UK travel tips

To be clear, today's pictures were not taken today. They were all snapped either yesterday or within the last week though, and are proof that it doesn't always rain here. In fact, spring can be very lovely: blue sky, trees in bud, blossom clouding branches, bearable temperatures... Today, however, is grey and wet, and promises to stay that way, so these pictures are here to jolly things up.

An old schoolmate is planning a trip to England and from her FB posts, I'm getting an interesting picture. She wants to visit London and Liverpool. Her solution? To stay somewhere between the two. I suppose this could work, but is a bit like wanting to see NYC and Washington, DC, so choosing to stay in Philadelphia. That is, you'd end up spending a LOT of time traveling between all the places. Of course it's tempting, when going somewhere you may not get to again, to try to spread yourself thin to pack in as much as poss, but I would say this can make it all more exhausting than needs be.

With limited time, it's undoubtedly better to spend a couple of nights actually in London, one somewhere en route to Liverpool (the Cotswolds maybe? Stratford-on-Avon?) and then a couple of nights in Liverpool. Et voilà! Still see it all, but not so much time going back and forth. That's my March travel tip, anyway.

Meanwhile, I share with you these snapshots of my commute to work, which I'm very lucky takes me the long way through Alexandra Palace Park in north London. From its top, though not terribly well illustrated in these pics, you can see right across London and for those planning a trip to this city, I would recommend it as a place to come to admire the view, either with a drink on the terrace of the Phoenix or for something soft, by the boating lake or in the Grove – except that I kind of like it empty and quiet, so maybe I'll keep that tip to myself.