I have already posted plenty of pictures on Instagram about our trip, but I wanted to post here as well so I can go into more detail about the wonderful trip Louis and I had to England! This is mostly for my Mom because she doesn't do social media and is currently serving a mission in Italy.
Day 1&2-Travel Day(s)! Our flight was in the evening so we spent the day packing up last minute things and getting things squared away with our kids. Louis' mother watched them for us while we were gone. Louis' Dad dropped up off at the airport the three hours before our flight they suggest for international travel. We had checked in online so we just had to check our bag and go through security. We did all that in about 15 minutes and we had 2 1/2 hours to kill at the airport! We ended up just walking around and getting some dinner. We didn't get much sleep, but our flight went really well. When we got off the plane we had to walk a mile to the passport check then got our bag and found my sister Sarah! She drove us back to her house (I may have almost gotten in on the wrong side of the car) and we just hung out at home the rest of the day, trying to stay awake to get ourselves into the time zone there.
Louis got to fly the plane. . .
Coming into England
Day 3- Harry Potter Studios! Louis was looking into things to do in England and he stumbled upon this and knew that I would love it! We asked the Moran's if any of them wanted to come with us and they all wanted to! Unfortunately Sarah, Emily, and Abigail all had previous engagements so it was just Natalie, Samantha, Louis and me. The tour is self-guided so you can spend as little or as long as you want there. Louis read that with it being a self-guided tour it's a good idea to schedule your tour for earlier in the morning. We scheduled our tour for 9 in the morning, which meant that we had to leave at 6:30 in the morning. So there we were 6:30 in the morning, it was dark, it was rainy, Louis was driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the road, in a place that we were completely unfamiliar with! Did I mention that the lanes on the road are like half the size as they are in America? I did not keep my cool very well. Poor Louis. We also ran into quite a bit of traffic. We got there though and we were all excited! We got to walk through many different movie sets, (the great hall, Gryffindor common room, Dumbledore's office, Hagrid's hut, the forbidden forest, etc) outfits that were worn, (including the very first Hogwart's robe that Daniel Radcliffe wore) props from the movie, and more. I think the most amazing thing we saw was the replica of Hogwarts that they used for filming in the movies. It was amazing and huge! Louis' favorite thing was the shelves just filled with different props from the movies. We ended up spending three hours exploring and looking through the gift shops. On the drive home the GPS decided to get adventurous and took us off the motorway and through some little town, winding through who knows what street. If I hadn't been stressed about it I probably would have really enjoyed looking around at the houses, red phone booths, parks, and everything pretty we drove by. We did get back to Sarah's safe and sound.
I'm posting this because even the traffic cones were cool at HP studios!
The Great hall decorated for Halloween
The outfit on the left is the first wizard outfit Daniel Radcliffe wore
Mad-Eye Moody
Ron's Yule Ball outfit
The Fat Lady
The entrance to Dumbledore's office
Dumbledore's office
All of the Horcruxes
Quidditch equipment
The entrance into the Forbidden Forest
Entering Platform 9 3/4
The Knight Bus
Natalie and Samantha on the Knight Bus
Entering Number 4 Privet Drive
I loved this! They had a ton of Hogwarts
letter strung up in the front room!
Natalie was worried about Samantha's driving
Diagon Alley was so awesome! The lighting was just awful.
It was pretty bad through the whole thing.
The most amazing part of the tour
In Ollivander's they had the names of everyone's name who worked on
the movie (cast and crew) on the wand boxes. We found one with Natalie on it.
Day 4- Jet lag caught up to me and we slept 12 hours! When Louis and I woke up everyone was gone and there was a note saying they were at Emily's volleyball game and to call when we woke up and Sarah would come pick us up. We ate breakfast then called Sarah and got to watch Emily play volleyball which was special because this is her last year of playing in high school. When we got back home the older girls started getting ready for the homecoming dance that night. It was fun to see their excitement and be there with them for something we normally wouldn't be.
Day 5- Was a Sunday and we just went to church and played games!
