Scotland 2023: Planning the Trip
A Note
I wrote this log in multiple phases, some during the months of pre-planning, some while we were there, and some after we came back. As such, tenses shift a lot. I’m not planning on cleaning this up, however!
Planning
Oh, boy! I outdid myself for this one! This trip was the culmination of FIVE YEARS of planning and many (many, many, many) iterations. Original planning for this trip began somewhere around 2018 or so, when we realized that Andrew would be off to college in the autumn of 2023 and we could once again think about travelling as just the two of us rather than as a family. Scotland had long been on both our lists, so I began to look around at attractions and consider how a trip might be blocked out.
Somewhere along the way I stumbled across the website www.britainexpress.com, which had a massive wealth of information about attractions around the British Isles, including rating them on a “heritage scale”. Since the historic import of an attraction is something I care about, I began to collect a huge amount of info from this site and started to build up a large database of possible things to see and do. By the time I was done, there were roughly 1400 different places that were “in the neighborhood” of where we might go.
A few assumptions I was making about the trip. We would:
a) Start in London
b) Rent a car
c) Drive our way north making a series of overnight stops over 4-5 days until finally arriving in Edinburgh
d) Stay in Edinburgh for 3-4 days
e) Return home
Examining each of these assumptions was, of course, part of the overall planning process and I considered MANY different scenarios.
Could we avoid renting a car and instead take either a packaged tour and/or use train rides to work our way north? Train rides were ruled out pretty early as I realized that too much of our time would be eaten up by the train travel process, including having to get to/from stations. (I admit to also being heavily influenced by the writer Bill Bryson, whose chronicles of trying to use the railway system in an economically declining UK made it clear that service was pretty poor and getting rapidly worse.) We’d also have to plan our lodging to optimize for proximity to the train station and we’d be extremely limited in where we could go in a given town. We’d have to use taxis or buses a lot. Ultimately, this just wasn’t going to work. I also looked into a couple of packaged tours that took care of moving us via bus to various destinations, but organized tours just aren’t “us”, so I abandoned that line of thinking early on, also.
Could we avoid London entirely and fly to/from Edinburgh directly? None of my planning actually toured anything in London. We only were there because that’s where Heathrow is. So we could, theoretically, have flown directly to Scotland and used it as a base of operations, and/or made the trip in reverse direction, starting in EDI and working south to LHR. While Edinburgh is a place we really wanted to go, limiting to trip to ONLY Edinburgh wasn’t enough – I, at least, still wanted to see sites in England. Working south would have meant that the driving-heavy parts of the trip would have happened at the end. This was less attractive to me than front-loading all the driving at the start of the trip and being able to relax more at the end of the trip (since we could drop the car as soon as we arrived in EDI and then simply wander around the city mostly on foot for several days), so LHR to EDI sounded more attractive than EDI to LHR.
Could we fly into LHR but out of EDI and avoid going back to London? To fly back out of LHR, my initial thinking was that we’d take a train from EDI back to LHR and then catch a flight. This was do-able although a bit complicated on timing because we’d have to arrive in London the day BEFORE our outbound flight, but was the operative plan for a long time. Later in the planning I did consider just flying back directly from EDI, but the Kayak flight options all turned flying days into 18-22 hour days and routed through places like France or Copenhagen. Even worse, I couldn’t find a carrier that was flying the B787-900, which was the only one that had seats wide enough to make us happy. Late in the process I discovered that Kayak wasn’t showing me Virgin Atlantic (VS) flight options. VS uses B787-900s and still seems like the best carrier SFO-LHR, so I started looking at them – and found that we could fly from EDI to LHR and then step aboard VS’s flight LHR-SFO in a pretty seamless way, so that became the final plan.
As to WHAT to see, that was an iterative process of looking at the options, looking at a map, considering driving routes and schedules, and the whole myriad of options. Most of the plan fell into place pretty organically. The “anchor site” was the town of York, to see “whatever”, so the travel plan was designed with that in mind and other sites were selected simply because they made the most sense of our route and available time. While we’d end up seeing “Abbey” or “Historic House”, there were no particular “must see” sites on those lists – we’d be happy with whatever abbey or house made the most sense. There were MANY plan permutations before finally settling on the schedule we did follow.
