Plans are overrated

For as much as I tried to plan out an amazing, magical, once-in-a-lifetime trip to Scotland…. man. Life be lifin’, y’all. I was not expecting to be felled by Covid for a good portion of it, and then struggling to recover for pretty much the entire rest of it!

So now I’m in the final stages of planning my England trip, and I’m almost like… should I even plan anything? I mean, other than a plane ticket (already bought) and a hotel room? What if I get sick again? Or what if, yuck, I’m still recovering??? Honestly the way I’m feeling, I might in fact still be recovering. I feel like I’ve been sick since the middle of May. Oh, wait, I have been.

So all the exploring of England that I wanted to do, all the weird shit I wanted to go see… I think, instead, I’m going to do 11 days in London, followed by seven days in Andover, followed by four more days in London. I am eyeing one day tour that would take me from London to Dover and back, and I’m checking out train tables to see if I can get up to Thirsk and go to the James Herriot Museum (there are a bunch of tours of the Yorkshire Dales that I’d love to take, and most do include a stop at the museum, but they either leave from York or are not running at the time of year I’m there). Mildly disappointing, but I’m trying to look at it like “things I’ll do next time” instead of “things I don’t get to do.”

I’m trying to plan this leg of the trip assuming that my health will not be 100%. Why don’t I just cancel/postpone, you might be asking…. Because. Because this was the year I was going to go to the three places I’ve always wanted to go, and fuck my health, I’m going. Or rather, I’m going BECAUSE of my health. I’ve had so many people close to me die in the last few years, and all of them died with regrets of things that they’d never gotten around to doing. What if my health never gets better than what it is right now? What if Septicemia and Covid almost back-to-back have dealt me a hand of cards that are going to mildly suck for the rest of my life?

Then I want to go do the things I can do, in the places I’ve wanted to go. I don’t want to sit around waiting to get better, regretting that I postponed or even completely cancelled.

And it’s not like there’s not a huge list of things I can do just in London! Here’s what’s on my Tripadvisor list….

• Temple Church
• Highgate Cemetery
• Victoria & Albert Museum
• National Gallery
• National History Museum
• Sky Garden
• Seeing Trafalgar Square
• The Florence Nightingale Museum
• Grant Museum of Zoology
• Sherlock Holmes Museum
• Hunterian Museum
• Jack the Ripper Museum
• Madame Tussauds
• The British Museum
• The London Eye
• The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
• Chelsea Physic Garden
• London Zoo

And that’s not even taking into account all the monuments I want to see that’ll take like ten minutes, like the Peter Pan statue. Plus the one tour I’m looking at that’ll take me to the Cliffs of Dover.

I think that I can 100% fill fourteen days with just London. And I’m trying to tell myself that what THAT means is that next time I go to England, I don’t even really need to DO London, I can go right to York or Leeds, and see other things.

Right?