British Isles Princess Cruise – England (February 2025)
I realized that I haven’t posted on here in a while. I’ve been in a weird place in life and haven’t really had much to write about. As I was thinking of what a new post could be, I noticed this was in my draft folder. I think England was the hardest for me to write because I didn’t get to enjoy some of the places as much as I wanted to. I was sleep deprived from the red eye flight for our day in London, at St. Peter Port in Guernsey we happened to go on the day that a lot of the town was closed, and during our Stonehenge trip I was unknowingly fighting COVID-19 (so I wasn’t feeling the best). So I think after 2.5 years I have finally found words of how to write about it.
Our trip started in London after a red eye flight. We headed to our hotel near St. Paul’s. Since this was our second time there (we spent a couple days in London back in 2005), we decided to explore this new area instead of getting on the Tube to go to the main attractions. We saw St. Paul’s Garden, walked over to Shakespeare’s Globe, walked across the London Bridge, and saw the HMS Belfast. We didn’t get any tickets for any of these but just seeing the outsides and walking around London was a pretty amazing sight. It took us a while to decide on a place to eat but we went near the Tower of London to The Dickens Inn and sat out on the patio (which was pretty good food).
Our next stop was Portland. This is where my mom and I went to the Abbotsbury Swannery and the Abbotsbury Sub-Tropical Gardens. If you saw the photo of the swans at the top, this is where we saw them. The Swannery was an amazing place. It is the only place in the world where you can walk among the colonies of nesting mute swans. There were baby swans there with the adults. They even had an area where the put swans if their mate died before the babies hatched so that they could be looked after. The Gardens were an interesting place to see. This is a 20 acre garden that includes many exotic and rare plants from around the world. IT is world famous for its camellia groves and magnolias. There were many paths that you could take to walk around the gardens. We decided to take one that ended up having as go across a rope bridge. Throughout the garden, they had an exhibit of storybook sculptures.
Before we booked our cruise, I had never heard of the Island of Guernsey before. It has an interesting history of being under the control of many different countries at different points of history (between the English and briefly the Germans). This has shown through the street signs being in multiple languages. My mother created a walking tour for us to do this day, however most of what we wanted to see happened to be closed this day. Right at the port we did see the Liberation Monument. We did walk to the German Naval Signals Headquarters museum (which we were excited to see since a lot of my family was/is in the military) but it was closed. We saw the Guernsey Gardens which had a beautiful sight of the harbor and the island as it is on top of a hill. We walked by the Island War Memorial and the St. James Concert Hall. We did end up being able to go into the Castle Cornet which is a fort/castle built in the early 13th century. This place had many interesting places to visit and I hope to go back when more things are open.
Our last stop of the cruise was Stonehenge. We decided to add this stop on the way to the airport. If you don’t know what Stonehenge is, it is mysterious mystical ancient stone circle. There was so much archeology and information between the museum with stone structure. Again, I was not feeling well during this visit but it still was amazing to see. We also drove past Windsor Castle and the Supersonic Concorde which is on display at Heathrow Airport.
Have you wanted to visit England?
What place do you really want to see there or was your favorite place while you were there?
