In the summer of 2009, we attended the Rotary International convention in Birmingham, UK. We traveled a week early to visit Oxford and Bath on our own. It was a great trip.
Birmingham is a nicer destination airport than either Heathrow or Gatwick. It is connected to the UK train system! We hope to use it in the future should our travels take us back to the UK.
Click on the links to join us on our adventures.
In
keeping with our tradition of "multi-modal" travel, we drove to
Pennsylvania to leave our dog Hoppy
with Jim's sister Grace, then took the train to Newark airport for
the plane to Birmingham. We traveled on trains and buses within England before returning to the US on the trans-Atlantic
liner Queen Mary II.
We had visited Oxford a few years before and after five days had not seen nearly enough. We thought another three days would enable us to wrap it up.
Silly us! There is still much to see.
Bath has been popular for its hot springs since prehistoric times. The Romans developed the area and it has been a resort ever since.
After Bath we made our way back to Birmingham for the Rotary International convention including around 50,000 Rotarians from all over the world. The flags in the picture, presented in the opening ceremonies, honor all the nations with Rotary clubs. Most of them were represented.
After the convention, Rotary provided a bus to Southampton where we boarded the Queen Mary II for our trans-Atlantic voyage. We had sailed on the QMII from NYC to England in 2007 and we had such a good time we decided to try it the other way. (Image from CruiseCritic.com.)