“Sometimes you fall in love with a place, dramatic and urgent as falling in love with any person.”
–Nina de Gramont, The Christie Affair
Scotland | England | Wales | Ireland
Share.
It all began with a risky proposition: have kids early and travel in retirement. The kids are grown. The career in the rearview mirror. We are blessed to live out our dream and invite you to share in our travels.
Enjoy.
Littered with ancient castles, stately homes, gorgeous gardens, and stunning landscapes—even an entire year will not be enough to take in all that the UK has to offer. We hope you will enjoy these magical places along with us.
Inspire.
We all need inspiration and there is nothing quite like travel to broaden our horizons. We hope the places we visit will inspire you to plan and take the journey that most inspires you!
Amanda
So, what is it about England? Why in the world would we want to live there for an entire year? For me, the answer is incredibly simple: because it’s England!! To me, it’s a magical, fairytale land, a place that I have visited in my mind a million times. So much of the literature I grew up reading took place in England, from The Tales of Peter Rabbit that my Grandma Bev used to read to me when I was very little, all the way to my beloved Harry Potter novels. And don’t even get me started on all of the films and TV shows. But to be honest, I must admit that my true love affair with all things British began when I started reading romance novels as a teenager. So many of them were set in Regency London, with the heroines wearing big beautiful ball gowns, dancing endlessly in candlelit ballrooms with their handsome suitors. There was so much beauty in the scenes set in the bucolic countryside with so many gorgeous castles and stately manor homes; who wouldn’t fall in love with such a magical place? Call me a hopeless romantic or whatever you like but the thought of spending my days exploring the real Hundred Acre Wood, the actual Lake District garden that inspired Beatrix Potter’s darling woodland creatures, or the café where J.K. Rowling wrote her spellbinding novels, sounds like pure heaven to me! And to top it all off, I have my very own handsome suitor to share it with. The fact that Steve shares my deep and abiding love of this magical place and everything in it is more than I could have ever asked for. I feel so incredibly lucky and blessed to get to share this experience with him. Once again, he is making all of my wildest dreams come true and I couldn’t be more grateful as we set out on an adventure of a lifetime together!
Steve
It was Amanda’s love of England that sparked my interest, but it was the trifecta of the internet, Google Earth, and sat nav that gave us the confidence to plan our first trip in 2009. It turned out that planning our own trips was less chore and more fun than I expected. Film location scouts get paid good money to find stunning backdrops for films and TV. The journey before the journey became a quest to discover many of the places that we found particularly interesting from books, movies, TV series, and documentaries. While we were enamored with Stonehenge, we were equally pleased to discover lesser-known treasures like Stourhead, Stanage Edge, Haddon Hall, and The Bridge Tea Rooms. We also drank pints in a pub built in 1189, sat at Katherine of Aragon’s tomb, followed Jack the Ripper to The Ten Bells pub, and crossed the River Dove on huge stepping stones beneath Thorpe Cloud. I even discovered the spot where Westley made Fezzik dream of large women. Arriving at these spots was magical! As I leave behind a beloved career, I hope my immersion in this new journey and the ancient beauty preserved so thoughtfully throughout these countries will provide both a wonderful distraction from all the change, but also offer time to slow down and reconnect with the person who I met and fell in love with thirty two years ago—the person whose love of England became utterly infectious.