Starting to Seem Real

Since it is now less than a week the trip is suddenly is beginning to seem very real. I sat down and made my to-do list and shopping list last night. I wonder what it says about my personality that my to-do list contains at least two entries that start with 'make list of...' I guess that is the side effect of being a project manager for years. We like things that we can break down and plan.

There are all the obvious things, packing, paying bills before I leave and the other mundane things one does before a trip. And of course the really important things, like downloading a couple of books onto my iPod and making playlists for the plane. But the fun part is finishing up the book on the children of Henry VIII and reading the guidebooks and thinking about the things I am going to see.

When I was a teenager I read a series of books by Elswyth Thane that took a family from pre-Revolutionary war time in Williamsburg, VA through post WWII. There are 7 or 8 books and they take place in Williamsburg, in England and Germany primarily. While they were novels and focussed on the lives and interactions of the characters, they also provided a lot of well researched history, including parts on the Revolutionary War, US Civil War, Spanish American War, WWI and WWII, including the bombing of London. I don't know if they were good or not, but I really liked them, and they were a big contributing factor to my interest in history. For many years I have wanted to go to the places those books describe. A visit to Williamsburg a few years ago satisfied part of that longing. This trip is the next step in that journey.

I haven't been able to find any real information on my great-grandmother from Wales, so all I really know is that she was born in Glamorganshire, Wales and that she had my grandmother, who was the 12th of her children, in 1900. So my father and I were speculating and thought that she might have been born around 1865. But we don't have enough information to pin down exactly where, and her name is fairly common. There are several women with her name born in Glamorgan within about a 20 year span, any of whom could be the one we are seeking. Or perhaps we are on the wrong track. So we will visit Swansea and vicinity and imagine that she might have been there, and as the train goes through the heart of Glamorgan I will try to envision a young woman growing up. I look forward to being able to describe Wales to my father.

I think that it is now time to start chipping away at the to-do list....

First Thoughts

I haven't thought that I would be someone who would blog, and I am not sure that I really have anything to say that would interest anyone. But I am getting ready for a trip to the UK and thought that this might be a good way to keep people up to date on the trip, and also a good way for me to put down thoughts while they are fresh in my mind and remember the trip later.

This is an exciting trip for me for several reasons. Of course first and foremost because I will be visiting my daughter who is studying in London, and I am looking forward to seeing her and the places where she is staying, studying and visiting.

But another reason it is exciting is that I have never actually been out of the USA. Well, technically that is not true, I spent a week in Toronto many years ago, and we took a family vacation that incorporated a stay in Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. But that would be it.

I am looking forward to the history, having always lived in the US, where 'old' mostly means the late 1800's. Of course there are older places even here, but they are less common and I have not yet been to many of them.

And I am greatly looking forward to seeing the place where parts of my family came from. My heritage is quite a mix, with one grandfather born in Germany, one Grandmother born in the US of parents born in Ireland, another Grandmother born in the US of a mother from Glamorganshire in Wales and a father from England (place unknown to me). My other grandfather came from a family that has been in Virginia since the late 1600's and includes English, Welsh, Scotch-Irish and Dutch among others. On this trip we will be visiting Swansea, Wales which lies in Glamorgan. We will travel on the train through Glamorgan to get to Swansea, and will be able to at least imagine my great grandmother having lived there.

I will be leaving on 10/23, and I will be returning on 11/4. We plan to see London, Bath, Stonehenge and Avebury, Swansea and Edinburgh. It will be a lot of traveling and will give us a chance to see various parts of the UK while traveling on BritRail. There are so many things to see, I know there won't be time to see them all.