A reflection on my UK travels
Some travel tips, thoughts on patriotism, and the evolution of my writing process
Houston, the eagle has landed! 🦅
After a few wonderful weeks traveling all across the British Isles, I’m back home in California, enjoying the sunshine and being at home. What a lovely little intermission before I start backpacking the Pacific Crest Trail on Sunday!
Thank you, everyone, for such a wonderful April, and to all my hosts for letting me crash on your couch/bed/floor. The hospitality and friendship I felt on my trip were amazing and, honestly, hard to put into words. Emma, Joe, Ben, Caroline, Federico, Rachel, the Brydens, what a lovely time we had!
You may be wondering why I wanted to go to the UK in particular for this month-long trip, and the short answer is that I’ve had quite a romanticization of the UK my entire life. That’s part of the reason why I was so excited when I first met Joe and Ben in Paris!
I’d played around with the idea of doing a grand tour of the British Isles, and when I graduated from UCLA a quarter early in late March, I had a free month before starting the PCT in May, AND had friends abroad whom I could visit. The setting was perfect for a grand tour.
And boy, was this tour grand!
London —> Southampton —> Bath —> Bristol —> Killarney —> Dublin —> Liverpool —> Manchester —> Yorkshire —> Edinburgh —> Glasgow —> Inverness —> London
What a month it was! Here’s the final map of the trip (wow Polarsteps is so cool, thanks Emma for putting me on to it), it turned out way more epic than I could’ve ever imagined.
A month is a long time, and one picks up a lot of tips and tricks on solo traveling in that time. I wanted to share those here, both for y’all to read and my own future reference when I embark upon another international trip. I also wanted to highlight some thoughts on British vs. American patriotism and look back on the evolution of my writing process these last few months.
What a plan. Let’s do this!
A long and disjointed list of travel tips I acquired, discovered, or independently verified during a month of solo travel:
When taking the train around the UK, get yourself a student rail card to save 1/3 on every ticket’s price. Unless you have a British ID, you’ll need to pick up this rail card in person at a train station in the UK. It costs ~35£ for a one-year rail card, but it saved me well north of $100 just this month!
On the topic of trains, use the app Trainline for all your train needs. You can buy tickets, view real-time schedules, plan trips, it’s the best
You can also get a rail card in Ireland for 50% off all train and bus tickets. Federico and I weren’t able to get one because we left Dublin before the office opened at 9 am, but great suggestion there for future reference
Google Maps is the best for navigation and public transit schedules. Save your maps offline for wherever you’re going
Literally just ask random locals where they go to eat, and that place is bound to be delicious
Use Splitser if traveling with a friend(s). It’s way better than Splitwise or any other derivative apps
Hostelworld is the best for booking hostels, that’s all I used
If someone strongly recommends someplace, just go there rather than the touristy places. For me, this was Kevin’s suggestion to visit Killarney and stay at the Black Sheep Hostel
Traveling by yourself is nice and fun, and you get to see so much and introspect a lot. Being in a new environment is quite amazing and helps remove you from the normal thought processes and habits you have back home
However, traveling with friends is so much fun, especially if you have the same travel style. My 4 days with Federico were the most fun I had the entire trip :)
After a few days of intense travel, you’ll definitely need to take a break. A vacation from your vacation, if you will — I first felt this strongly in Liverpool, and basically took the day off and didn’t leave the hostel much at all. Take yourself on a date, and treat yourself to a nice dinner every once in a while
Having people to visit is so amazing, particularly when traveling internationally. It’s amazing to crash at friends’ places on the other side of the world. Make close international friends, then go visit them — they’ll be the best tour guides you could ever ask for
One of the best parts of traveling is realizing that your way of life is not the only way to live life
90% traveling and 10% blogging is better than 100% traveling and 0% blogging. Guaranteeing long-term memories is an amazing investment
Bring your own towel when traveling. Hostel towels are gross and expensive to borrow. As written in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.
Bring your own padlock because some of these hostels are quite sketch and you’ll want to lock up your things
Kevin Kelley, a prominent travel writer, recommends doing an “out-and-back” travel trip — go to the furthest destination from your arriving airport first, then work your way back to the main city. This maximizes the shock factor of the trip, and Federico and I had the best time doing it in Ireland! We went to Killarney immediately, then headed back slowly to Dublin :)
“Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back.”
Get one of these amazing charging block adaptors, they’re wonderful. It fits all international outlets and has a bunch of charging ports, I love it
If you ask to take a picture with someone “to show your mom”, they’ll say yes every time. Yes, my mom will see it. Via the blog
Bring a reusable coffee cup so that you can get cheap coffee refills at chain shops in the UK and free coffee from hostels
If you come to the UK in April, there will be lovely cherry blossom trees blooming all month!
Having a big backpack for major travel and a small backpack for day travel is a really great combination! I brought a 55L Hyperlite Unbound and a Cotopaxi day pack, and the duo worked amazingly
I really loved how many sheep I saw on this trip! Ireland, Yorkshire, Scotland, they’re everywhere
Atlas Obscura is a great website for discovering niche things in new cities
To combat jet lag flying from Europe back to the US, stay awake the entire flight and then go to sleep at nighttime in America. You’ll be tired on that flying day, but will have no jet lag after!