Day 6- Sarah, Louis, and I headed out to Cambridge. We drove to a park and ride and took a double decker bus into the town. Cambridge is a town with (according to Google) 31 colleges. The oldest university was founded in the late 1200's! Very old town, very old beautiful buildings. When we first got into town a guy stopped us asking if we wanted to take a punting tour. We had talked about doing it before we got there and so as the guy kept talking and kept lowering the price we decided to go for it! The tour wasn't for another half hour or so so we walked around town a bit before heading back. Heading to the river was hilarious, we walked through the town and through alleyways until we saw a sign written in chalk on a wall saying "TO THE RIVER" with an arrow pointing the way. Seemed pretty legit. We were at the very front of the boat so we weren't able to hear the guide very well standing on the end of the boat. It was a fun and relaxing way to see all the colleges though. After we were done we walked around town a bit and shopped. Sarah's favorite thing was all the little doors inside of the big doors! I'll add a picture so you know what that means. We had lunch at a pub and Louis ordered the fish and chips and was very happy when it got brought to the table. It was bigger than his face! After lunch we walked around the market and headed back to the bus. On the way home Sarah stopped at the Cambridge American cemetery. It was beautiful and interesting to walk around and look around. The Moran's have a tradition to carve pumpkins on the Monday before Halloween so that night we helped out with that. I think it was Samantha that told us of the idea she saw somewhere where they used beaters to clear out all of the pumpkin guts. Louis tried it and ended up breaking Sarah's beater!
A little door inside a big door!
The market
Look at the size of the fish!
The American memorial cemetery
The ceiling in the chapel in the cemetery
Day 7- Louis and I ventured out on our own to go to a castle. This was Louis' favorite day of the whole trip! It was a castle named Castle Rising about an hour north of Sarah's house. It was a really fun little castle ruin with a huge embankment all around it. It was fun to walk around and explore and read all of the plaques. We first walked around the top of the embankment where there used to be a stone wall. After that we walked down and got to go inside the castle and explore. It was so much fun to explore through the castle and read the plaques about what each room was once used for. One of the plaques shared what different things the castle had been used for, my favorite thing was a one-person lunatic asylum. Louis' favorite thing was a hunting lodge. I also need to say that Louis did such a great job driving and I only freaked out a little bit! It helped that the roads were wider on this drive.
Standing at the top of the embankmant
Looking through the front door, they had two doors
after the front door to better security I guess
Castle Rising
Day 8- First thing in the morning Sarah and I went on a walk around the town, there is a little walking path that does a loop around the town. It was really nice and one of my favorite things we did on the trip. There is a old church and cemetery near her home that I really enjoyed walking through and trying to read the worn headstones. I think that's because of my mother, she likes old cemeteries too. It was nice to walk around and get to talk with Sarah and get to know her more. I feel like even though she moved out of the house when I was 5 or 6 we still have a good relationship and know each other fairly well. When we got back Louis had woken up and Sarah had to head out. Louis and I decided to go on another walk and headed to the same church and cemetery I had walked around earlier. We walked around it a bit more then headed back to Sarah's house. I didn't want to venture off into town too much because I was nervous we wouldn't be able to find our way back! When we got back to the house we tried to decide what we wanted to do that day. Louis had said that he would be fine not going to London, he doesn't like big busy cities, but I still really wanted to go to the temple. So we decided to skip exploring London (something I don't regret at the moment, but maybe that will change as time passes) and head to the temple. It was about a 2 hour drive to the temple and again, Louis did great! He didn't take one wrong turn out off the dozens of traffic circles we went through until the very last traffic circle before the temple. Luckily the exit he took out of the traffic circle appeared to be someone's entrance to their farm and the road had a bit of a turn off and we could actually turn around. Something you can't do on many streets because they're very narrow and have no shoulder! After that 1 minute detour we arrived at the temple. We had made a reservation earlier to stay in the hostel on the temple grounds so we first went in and checked in and dropped our bags in our room. Then we walked around the temple grounds before going in to do a session. When we got into the temple though a session was just about to start and we didn't have time to change and head up, instead we did sealings which I love! You get to talk to the people who are in there with you and get to know about them a little bit. The hostel had fridges, stoves, microwaves, etc in each room so we were able to make our own dinner that night and have some nice time alone.
church by Sarah's house
The London England LDS temple
Day 9- We headed back to Sarah's house first thing in the morning, again no wrong turns out of the traffic circles! We got home and headed to Lavenham with Sarah. It's a cute crooked town full of English tudor homes that I love! You may remember me saying in my Instagram post that we saw a crooked lane and a crooked house, we missed the crooked man and the crooked mouse. It's a pretty small town, but we walked down a few street just sight seeing, walked through a couple of antique shops, (something I love to do because of my mother) walked through some gift shops, had lunch in a tea room, (yummy cheese scones) and walked through an old church/cemetery with beautiful stained glass windows. Apparently Lavenham is the town that they based Godric's Hollow on in the Harry Potter movies. We walked by what the Potter's house was based off of and the church/cemetery we walked through was the one where Harry's parents were buried. Louis thought the stand at the front of the church (I'm sorry that I don't know what it's called, is it just a podium?) looked like something Dumbledore would use so he stood up there for a picture, I told him it was inappropriate, but he didn't care. It was a fun afternoon out.
