Travel Video: Hot Springs

I finished my Hot Springs, Arkansas, travel video! You can watch it below or click here. If you are interested to know how I made my videos, see this blog post.

You can watch other travel videos here. Now my next task is to put together all the recent survey results about sharing online photos of your kids. I ended up with 141 responses, so thanks to everyone who contributed!

Hot Springs, AR July 2019 from Amanda Bumgarner on Vimeo.

Travel Log: London

And so we come to the end of my Europe travel recaps (although someone asked me if I was going to write a post about our budgeting and spending on this trip, which I might do!). This is kinda long, so I'm going to put a link to our London travel video here at the top. It's also embedded at the bottom of this post!

We left Cambridge on Thursday and took the train to London, where we stayed at a hotel very near the Paddington underground station (for anyone reading who knows where that is). The above photo was taken on the street outside our hotel on our last morning. There was a whole thing I'll have to mention if I do our budgeting post. I originally booked an Air BnB with what I now realize was a really bad cancellation policy. Lesson learned! After doing a bit more research, we realized that we didn't want to stay in that location because it would be too far and annoying to commute into central London each day. So we cancelled that (losing 50% of our payment super bummer!), and I was able to get one of the last rooms at a hotel that was a bit more expensive than the Air BnB but so much better location-wise. And it really wasn't even that expensive... right around $100 per night.

Anyway, enough about that. We spent the rest of Thursday, all day Friday, all day Saturday, and the morning on Sunday in London. Our flight back to Boston left in the late afternoon, and we ended up just going to the airport super early because we didn't want to carry our bags around and we had to check out of the hotel.

Our schedule for Friday and Saturday looked pretty much the same: set alarms for 8:00, leave the hotel by 9:00, stop at the bakery next door and get muffins for "take away" (to go in British speak), walk through Hyde Park into central London, and spend the day walking around. We  didn't get back to our hotel until 6:30 or 7:00 or so and estimate that we walked at least 10 miles each day!

After spending 4.5 days in three smaller towns, London was definitely quite the experience. It was louder and busier and more expensive, and I think if we had to choose, we preferred our time in Liverpool and York the best. However, we thought London was super neat and had such a great time wandering around! It was fun to be somewhere that was so international. I mean there's just nowhere quite like it.

Travel Log: Cambridge, UK

We left York after lunch on Wednesday and headed south to Cambridge. We chose Cambridge as our third and final destination before settling in London for the end of our trip because it was in a good location to complete our circle(ish) train ride around northern England and not too far from London, so we wouldn't have a long ride on Thursday. 

We were intrigued by the history there, the famous colleges, and the architecture. What we were not prepared for were all the BIKES. So many bikes. So many. Honestly, never in my life have I been anywhere with so many people riding bikes. Which makes sense now that I think about it, because it's a small college town, so biking is an inexpensive way to get around. But it was crazy how many bikes there were. Every single wall, post, and railing had some kind of sign attached to it stating whether or not you were able to use it as a bike rack. When we crossed the street, we were more scared of a bike running us over than a car. I'm not exaggerating!

After two Air BnB experiences, we booked a hotel in Cambridge. It was unlike any hotel I've stayed at in the US and was basically like an Air BnB because it was self-check-in! A week before our arrival I received an email telling me instructions for how to get to the hotel and the key code to get into the building and into our room. There was a note on the bed when we got there with my name on it that had instructions for the WiFi and the check-out time. 

Travel Log: Liverpool, UK

Continuing our travel posts! I can't believe it's already been two weeks since we came back. It  was so nice not cooking or cleaning or, well just dealing with all of life for a bit ;)

I've only been to Europe once before, and that was in college for an 11-day January term trip with a class to Greece. Jordan has never been to another continent before. We liked the idea of going to England because we knew it was going to be relatively familiar to us at least as far as the language and general customs. We were definitely going to spend a few days in London during the trip, but we also wanted to travel to a couple different places around England.

Liverpool was Jordan's must-go #1 destination because he's a big fan of their football (soccer) team, and we either wanted to try to see a game or do an Anfield Stadium tour. So Liverpool was the first location we officially booked (and it was honestly what finally sold Jordan on the idea of actually doing the trip!). We were in Liverpool for 2 days and 2 nights and stayed in this Air Bnb. (If you have never used Air BnB before, you can use my referral link and get $40 off your first trip. I've now used Air BnB six separate times and had great experiences for all!)

You may have heard of Liverpool because it's the home of The Beatles. There was a carpool karaoke with Paul McCartney where they drove around Liverpool! You can watch it on YouTube, and if you skip ahead to 15:42, they go into the pub where Jordan and I ate dinner our first night (Sunday).

We flew into London (Gatwick) Sunday morning and immediately took a train from the airport to the main London Victoria station. From there we both bought an Oyster card and took the underground to another train station, which took us to Liverpool Lime Street Station (roughly a 2-hour train ride; Liverpool is to the north west of London). I ended up sitting next to a guy who was from Liverpool and worked in administration at one of the universities. He was super nice and suggested a few places to eat and things to do.

pancakes as large as your head + branson travel video

This post contains pictures and stories and a travel video of our trip to Branson a few weekends ago! I already shared the main logistics of our trip and a few pictures here, so read that first if you missed it. If all you want to see is the video I made of our trip, scroll to the bottom!