Then, when COVID hit in 2020 I stopped planning because, as 2020 turned into 2021 and ANOTHER year of shutdown, it because clear that not only were we forced to re-think our comfort level for a 2023 trip, on a more practical level I was unable to do a huge chunk of the research that I love to do. Why? Well, not only were tourist sites switching over to COVID schedules – meaning that a lot of info about visiting was simply pulled down but, even more frustrating, hotel and restaurant info was hard to come by. Restaurants, in particular, pulled down their normal menus because they were forced to cater more to take-out offerings. So I couldn’t have fun (and also stockpile useful info) like I normally would by looking up stuff on the web. Sigh.
It wasn’t until the start of 2022 that I once again slowly picked up the planning process. This was driven by a combination of factors, the most significant of which was that in a post-vaccine world it was possible to again start realistically thinking about travel – even if we were still unsure about a possible trip in late 2023. Restaurant menus started returning to “normal”, although not always as quickly I would have hoped. Fortunately, the two year planning hiatus had restored my enthusiasm for the process and I made several tweaks around the flight planning (this is where I rediscovered the Virgin Atlantic flights) and some of the ground travel plans. The most significant of the latter was swapping out a day that would have had us doing to drive-by of Lindisfarne and tweaking a couple of days to try to make them less driving-heavy. I also condensed the schedule by cutting out the 4th day in EDI – while it could be easily restored, I felt like the original 4th day wasn’t that interesting to begin with and we’d probably already be pretty tired and would welcome coming home a day earlier.
In October 2022 I really got energized and gave the plan yet another look. I completed a survey of the attractions in Northumbria, County Durham, and Yorkshire that I’d never gotten around to researching earlier – and this had a huge impact, since I essentially filled in large parts of the map we’d potentially be travelling through with missing data. This allowed me to “see” our potential routes much more clearly, and I got a more firm handle on a route that took in a nice variety of places without having to deviate too much to the east or west of our main route northward. I also starting considering a longer trip (adding a few more days of travel between London and Edinburgh to reduce any long driving days).
I also realized a couple of things about York. By going in October we’d likely be missing the normal tourist crush. This meant that I did NOT have to avoid hotels in the city center out of fear about trying to park our car. I’d been planning to use a hotel outside of city center and using the Park and Drive services to get to the attractions. Instead, I realized I could put us into one of (rare) city center hotels with onsite parking – and then WALK to the attractions. Not having to account for shuttle schedules really simplified planning for York.
One of the new destinations became Alnwick in Northumbria. This location just naturally fit into the slow-paced routing I used. Amusingly, I recognized this area not from prior surveys of tourist attractions or historical knowledge, but rather because the area was the home of the Harry Potter family in a series of fanfics written by the author Northumbrian. His knowledge (and love) of the area came through his stories very strongly, and therefore I gave the attractions here more attention than I otherwise might have – and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had no hesitation about including some of them in the planning.
As far as Edinburgh itself was concerned, I kept going back and forth between 2 full days and 3 full days in the city. I ultimately settled on two on the presumption that a full day on the Royal Mile was more than enough time to experience “core Edinburgh”. I was able to find both a free Rick Steves audo tour and a local guide’s free audio tour that, when mashed up, seemed to offer up a really entertaining tour. Steves focused on the sights of the Mile, while the other tour took you into several of the Closes that intersect (and offered up some wonderful history, architecture, and social history notes). I was able to feed the various MP3 files through Microsoft Dictation and automatically transcribe those into a script of about 2 hour’s length that we can read our way through along the way. By meandering our way down the Royal Mile we should be able to easily spend a full day, taking in several key attractions along the way.
So various schedule permutations were tried before I finally settled on something REASONABLY firmed up. As usual, I had a lot of options where we could swap some things for others, but I generally liked the “mix” of choices enough to mostly lock down the itinerary by Nov 2022. I did check in with E on the question of “lots of different towns/new hotel every night with lots of short drives in between” vs “camp out in a few towns with LOTS to do for a few days/change location every 2-4 days with long drives in between”. We both liked the idea of hitting a few highlights in LOTS of places this time around. “Next” time we might focus on a smaller subset of towns – York comes to mind as a likely option, as well as another London-focused trip – based on what we experienced in our little samples this time.
