60th birthday trip

I turn 60 next Sunday.

Wow. 60. How did I get to this age? It’s funny how birthdays sneak up on you more when you are older than when you are young.

When I turned 50 we started a new tradition of celebrating ‘big’ birthdays with a trip. This year we are continuing the tradition with a trip to the UK. A few days in London followed by close to two weeks in Scotland.

Originally I had hoped to be in Paris – my birthday is July 14th, also the French National Holiday. It would be nice to be in Paris for Bastille Day and enjoy the festivities that they are putting on in honour of me.

But I digress (as per usual).

In the end Paris got ruled out because of the Olympics.

Plan B was London and Scotland. London was our last pre-COVID trip together and even though we were there for a week there was much left to do.

On my birthday we will have a typical British Sunday roast lunch feast. Later we have tickets to see a play. The next day we tour Buckingham Palace, Westminister Abbey, and the Courtauld Gallery. We also have dinner with one of my former students who lives in London. The following day we hope to visit the Victoria and Albert museum. In the afternoon we have a music and pub tour with a friend of ours.

We take the train to Edinburgh on the 17th. We have never been to Scotland before and are quite looking forward to it. We don’t have a ton of things booked for Edinburgh. We will see Holyrood House, the castle, a concert in St Giles Cathedral. We’ve book a pub dinner, tea, and yes, another Sunday roast feast. We are also having drinks with someone I used to work with in Toronto – we never actually met in person and it is an odd twist that it is in Edinburgh that we will finally meet. 🙂

Another train trip on the 22nd will bring us to Glasgow. Here we have tickets for the degas exhibit at the Burrell Collection, a scotch and chocolate tasting, a day trip to Stirling and Loch Lomond. We actually have a day with nothing planned which is always a treat.

Rather than taking the train back to London we’ll be flying to Heathrow. We decided to stay at an airport hotel that night so we weren’t rushed on the day of our flight back to Canada. Given how close we are to Windsor Castle we hope to store our luggage at the hotel and take a taxi to the castle for the afternoon.

The next day (the 27th) we fly back to Canada.

We’ve been looking froward to this trip and its difficult to comprehend that we’ll actually be in London this time next week. YEAH!