Britain -- The Island Museum

Great Britain is like a giant museum.  Everywhere you look there is some ancient monument or ruin, and when you try to back up enough to get a good snapshot you bump into the next registered building or museum.  A good guide book of Britain will have a map dotted with more tourist attractions than villages.  The whole bloody island should be walled off and preserved for future generations.

Which is funny, in a way, because past generations seem to have done their level best to destroy the British heritage on any number of occasions.  Not that this is unique to Britain, we've seen this in Egypt, Cyprus, and Italy (to name just a few places).  We lost track of how many times the tour guides would say something like, "and the heads of these statues aren't actually original because so-and-so came through and knocked them off."  One statue of a saint in Bath has a really funny looking face because the head was knocked off and instead of adding new stone they fixed it by carving a new head out of what used to be his beard.

Nevertheless, the one thing to remember if you're going to Britain is to firmly and irrecovably give up before you start.  That is to say, you must make peace with the fact that you can't see everything.  In fact, you can't really see any measurable percentage of what is there in short of a year.  If you're one of those people who must see everything you'll just have to emigrate and spend the rest of your life there.  Which just may get you through England and perhaps part of Wales.

As for us, we just took a semi-random approach to our tour.  We had friends in Coventry and Manchester, which helped to define our schedule.  Before we even got to Britain we decided to skip London entirely in order to travel the countryside and see more.  London itself would probably have tied us up for weeks and we weren't feeling the desire for a large chunk of urban touring after Amsterdam.  We also wanted to see some specific places such as Bath, Stonehenge, a particular site in Wales, and some of Scotland.

In the end, we visited the following places:

• Coventry

  (first base of operations)

  • Oxford

    36 colleges in one place

  • Stratford-on-Avon

    Shakespeare's birthplace

  • Warwick Castle

    Truly magnificent

• Bath

  Water is best!

  • Wells Cathedral

    Serendipitous beauty

  • Stonehenge

    Long live rock!

• Wales

  The other part of Britain

  • Brecon

    Mountain roads

  • Portmeirion

    Be seeing you!

• Manchester

  (last base of operations)

• Scotland
  • Hadrian's Wall

    The edge of civilization...

  • Edinburgh

    ...and just a royal mile beyond

Not the best selection, perhaps, but we did manage to visit England, Scotland and Wales.  Certainly it was more than enough to wear out both body and mind (whilst enriching the spirit).