A Belated Christmas in London

For those of you who don’t know, my brother and sister in law are living in London right now while she completes her MBA. That meant that my side of the family wasn’t able to be together around the holidays. So we decided to take advantage of the January prices and celebrate a belated Christmas with them last week!

 

Daniel and I went to London for the first time back in August as part of our anniversary trip to Europe and I immediately fell in love. Getting to go back just a few months later was a dream come true, and this time I got to experience it with my favorite people. One of the things Daniel and I noticed last time was that London had lots of awesome sites, but so did the surrounding cities in England. We didn’t have the chance to take any day trips last time so this visit we did allll the day trips!

One trip was to Windsor Castle (any fellow Royal Wedding watchers??), Stonehenge, and Oxford. It was a jam packed day but so worth it! I could have spent a whole day just at Windsor, but we got to see some of the amazing castle and chapel before heading out to Stonehenge. The beauty of Stonehenge was in the age and history of these boulders…they are from 2000 BC! If you didn’t know that, it would just like a pile of rocks and be pretty unimpressive. The final stop of the day: Oxford. My dad works in collegiate ministry so we have always visited universities anywhere we go on vacation. I was particularly excited about Oxford because I grew up with the stories of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien swirling around our house. The highlight of this leg of the trip was seeing the pub where they met with a few other guys and discussed their writing as the Inklings. Seeing that with my dad, who introduced me to these authors, was one of the best memories from the entire week!

 

A few days later, my brother and sister in law gifted us a day trip to Brussels, Belgium for Christmas! As many of you know, Daniel is obsessed with soccer/football and many of his favorite players are Belgian. And as many of you know, I am obsessed with chocolate and Belgium is the chocolate capital of the world. This city is the perfect day trip city y’all. We saw (and ate) everything in 6 hours and were blown away by the architecture and vibe of Belgium. Also, every other storefront was either a chocolate or waffle shop so this was as close to heaven as I’ve ever been.  The two hour train ride from London to Belgium and back was like riding into Narnia because we looked out onto a snow covered Northern France.

 

 

 

 

We spent our days in typical Buschman family vacation fashion: walking all day and playing games all night. It was hard to leave, but we will all be reconvening again in June for a wedding in San Jose, California! So it’s all sunshine and warm weather next time…Daniel already can’t wait!