Britain with Kids
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| Jackie Steves with a friendly set of binoculars. |
A Steves family report
Imagine being 11 or 14 — and a child of Rick Steves — and spending a big part of your summer vacation with that robo-tourist. Jackie and Andy did in July 2001. What were the highlights? Here are the results of our family's post-trip interview (taken at Heathrow airport while waiting for the flight home):
Best city: Blackpool, England's white-knuckle ride capital! The Pepsi Max Big One — one of the world's fastest and highest roller-coasters — is still the best. A tip: avoid the old wooden-framed rides. They're too jerky for parents.
Best nature experience: Horseback riding through the Cotswolds. Wear long pants. One hour is plenty (figure around £20/hour with a guide).
Top kind of tour: Open top bus tours (most cities have them, you can relax and not walk while the guide talks, good for picnic lunches with a moving view). Audioguide tours (now available at most sights) because you can pick and choose what you want to learn about.
Fun museums: Edinburgh's Camera Obscura, a primitive 1830s spy camera from a tower, which comes with a funny demonstration and three floors of fun illusions and early 3-D photographs. Warwick Castle, with Madame Tussaud's wax people having a garden party in 1898.
Worst food: Black pudding that so many B&B people want you to try for breakfast… it's a gooey sausage made of curdled blood.
Best new food: Chocolate-covered digestive biscuits (cookies) and vinegar on chips (that's British for French fries).
Most boring tour: The Beatles tour in Liverpool: most kids don't care where Paul McCartney went to grade school or about a place called Strawberry Fields.
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| A medieval knight at the Tower of London makes a good point. |
Funniest activity: The Bizarre Bath walking tour is two hours of jokes and not a bit of history. It's irreverent and dirty — but in a way that's OK with parents.
Best activities: Leisure Centres (pronounced: lezh-your) in almost every town have good swimming pools. Some B&Bs have DVD and/or video players and movie libraries. Others have players and a rental place nearby that rents to guests of that B&B. Checking email and surfing the web. London's easyInternetcafés are huge, cheap, and fast.
Best theater: Shakespeare's Globe in London. First tour the theater to learn about how and why it was built like the original from 1600. Then buy cheap (less than $10) "groundling" tickets to see the actual play right up front, with your elbows on the stage. The actors make sure to involve the audience...especially the groundlings.
Most interesting demonstrations: The precision slate splitting demonstration at the slate mines in northern Wales. The medieval knight at the Tower of London who explained his armor and then demonstrated medieval sword fighting tactics — nearly killing his squire.
A key to happy travel is to use the car for the countryside and turn it in for the cities. From Heathrow, ride the bus directly to Bath (a genteel place to overcome jet lag). Pick up the car there for small town and rural wandering and drop it in Edinburgh. After seeing Edinburgh, we hopped a cheap flight (booked a few days in advance in England by phone) back to London for a big city finale to our family adventure.
Updated for 2008. For lots more information, check out our best-selling Rick Steves' Great Britain guidebook — or join us on one of our free spirited Britain or Scotland tours.