Louie Cottage!
This is a picture from the pamphlet because
we couldn't get a good actual picture
His Dumbledore picture
Day 10- Sarah had volunteer obligations at her kid's school and a guy coming to check the furnace so we stayed home to wait for him while Sarah went to school. This gave me time to organize our things and get re-packed to go home on Monday. Later that night was the ward trunk or treat that the younger kids had been looking forward to. We went early and helped get things set up, it was a enjoyable evening of food and conversation. We sat by the new elders that had just been transferred into their ward.
Day 11- Only two days left in England and our last day to go on an adventure as the next day was a Sunday. Some place that I had read about and thought would be fun to go to was Bury St. Edmund, so we headed there! Getting to the town of Bury wasn't difficult, but finding a place to park was! It only took us about five minutes and one u-turn until we got in a spot and paid for three hours. We headed out the door without eating breakfast with the intention of finding a place to have an English breakfast when we got into town. So we walked around the shops and through the market and found a cute cafe that served breakfast. It wasn't quite a full English breakfast, there weren't beans and there wasn't a fried tomato or mushroom. I was personally fine with that! I also got a huge hot chocolate because it was quite a cold morning. After breakfast we continued wandering the city and walking into a few shops until we came to the cathedral. There was a garden all around the cathedral that had ruins strewn through out it. It was beautiful to walk around and I wish I had taken more pictures. We walked into the cathedral and enjoyed the stain glass windows and the ceiling was also amazing. We walked through the cemetery then went back into the center of town and walked through the shops again before heading back to the car.
Later that night I went with Sarah to Norwich (I think) where the older girls had a stake activity and we went shopping quickly while they were there. There may have been a parking mishap. . .but I won't go into that! I was able to find a couple of cute things to take home for myself and we headed back to pick up the girls.
I'm sure you all want to see a picture of my breakfast
Part of the ruins in the garden
Bury St. Edmund Cathedral
Day 12- Another Sunday, so we went to church and played games! We went to bed early because we had to wake up at 3:00 in the morning to get ready and head to the airport.
Day 13- Travel day! Up bright and early! Actually it wasn't even bright yet. We headed out on time and were excited to get home. Things were looking good and then we hit some traffic. Then we decided to take the GPS's suggestion and get off the motorway to hopefully bypass the traffic. Not sure if it was the best idea or not we ended up going through a town Sarah wasn't familiar with so she didn't know how close or far away from the airport we were and I tried really hard not to worry, but as the minutes ticked away I did a bit! We ended up getting to the airport just before 7:00, about a half hour past when we wanted to. We rushed in and found a long line to check our bag, after we checked our bag we found a long line to get through security. Thankfully though, right as we got to the security line they opened another line and the security guy motioned us over and what would probably have taken 30 minutes only ended up taking 10. After that we found out gate and were able to sit down for about 15 minutes before they started boarding the plane. It ended up being perfect. On the flight home we had a layover in Detroit. We landed there, got our bag, went through passport check, re-checked our bag, and went through security. We again got through lines quickly and got to our gate with 3 hours to kill! It passed quickly and we were boarding the plane in no time. It was another good flight and before we knew it we were landing in Salt Lake. We got our bag and were on our way to meet Louis' Dad. Avery had come with him and so on the drive home she talked my ear off while I thought about how tired I was after being awake for 22 hours at that point. We stopped and gathered the rest of our kids (Ethan kept running back and forth between Louis and me saying "Mommy! Daddy!") and we headed home. We finally went to bed for the night after being awake for almost 25 hours. It was nice to be back at home in our bed.
The trip was wonderful, it was good to be focused on just the two of us and not have to worry about anyone else but us. It was relaxing and rejuvenating and I'm glad we had the opportunity to go.