Side note: As I used britainexpress.com as my primary source of potential sites to visit I kept thinking “wow – there are a LOT of castles in the UK.” Then someone tweeted this map, showing the concentration of castles in Europe (with the text “wow France!”). I stand corrected. And clearly my head will explode if I’m ever called upon to create a Spreadsheet of Fun for France. 😊
France will kill me...
I once again set aside planning until late April 2023. By that time we knew Andrew was going to attend CU Boulder so we had some actual dates for getting him to Colorado and getting him installed at school. Knowing he’d be moving in mid-August and starting classes near the end of August we realized that we could realistically push our trip up to September 2023 – so I went to work to book hotels. After a couple of hours I had reservations in place. Unfortunately, I should have booked flights first – because it turned out that our desired Virgin Atlantic flights in September were already pretty heavily booked, and the set of dates I’d based hotel plans around turned out to be terrible for flights. So I had to book flights, then go back and revise all our hotel reservations. Annoyingly, most hotel sites required me to cancel and rebook. Only ONE hotel allowed me the luxury of simply changing dates. A couple of hotels forced me to either email or call them to adjust because I couldn’t even cancel via the web. Grr. A good illustration of the difference of giant US hotel chains with centralized reservation systems vs smaller, independently owned UK hotels with limited IT budgets or expertise.
Flight Planning
Air travel is still very exciting to me. I love the hustle and bustle of airports, and travel by plane is still as exotic to me as it was when I was a kid. However, as we’ve aged there’s no question that air travel has become more burdensome to us. The level of discomfort has increased and we don’t bounce back as quickly as we used to when we were younger. No surprises here – just facts. These days, our physical comfort is MUCH more important to us than it used to be, and as a result of that I spend a LOT of time evaluating flights, looking for the best marriage of comfort to value I can.
This was the first time I SERIOUSLY considered business class. Our last cruise, where E and I flew Delta first class to Miami in order to benefit from their 21” (or maybe it was 22”) wide seats was an eye opener. Those seats weren’t fancy lie-flat seats or anything close to that – they were just WIDER. And that made a HUGE difference to our flight experience. We ruefully acknowledged that we might have spoiled ourselves. So I did look at business class on flights, but we’re still too frugal to splurge on the fares, which are 10x more than economy or 2x-3x more than premium economy. Perhaps someday, but not yet.
So having decided that upper class seating was outside our budget, I did quickly focus on the differences of Economy vs Premium Economy. There was fundamentally no difference among carriers when it came to Economy seating – they were all cramming folks into narrow seats in the 17”-18” width range. Among Premium Economy carriers, there also wasn’t much upside between the carriers – most offered more legroom but didn’t generally offer more width.
Except. Among the carriers who flew the B787-900 plane, Delta (who seem to have noticed that Americans are overweight) offered 21” seat width in Premium Economy. So I eventually narrowed down my flight searching to favor B787-900s with wider seats. We were willing to pay 1.75x for a PE seat vs an Economy seat. We felt like that was reasonable value – even if that was ALL we got over Economy. (Fortunately, PE still brings a few other perks.)
When I picked up planning again in 2022 I realized that I hadn’t seen any Virgin Atlantic (VS) flights in my research. E and I had flown VS on our honeymoon trip in 1998 and had loved the experience, so I visited their website and discovered that the Delta flights were actually operated by VS (and were potentially less expensive if booked direct with VS). Further, a test booking on the VS website of a potential EDI-LHR-SFO trip (where the LHR-SFO leg was the flight that mattered) offered up EDI-LHR options that hadn’t shown up on Kayak. It was this revelation that allowed me to ditch the idea of taking a train from Edinburgh back to London in order to fly out of LHR. We’d just fly out of EDI and connect at LHR for the trip home. While this lengthened the day of travel, it also vastly simplified things and, overall, was a MUCH better plan. By the time I actually booked flights, however, neither Delta nor Virgin still offered an EDI-LHR connecting flight – I ended up having to book a stand-alone BA flight which would NOT check our luggage through to SFO. Upon landing at LHR we were going to have to retrieve our bags and then make our way over to the International terminal to catch our Virgin flight. Fortunately, we’d have several hours to do this.