Okay first things first. Let's talk about one of the most important aspects of any vacation: food. Jordan and I have been mostly disappointed in the food on our past few trips, but we more than made up for it this time. Have you ever been eating the most delicious meal and then you get full and feel really, really sad that you just can't cram down any more food? Well, it happened more than once on this trip and I'm not complaining.

The fun part was that even though we do budget for travel, we still usually keep an eye on our spending and try not to go crazy on food. But as I mentioned in my previous post, our hotel was so stinking cheap that we basically threw caution to the wind when it came to our meals. We didn't care about prices and tipped big and did crazy things like order dessert! 

This is what it feels like to be a movie star! I assume.

I am our designated Family Vacation Planner, so I created a list of breakfast, lunch, and dinner places for each day we were going to be in Branson. The majority of our eating spots were based on recommendations from friends, and they did not disappoint. On Sunday we had the most delicious brunch at the Keeter Center.

A Weekend in Chicago: Travel Video

Last Saturday we drove 13 hours in the car with R to Illinois for a family weekend to celebrate my grandpa turning 80. We stayed overnight at my grandparents' house, and in the morning we drove into Chicago with my immediate family and extended family.

We went to a Cubs game, ate pizza, saw the bean, and walked over 22,200 steps just on Monday alone. Jordan, R, and I flew home Monday night. We partied hard, and we still haven't recovered, but we did it! R is a traveling rockstar, and I honestly cannot believe all the things we've done with her during her first year of life.

Once again, we had a rough traveling experience coming home. You may remember what happened to us coming home from Virginia in March. Our flight was cancelled, and we had to stay overnight and take an early flight the next morning. Annoying for adults, but when you add a baby to the mix it's SO FUN. It's just how I wanted to spend a day of paid time off. Read my sarcasm.

Well, friends, learn from our mistake and never book the last flight of the day. Our flight home from Chicago got, wait for it, cancelled. Mechanical malfunction or some other nonsense. Long story short, after weighing our options we decided to have American rebook us on an 8:30 pm flight to Dallas. We could stay at my parents' house and fly to OKC in the morning. Not my favorite but acceptable. But THEN, the 8:30 flight got delayed and delayed and delayed again and didn't leave Chicago until after 11:00. R decided sleeping wasn't as fun as crawling around the airport terminal making friends, so Jordan and I took turns chasing her around for hours.

We arrived in Dallas around 2 in the morning. We were the only flight and still had to wait over a half hour to get our bags,even though we didn't actually check anything, but when they gate checked the car seat and our suitcase they decided to put it through baggage claim. By the time we got to my parents' house it was after 3 in the morning. We got up at 6 so my sister could drive us back to the airport for our 8 am flight.

What I'm saying is, I was extremely well rested.

I practically kissed the Oklahoma ground and swore never to leave again. Or, at least never book the last flight of the day because only terrible things happen when you do that. BUT WE MADE IT. And I have another story for the blog. So there's that.

In related but not as terrible news, Jordan and I bought a video recorder as a joint birthday gift, and I took it for a spin in Chicago. I filmed a bunch and used iMovie to put it all together. I think making videos is my lost calling, because it is so fun to make these even though I stay up way too late working on them. The video should be embedded below, but if it's not you can click here to watch it on YouTube. Hope you enjoy! All in all it was a fun weekend with family, and we certainly packed in as much as we could in just two days.

p.s. If you are interested in how we budget for travel, click here.

Our Historical Virginia Vacation (Part 2) + A Video!

// Read part 1 here.

Today I'm going to share pictures from our day in Lexington, Virginia, which is about an hour from Charlottesville. Jordan is reading a giant book on Stonewall Jackson and was excited to see his grave and visit his house. Also, at the end of this post there is a short (less than 2 minutes) video I put together of our Virginia trip!

R slept through the entire tour of the Stonewall Jackson house, which I was a little bitter about because I wished she had done that the day before when we were at Monticello (Thomas Jefferson's house). I don't think I mentioned that she started talking in the second room and got both of us kicked out of the tour. Little troublemaker. Jordan stayed and finished the tour while R and I wandered around outside the house for an hour. It's a good story to tell her when she's older, I guess.

Before arriving in Lexington, we drove an extra twenty minutes to Natural Bridge, Virginia, because I wanted to visit Foamhenge, a quirky roadside attraction I'd read about on the internet. You may remember Carhenge in Nebraska? Well, Foamhenge is the same thing but made out of foam! It was truly one of the weirdest things ever, and Jordan gave me a hard time about going so far out of the way to see something so strange. 

There was literally no entrance or any way to drive up to it. We could barely see it from the road, so Jordan pulled to the side and I ran up a hill to take this picture. It felt like the way horror movies start. I told him we need to see what other fake Stonehenge replicas we can find in the US to visit, because clearly now that we've seen two we need to see them all.

We looked on Trip Advisor to get eating suggestions for lunch, and since it was a Monday almost all the places were closed, so we had basically one option. R was perfect while we were eating! She just sat in a high chair and played. Don't get me started about the fact that she's big enough to sit in a high chair.