UK 2013 Day 12 Home

Day 12 - Wednesday, June 19 2013: Back Home
For our final act we had to get up pretty early - about 530AM - in order to get on the road and make the roughly 2.5 hour journey back to Heathrow airport outside London.  This meant that we missed a final nice breakfast, although we (probably) had bought some breakfast snacks at the grocery the prior night.  The drive back was uneventful, and we dropped the car off at Heathrow  sometime around 9AM.  Amusingly, they didn't notice the busted tail light.  The red plastic had broken so cleanly that it must have looked like a backup light rather than a brake light.  What they DID notice was the gash in one of the tires that resulted at some point from hitting a curb while making a left turn from the unaccustomed right-side drivers seat.  This is something that they were clearly looking for at check-in, and we realized that this must be something the a LOT of renters fall victim to.

Our flight was about 30 minutes or so late in boarding.  It turned out that the flight crew had been locked inside a lounge and it took a while for someone with a key to be dispatched to let them out!  Other than that, we had smooth travel.  We once again ended up in the upper deck economy section and had a nice quiet flight back home.  We were met at the airport by our sister-in-law, who drove our car (which, you may recall, was picked up from the SFO parking lot by Eileen's brother a few hours after we'd left SFO) to retrieve us.  We stopped by her house to drop her off before continuing back to our house and walking in the door around 6PM.  That meant that we'd been travelling about 18 hours.  I (probably) went and picked up a pizza while Eileen sorted the mail and tossed a load of laundry in the washer - but in all likelihood we would have been in bed by 9PM at the latest, tired but happy.

Overall, we'd had a great time.  We'd enjoyed most of the places we'd chosen to tour, but the real highlights included:

  • London: Geffrye Museum, Tower of London
  • Windsor: Harry Potter Studio Tour
  • Wales: Techniquest

Without question the Harry Potter Studio Tour was the #1, hands-down winner.  All four of us had loved that!

The 2013 trip to the UK was a watershed moment for us.  We were very aware that we only had about a 5 year window, starting with this trip, in which both boys would both still be at home with us before their college and adult lives might put an end to this.  In fact, as I type this in August 2018 our oldest son Robert is right now in Bellingham, Washington with Eileen for his freshman orientation at Western Washington University, and he'll actually start his 1st quarter there in mid-September.  So 2013 marked the start of much more intensive period of vacationing for our family as we tried to maximize our time together.  This trip proved that the boys were great travellers, and in the years to come we'd end up taking a variety of different trips, many of which are found here on this blog.

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