Finally, after blocking out daily schedules and doing some test flight bookings it looks like leaving SFO on a Wednesday and returning on a Saturday may offer some of the lowest pricing. A Thu/Sat and Fri/Sun pairing seemed more expensive. When I finally make REAL bookings I’ll figure it out…but for now, the days we’re in various locations respects some of the constraints imposed by schedules at various attractions. (When I finally did make the bookings, we ended up flying out Sunday and coming back on Wednesday. The primary reason for selecting this was it allowed me to find pairs of seats in Premium Economy for both directions. The fact that this combo was also about $2K less than some of the other options was icing on the cake.)
I also looked at the logistics of connecting at LHR coming from EDI. It looks like our domestic flight will arrive at LHR T5 but we’ll head back to the US from LHR T3, so we’ll have to move between terminals. I’m assuming that our one-way flight EDI-LHR will be on British Airways and it is likely that we will NOT be able to check our bags to SFO when boarding in EDI. We’ll probably have to retrieve our bags from baggage claim in T5 and then get both our bags and ourselves over to T3 for check-in. (This turned out to be the case. There was no way to book the entire EDI-LHR-SFO journey as a single ticket – i.e. as a single locator number – so we effectively had two individual flights that are NOT technically “connecting flights”. So we must pickup our bags from the BA flight at T5 and we have to use a method of moving from T5 to T3 that is NOT the purple route Connecting Flights bus. Further, once we get to T3 we’ll have to go through security again. I’m still going to leave all this info in the log, however, in case it is helpful for a future trip.) Doesn’t sound too difficult, but will add some time to our inter-terminal travel since we’ll have to wait for our bags upon arrival at LHR.
Upon arrival at T5, we may have up to 10 to 15 minutes of walking if we arrive at T5B or T5C, respectively. Once at T5A, if we have to retrieve our bags we’ll go to baggage claim on Ground Level. Once we have luggage we follow blue directional signage for “Terminals 2,3,4 via Free train transfer”. Along the way we should see well marked kiosks for “Train Tickets” which will dispense tickets. Then follow blue signage for “Trains” and/or “Lifts for Trains”. (The video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caQ84XzxsOM shows this whole process nicely. The ticket appeared to dispense w/o use of a card – just pressed a button. This guy stepped onto London Underground marked as “Next Elizabeth Line via Ealing Broadway”. Once onboard, the train’s signage indicated “Train to Paddington”, although he was only going to another terminal.) Once at the T2/T3 stop he exited and followed clear signage to lifts that took him up to where he chose the path to his terminal.
Once at T3 we’ll exit Heathrow Express on Level -2 and make our way to Virgin Atlantic check-in on Level 0. (The Heathrow airport site says to take the elevator to Level -1 and then take some stairs to Level 0, but this sounds sub-optimal. I’m betting we can take the elevator to Level 0 and – perhaps – have to walk a bit more on Level 0…but hopefully we’ll be able to avoid lugging suitcases up a level of stairs.)
As best I can tell, there are THREE ways to get from T5 to T3. The first two start the same: once we exit baggage claim we look for the signs that will take us DOWN to either London Underground OR Heathrow Express. The choices are:
1) London Underground (Piccadilly line to Terminals 2&3, departing every 10 minutes). Each of us would need a contactless payment method in order to get past the turnstile, although we wouldn’t be charged for the ride as long as we only travel between terminals. Our VISA cards SHOULD work, but either Google Pay or Samsung Pay are options, too. It is roughly a 6 minute walk from the T3 station to the T3 Departure terminal.
2) Heathrow Express (Elizabeth Line to Terminals 2&3, departing at least every 15 min). We can grab a free inter-terminal transfer ticket from one of the machines in the station. It is roughly a 2 minute walk from the T3 station to the Departure terminal.
Both options 1) and 2) take 16 to 20 minutes to go between terminals. Upon reaching T3 I believe we have to once again go through security (yes, this is the case) since we’ll have been outside the secured zone once we step onto the Underground or Heathrow Express. The Heathrow Express seems like a better choice since it is both simpler to obtain a ticket (free machine dispenser instead of needing a contactless card) and an easier walk once at T3 (2 minutes vs 6 minutes).
