I know I kept saying that we were going to London, England, but we had to make a couple of stops along the way.
We arrived at Heathrow Airport in London at 11:00 p.m. about a week ago and had to drive directly to Kettering that night. Chad had to go to work the next day so there was no way to postpone it to the next day. Lucky for us, our bodies still thought it was early evening so the two hours it took to get to Kettering went without a hitch. Chad was amazing driving a manual car on the left side of the road, in fact you would never know that he had ever driven any other way. (Lucky for me the first time I had to drive the car, Zoë was the only one in the car as I definitely might have been a little stressed out by it.)
We stayed in a nice hotel in Kettering, in a more business park area. Z and I had to find something to do and move around since the jet lag was a bit rough. The closest thing to walk to from the Kettering Park Hotel and Spa was a Tesco and some other stores that looked to be mostly home improvement stores. There was not much to do, but we didn’t really explore outside of the neighborhood we were in.
We were luckily only in Kettering for one whole day. We moved to The Bedford Swan Hotel in Bedford. The hotel was beautiful with a lovely free breakfast, large and clean rooms, and easy and ample parking (good for this unsure driver definitely). The hotel had me at free breakfast though, the rest was just icing on the cake. Next door to the hotel were the remains of the Bedford Castle, and across the street was the Ouse River. The river area reminded me of a scene from Alice in Wonderland – there were swans swimming up and down the river, quaint walking bridges, green grass spotted with tiny daisies, and weeping willows (my favorite kind of tree). It was beautiful and with the weather being warm and sunny the whole time we were there, we took advantage of the park as much as possible.
Zoë and I mostly hung out close to the hotel and rested. We were both a bit tired and had caught a respiratory flu. But we still had fun.
Have you ever been to England? What was your favorite area or thing to do? Leave a comment and let me know!
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