The UK is one of those places we keep returning to over and over again, and somehow every trip there ends up feeling completely different from the last.
Some trips have revolved around London, others around Christmas with family, countryside escapes, theatre weekends, or simply needing a place to land between longer stretches in Europe. Somehow, no matter how many times we go back, we always find another version of the UK we hadn't experienced yet.
London, especially, has become one of our favorite cities to revisit because it works for almost any kind of trip. Once, we made a theatre weekend of it — four nights featuring a different show and dinner on the town each night: Hamilton, Les Misérables, Wicked, and The Mousetrap. Another trip revolved around Christmas lights and markets. Another was mostly wandering neighborhoods, coffee shops, bookstores, and parks.
One of the most memorable London trips happened completely by accident. We landed and realized Taylor Swift was performing the Eras Tour that weekend. Jessica's eyes immediately lit up, and within minutes I was on the treadmill at the hotel gym simultaneously working out and trying to figure out how to get tickets. Somehow we pulled it off. My sister Amanda flew out to surprise Jessica, my cousin Tegan met up with us in the city, and the whole weekend turned into one of our favorite London memories ever — the Eras Tour, dinners in the city, shopping for concert outfits, and just soaking up the energy of London in the middle of one of those huge cultural moments.
Outside of London, we've also spent a lot of time exploring smaller parts of England. During one stretch, we rented a place in the Cotswolds near a sheep farm and spent our days driving through tiny villages, stopping at farm shops, and wandering through countryside that looked almost unreal in how stereotypically English it was. We've done Stonehenge, Windsor, Oxford, and plenty of smaller towns that gave us a slower version of the UK than London. Once we drove out to Diddly Squat Farm (from the TV show Jeremy Clarkson's farm) and another time we took a train to visit a friend we had made on a cruise from Dubai to Singapore.
We've also visited family on the southeastern coast, which introduced us to another side of England entirely — quieter coastal towns, farm-to-table meals at local restaurants, and the kind of places tourists often skip entirely.
I think part of why the UK keeps pulling us back is that it feels both familiar and endlessly layered at the same time. Every trip feels slightly different depending on what kind of experience you want. Big city energy, countryside escapes, history, theatre, pubs, coastal towns, Christmas markets — it somehow does all of them well.
At this point, the UK feels less like a single destination and more like a recurring backdrop across different chapters of our lives. It's a place we can return to repeatedly and never really get tired of.