3) The THIRD method is available if it turns out that we CAN make our EDI-LHR flight an “official” connecting flight – and right now I’m pretty sure we CAN. I probably just need to book directly with Virgin rather than trying to book via Kayak. In this case we should be able to use the Connecting Flights bus service instead. After baggage collection at T5 Level 0 (I think that we can only check through to SFO if booking on a partner airline – i.e. Air France, Delta, or KLM. Since BA isn’t a partner, we’ll likely be issued multiple tickets – and that means we’ll have to collect our bags upon arrival from EDI and then check them in again with Virgin once we get to T3.) we follow the purple signs for “Flight Connections” (skipping the Arrivals lines in T5? Or is the Arrivals line also the line to get to Baggage Claim??). We’ll eventually get to Level 0 on the runway side. We then hop onto the dedicated T3 bus that departs the terminal every 6-10 minutes and takes 10-15 minutes to get to T3. A video walkthrough of this method can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4sVZRpwow.
Car Planning
Nothing special here. We’ve rented cars at LHR before and would once again make use of our familiarity with Budget to get something. (At least, that was the plan until I actually made the reservation in April 2023.) We’d only be driving one way, with the intention of dropping the car off at EDI airport on the day we pulled into town and then get around the city itself mostly via walking or public transportation. Given that everything we planned to see was along The Royal Mile we figured we could pick a hotel as central to that area as possible and only have about 1 mile to tackle on any given day (i.e. walk up to ½ a mile to one end of TRM and then another ½ mile back to the hotel by the end of the day).
On the expectation that I’d be renting from Budget, I took some time to figure out the logistics of pickup at LHR. International arrivals are at T3, which has a Budget/Avis desk in the arrivals terminal. Apparently, all Budget pickups will LOOK like they happen at an offsite facility that’s near T5…but they also have an on-airport pickup depot open 24 hours that services T2/T3/T4 – and you can choose to fulfill your pickup there, instead, REGARDLESS OF WHAT YOUR PAPERWORK SAYS. From a customer service response to an Avis/Budget customer I found: “If you do not book a BA flight at the same time as your car, your pre-paid voucher will show collection from the Terminal 5 depot, but in reality, you can choose which depot you collect your car from. We recommend you check the depot opening hours - in the event that the Terminal 5 depot is closed, you can use the Terminals 2 - 4 location. We do not need to know in advance which terminal you wish to collect the car from.”
For car return at EDI, it sounds likes the process is pretty efficient. There’s a central return center on airport property. Many folks mentioned that it only took them about 5 minutes to complete a drop-off, after which there’s a 5 minute walk (mostly under a covered walkway) to get to the terminal, from where we can hop onto Airlink 100 Express to take us into Edinburgh. The bus’s final stop is about a 10 minute walk away from The Inn on the Mile.
When it finally came time to book the car, I discovered that Budget was about 2x as expensive as other options. I ended up booking a small car with Alamo. The car I booked actually seemed to have a larger trunk than the models rented by Budget, meaning that our 2 full size suitcases should be completely hidden in the trunk rather than potentially visible through a hatchback.
One nice discovery was that the Waverly Train Depot in Edinburgh is a place that you can return most rental cars. So we’re going to pickup from LHR but return to the train station on arrival in Edinburgh. We can drop the car and then make the 0.3 mile walk to the hotel rather than going to EDI airport and having to take the shuttle that would let us out at Waverly Station. I did see some internet chatter saying that navigating to Waverly can be confusing, but I’m expecting that phone-based nav will be able to deal with this.
One thing that will be new and improved this time is Navigation 3.0. I hope. When we did our honeymoon trip to the UK in 1998 we had only a book of maps to guide us – and we did pretty well. With the advent of dedicated GPS navigation by the time of our 2013 family trip we used our Garmin GPS – and had challenges. The GPS knew more about street names than the street signs themselves, so would often tell us to “turn at Such and Such” – but there were no obvious markings of just where Such and Such really was. Further, the fact that our US-sourced GPS couldn’t accept postal codes made things a bit more challenging. We got lost more often with the GPS than we had previously with just our paper maps.
