England 2025
London, Cambridge, York, Leeds
Last week I was in England with my boyfriend, Ian, and my cousins, Christopher and Elisabeth. We chose England for a trip because Christopher wanted to go to a Leeds game together, and his sister, Elisabeth, lives in Cambridge, so we could also visit with her.
I wanted to end the week with the game, so we started in London, then spent a night in Cambridge, visited York for a couple nights, and finally ended in Leeds.
On past trips I’ve posted photo dumps on Instagram. Mostly as a way to collect my favorite photos to revisit. This time, I didn’t want to post on Instagram. I don’t want to redownload the app, the desktop site is trash, and I just feel grossed out by Meta.
I do still want to post about the trip, though. I love looking back at my own Instagram feed as snapshots of my past, so I don’t want to give up the practice, I just want it to take a different form.
Substack probably isn’t any better ethically (especially after the CEOs weird memo mentioning Elon…), but I feel less crappy scrolling through notes and I’m less likely to spend hours scrolling on it. Substack on desktop is actually nice. And reading long-form content is just better for me, personally, than my Instagram feed. Maybe writing some long-content will also be better for me.
When I made the Instagram dumps in the past — and they were dumps, just a collection of photos with no context — I never wrote any captions beyond maybe listing out the locations visited. I didn’t want to show off, I really only did it with the intention to remember the places. Maybe in this format, I’ll be able to go a step further and remember ~even more~ about the trip. My memory is famously terrible, but repeating things helps, so these pictures and words are flashcards for my own experiences.
I thought a lot about what I wanted to get out of a vacation on this trip. In 2017, I experienced one of my favorite traveling moments that I still think about often, but for one reason or another, haven’t been intentional about trying to repeat. I was in Reykjavík, and Ian and I walked up a little hill to an observatory overlooking the city and the mountains in the distance. I ordered a tea and a croissant and drew in my notebook, on top of the city, surrounded in fog.
At the time, I was working at a paint ‘n’ sip studio in Connecticut, and spent a lot of time in cafes in New Haven. I would illustrate my to-do lists or things I ate in a weekend, etc., so I carried that journaling practice into my travel.
When I was planning this trip to England, I sensed an opportunity to make time for moments like this. I bought a new notebook, I bought washi tape and little stickers that reminded me of my dog at an art supply store in Convent Garden, and I saved bits of paper from places we visited. I didn’t exactly capture the moment in the observatory in Iceland — that wasn’t really the point anyway. I slowed down and made something out of the trip — I mean that literally — in the form of writing on a page, scrapbooking. I accomplished that, but I do think next time I can do even better: scheduling time to just sit in a cafe, incorporating little drawings again (I miss art stuff). Despite having some things I can do differently on my next trip, there were a few things I realized I loved this trip that I hadn’t thought much about before. Namely: running and walking.
Our last few big trips were with family and friends, too, but for large swathes of this trip we were alone, just me and Ian. This meant we had our own schedule for the most part.
We didn’t really visit any museums or tourist spots. Instead, we walked around, napped, read, and I also went on some runs. I think walking (or running!) is just an ideal way to see a place. The weather was nice enough to run on this trip when it had been too cold to run at home. I saw things I wouldn’t have otherwise had time to see if I hadn’t prioritized fitting in runs, but with a relaxed schedule I had plenty of time. The runs I did go on were some of my favorite moments of the trip.
I was a little worried I was missing out on the big tourist destinations, but I ended up running past a lot of them, and in York, they were pretty unavoidable on any of the walks we took — and one of the destinations was a walk itself, along the wall around the city.
On a leisurely walk, a meander, a ‘potter’, my mind had more time to wonder about things naturally. I found myself asking questions about the history of a place from a place of curiosity instead of obligation, which felt both more engaging and less exhausting.
Besides resting and walking around, I appreciated getting to know my cousins and having a lot of fun with them both. Since Christopher still lives in the US, we see him more frequently and have grown really close over the past couple years, but we really only see Elisabeth during Thanksgiving. They’re 6-8 years younger than me, and I think growing up we were just very different, but those gaps don’t seem as large as adults. I admire who they’ve become, and I did feel a little protective of them during certain points of the trip, but really I think they’re great people and friends. They’re also cool. Our group chat is called The Chapmans, and it feels special to have a shared family name with them.
When I think back about this trip, the times I appreciated the most are things that could be appreciated anywhere. Long walks, good conversations, simple but quality food, naps, reading, writing, running. I don’t think the fact that these activities aren’t unique to any one location means I don’t want to travel, instead I think it’s more optimistic than that. I think it’s encouraging that I can do these in my own city. Of course, time and energy are more limited in a normal day-to-day work grind. But maybe with these priorities clear in my mind, I can move through my home differently and more intentionally. Trying to ride this post-vacation high for as long as I can. Gonna add some of these photos to my phone wallpaper rotation.
Whimsy: