downtown.
Chichester is really small, it’s literally just four roads: north, south, east and west. It was basically exactly you would expect a little village in the English countryside to be. It was kind of rainy, lots of cute little brick buildings, pubs, tea houses, an old church, everything. I loved it.
We went inside and explored the cathedral (since that was a regular thing we did in Spain) and then got lunch at a great pub called the Old Cross. I ordered Bangers and Mash, a traditional English dish, which is basically just sausage and mashed potatoes. What’s not to love? It is the ultimate comfort food, and it was even more perfect eating it in a cozy little pub on a rainy day.
We explored some more shops, and then got tea/coffee and scones at a tea house. The scones don’t taste the way they do in the States; I don’t know how to describe it, but they were SO good.
That night, Jemma and I went to dinner at a pub just down the road from the cottage with Susan, for the quiz night. The pub does it every Monday night, and all the locals come and participate. It’s actually a really big deal; we had to reserve spots on a team and everything. I had bangers and mash for dinner again, and of course, lots of wine. I was on a team with Jemma, Susan and one of Susan’s friends, who’s name I can’t remember. The questions were actually really hard! We knew a lot of them, but we still came in second to last. Oh well.
The next day we started out by walking three miles to Susan and Basil’s second yacht club, where we had lunch. It was a really gorgeous walk.
Later, we went back to Chichester, and spent more time shopping and exploring. We went to a Jack Wills store, and I bought myself a cute passport cover. We went to a modern art museum and saw an amazing exhibit by an artist named Bomberg, and we got some yummy coffee and hung out until the sun went down. All in all it was a successful day, until we went to take the bus home.
We were supposed to take either the 155 or 153 bus until we got to the stop with the gas station. We were told it would be really obvious, because there was only one gas station on that route. We got on the bus, told the driver where we were getting off, and sat down. About 15 minutes into the ride, despite telling the driver where we had to get off, we watched as a gas station came and went, and our bus just kept right on going. We got off at the next stop and realized we were literally in the middle of nowhere. There was some Italian restaurant and an auto-repair place, and then nothing. The bus stop didn’t have a name, and none of the tiny buildings around us gave us any indication of where we were. Basil had to drive along the bus route until he found us. Although we were finally in an English-speaking country after three and a half months, this was the most trouble we had with public transportation throughout the entire trip.
But hey, we survived.
The next morning, Basil drove us to the train station, where we began our trip to London. Getting on the train and making the transfer was extremely challenging with all of our luggage. I still have bruises on my knees from trying to get my suitcases on and off the platform, but somehow, we made it to London with all of our suitcases in tow.
Idly Wild 