This time, with the ability to use Google Maps on our phones it looks like we can download the entire UK map set offline and have access to ALL the POIs for routing, plus Google Maps also accepts postal codes as valid locations. (Actually, I was able to do a test routing between to UK locations sitting on the couch at home, and for those I could use postal code or even – much easier – site names.) So we should have full routing, full turn-by-turn, and ample destinations to use. I did check whether or not I could use Waze, too. I can – but that seems to rely on an active data connection to get road conditions so I decided to stick with Google Maps …which might ALSO want a data connection to update road conditions, but I KNOW I can offline Google Maps if needed, and offlining Waze maps requires some hacking. Well before the trip I saved all our destinations to Google Maps so we could call them up quickly as we needed them for navigation. (Further research yielded data usage estimates for online use of Google Maps or Waze, and I ultimately decided to purchase one month of Verizon’s Travel Package that include unlimited data in the UK. This way we can use my phone for full-featured navigation.)
Somewhere along the line during pre-planning I changed my mind re: using Waze. I’m planning to add a month of international data to both our phones since this is how Verizon offers it, and this means that we SHOULD be able to use Waze in the UK just as we use it in the US. With that in mind I went ahead and looked up all the various driving destinations and saved them to Waze so we can hopefully call them up with a minimum of fuss.
Hotel Planning
As usual, I spent a lot of time reviewing potential hotels using my normal method of looking up hotels “near” our attractions (for a variable definition of “near”) and checking both Google and TripAdvisor (TA) reviews. For TA, I do pay attention to their ordinal ranks (i.e. Ranks X out of Y Hotels in <location>) to get another comparison point. Sometimes that’s hard because two properties close together might use different ref scales (i.e. Hotel A ranks X out of 12 hotels, Hotel B ranks Y out of 3 Small Hotels), but I find value in having both a user star ranking as well as a relative ranking.
In general, I’m looking for 3-4 star hotels with at least Queen-sized beds and bathroom en suite. Figuring out actual bed size is sometimes a challenge because a lot of places will mention that they have “Double beds” – but it isn’t clear whether that means a Full, Queen, or King. If they explicitly mention that a given room can be either a Double or a dual-twin I assume King size. Otherwise I try to gauge from room photos, as unreliable as that might be.
For a trip to the UK, I’m also looking at things like easy parking for our rental car, the availability of breakfast at the hotel for convenience in the morning (although I don’t really worry about whether it is included or extra), proximity to places for dinner, location relative to whatever attraction we’re seeing nearby and – sometimes – historic background of the building. All things being equal, I’d rather stay at a 17th century coaching inn instead of a modern cookie-cutter Best Western.
For each place we’d be staying I generally had a short list of 3-5 properties that sounded interesting, and usually ended up with one of those that ranked 4.3+ stars on both TA and Google, as well as being high in TA’s ordinal rankings. For Edinburgh I quickly chose The Inn on the Mile primarily due to its placement pretty much dead center along the Royal Mile. I was quite surprised that, while expensive, it was still relatively cheap compared to other hotels with similar (or worse) proximity.
Attraction Planning
As mentioned earlier, www.britainexpress.com was a treasure-trove of information about attractions throughout the UK. I spent a ton of time compiling info to the Spreadsheet ‘O Fun and had the ability to sort attractions by geographic regions. I marked each attraction as YES, MAYBE, MEH, and NO to create a shortlist of options. I also mapped each attraction on a mymaps.google.com map and color-coded each one based on its YES/MAYBE/MEH/NO rating. With that, I was able to visualize the relative location of various attractions and began to consider potential driving routes that would pass nearby some of the higher-ranked attractions to find an efficient path that didn’t have us deviating too far from a (mostly) N/S route from London to Edinburgh.
The process was VERY iterative – easy enough to do when there’s 5 years to plan! I had the luxury of having both a primary plan as well as several backup choices. Most backups were selected as being “bad weather day” options, moving us from outdoor to mostly indoor activities. As per my usual obsessive planning, I spent time recording lat/long and postal codes of our key destinations “just in case”, and then much closer to travel I once again visited all the necessary websites to confirm things like schedules and pricing. I had tracked some of the schedule info when I first compiled my database but the world changed a lot both post-Covid and post-Brexit, and I wanted to be sure that our destinations hadn’t cut back on the days or hours they were open.
About five days before we started the trip I revisited all the attractions we intended to go to and decided whether I should (or was required to) pre-book tickets. While all sites certainly were happy to let me pre-purchase on the web, the only ones that REQUIRED it were Chatsworth House, The Real Mary King’s Close, and Holyrood House. For everything else we’ll just plan to buy at the door.
Photography and Other Gear
Unlike prior trips, we’re not taking a dedicated camera this time. Instead, my plan is to make liberal use of my phone (a Samsung S21). To that end, I took some time to watch some online tutorials about how to use the various controls and features of the phone, which is something I’ve never really paid attention to before. If (and that’s a big “IF”) I get my act together, I’ll take photos on the plane, of places and things we eat and, of course, of attractions. We’ll see how long my dedication lasts.
On the expectation that our cell phones will be critical pieces of daily life for navigation, lookup, and photography I also ordered a new portable power bank. We’re going to give Andrew our old Anker 12K power bank and we now have a new Anker 20K model. Since my new laptop backpack includes a USB passthrough port, there’s a mesh pocket inside the main section of the backpack to hold the power bank. I had a chance to use the new backpack during Lyric’s 2023 Festival and found it to be really well-suited for my needs, so pleased about that.
Finally, I’m expecting to take my laptop with me on the trip. While I could try to get by with only my tablet + Bluetooth keyboard there’s no question that I’m MUCH more efficient when I can use a full laptop, so that’s the plan. I’ll leave behind the USB port extender which means that most of my OneCloud local storage will be gone. However, I can access everything I need via the web, so I’ll just have the laptop and power supply. Since my existing wireless mouse won’t work w/o bringing along the USB hub I ordered a bluetooth mouse for traveling so I don’t need to worry about a receiver plugging into my laptop. Even though our agenda looks pretty full, I’m anticipating that we’ll have enough downtime in the late afternoons and evenings to make use of the computer. I think our days of “go go go” all the time are starting to wind down – we need a bit more downtime these days!
As to “other” gear, I’ll bring our UK power adapters, our Anker multiport USB charger, and an assortment of cables as usual and we should be good to go.
The Week Before Leaving
Despite planning this trip for five years, it was still a bit of a shock to receive an email from Virgin Atlantic on a Sunday morning one week before our flight, indicating that the window had opened for us to pre-order our meals. Were we REALLY that close to our trip?!? When I clicked on the email link to review the meal choices I was actually taken to a page that had a confusing message that “it appears that you’ve modified your booking” and that they’d send me a new link “soon”.
My guess at the time was that the email I’d received was a bit early – our 7-day window really wouldn’t open until about 5P on Sunday, and I’d gotten the email around 10:30A. This guess was strengthened when I searched for a direct link to their food portal and, upon entering our flight info, received a response of “Welcome, Early Bird!” and telling me to check back later.
Returning later in the day, after 5PM, proved me correct. We were allowed to pick from amongst three dinner choices, all of which were (surprise...not!) underwhelming. We were offered (IIRC) “butter chicken”, which was probably some chicken and rice glop, a fish dish (airplane fish – wheeee!) or Pasta in a cheesy alfredo sauce. Both of us opted for pasta, figuring this was the least offensive choice.
I also made a couple of last minute purchases, including blister plasters in case we hurt our feet while walking, compact flat packs of duct tape, and also some brass binder fasteners for the Folder of Fun, in order to secure the sleeved copies of the Schedule and Travel Summary inside. Another improvement to the folder was to attach a couple of binder clips to the papers in the side pockets so they wouldn’t slide around like they’ve done in the past.
As per prior trips I checked with the bank in order to file a vacation plan. It seems like this is no longer a requirement – both WFB and BofA’s websites no longer offered the option, instead indicating that this was no longer needed. I guess they now simply alert you via text messaging and have you accept/deny “strange” charges. We’ll see. Fortunately, we’re going with 3 different credit cards between us so it seems extremely unlikely we’d find ourselves without a working card. The intent is to charge as much as possible to the Royal Caribbean (BofA) card, since they don’t charge a currency conversion fee.
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