Carry a mini hand sanitizer with easy access at all times
Polarsteps is the coolest app to track your travels. Get it, and share your trip link with friends and family
Being able to carry all your things on your back is such a huge plus when traveling around. I love my Hyperlite backpack
There is a limit on how much artwork one can appreciate on one trip. At a certain point, all the museums and paintings kinda look the same
Macs have keyboard shortcuts for £ and € —> Option 3 for £, and Option Shift 2 for €. Very helpful if you’re writing about your travels around the British Isles on a laptop with an American keyboard
The classic American experience in Europe is “everything is so old and everything predates America and it's so exciting”
I love music, but walking through a city without AirPods lets you take in the sights and sounds of a new city much better. Do it. Enjoy the sound of the new languages, accents, cars, and birds!
I’ve given many shoutouts to the minimalist life, but it really is just so amazing to carry everything you need on your back and travel around wherever you want. I love my Hyperlite, please sponsor me. A few high-quality things are infinitely better than many low-quality ones
Have a general plan for what you want to do, and improvise along the way. Outsource planning to your local friends, and just go with the flow
The sooner you accept that you won’t see and do everything, the happier you’ll be. This is especially true in huge cities like London. This is best described by Chris Arnade, who writes
this fear of 'wasting' a meal, or an entire trip, ironically leads people to create exactly what they're trying to avoid, not literally wasted experiences, but stressful, anxious, and ultimately unfulfilling vacations, where you run around trying to maximize so much, you miss the part where you stop, relax, take stuff in, and live.
Lastly, I’ve found that the slower you travel through a place, the more of it you’ll see and enjoy. Fly over a city, and you’ll see barely anything. Drive through it, and you’ll see a bit more. Bike, run, then walk, and you see most of all.
Walking is, therefore, the best way to see and appreciate a city, so just take the time to walk around and wander. On one random walk through London with no destination in mind, I saw an apothecary, a Japanese knife store, a bunch of finance bros waiting in line at a salad shop, a symphony practicing in a church, a toy shop, and a Turkish rug shop.
Two stories come to mind regarding this idea of taking your time to walk through a new place. First, back when I studied abroad in Paris, I’d bike to and from class every day, and one day I decided to walk home. I stumbled upon this funny butcher shop that I’d biked by a million times, but never even noticed:
The second tale is from when Finlay and I were walking around Los Angeles, and heading toward KTown from LACMA. We stumbled upon the grand opening of a photography gallery in the most LA experience ever, and even got some free wine and cheese along with a lovely conversation with the curator. Lit
Walk and wander around, and you’ll find so many cool little secrets, just waiting to be found!
Some thoughts on British vs American patriotism:
Everything below is extremely subjective and based solely on my experiences and conversations abroad and in the US. Don’t sue me, please!
A recurring conversation I had all throughout my trip was about patriotism, and more specifically, contrasting American patriotism with what is felt around the British Isles. This is certainly because Trump’s tariffs (and honestly just Trump in general) have made America a punching bag on the world stage, but also because I’m clearly very American and very patriotic about it.
Generally speaking, I’ve noticed that there is much less patriotism in the British Isles than there is in the US. Interestingly, folks I met were very quick to distinguish where in the British Isles they were actually from — Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, or Wales. English people didn’t seem to really mind, and were generally ok with being referred to as British.
If you’re confused as to what the difference between the British Isles, the UK, Great Britain, and all these countries actually is, here’s a helpful map I found. England, Wales, and Scotland make up Great Britain. Great Britain + Northern Ireland make up the United Kingdom. The UK + Republic of Ireland make up the British Isles. The island of Ireland is made up of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which have historically had very violent beef. The extreme oversimplification as to why is that Northern Ireland is Protestant and the Republic is Catholic.
Since a lot of British history is stained by colonialism (Brittania rules the waves and whatnot), most English people weren’t too pumped to call themselves British, and non-English people often made the distinction of which country they were from. This comes from the fact that 1) British imperialism is not good, and 2) non-English countries were conquered by the English and made British. That’s why everyone speaks English, though there is a linguistic comeback on the rise for all the native languages across the Isles (Welsh, Scots Gaelic, Irish, etc.).
Several times, a person from Scotland corrected me that they were not British, but Scottish.
I felt this a lot in Scotland, where everyone I met was very proud to be Scottish and took every opportunity to tell me that (I’m looking at you, Rachel and Finlay).
It reminds me of myself when I introduce myself as Californian rather than American — there’s a presumption that the stranger will receive you better as being from a subdivision than a whole place, so you identify and portray yourself as being from the subdivision more than the whole. When I studied abroad in Paris, I played around with this fact all the time — to some people I’d say I was from the US, others California, others still San Francisco. Being from California got by FAR the best response, probably because the association there is amazing weather and chill people. Surfs up, broskis. 🤙
Calling an Irish person British might actually get you lynched. Don’t do it.
In general, folks are much less inclined to portray themselves as British and therefore clearly align themselves with the negative colonial history. But since Scotland isn’t known for its colonial history (we don’t think of a Scottish empire, but of a British or English one), there isn’t a negative connotation of being from there. That, plus a rich Scottish history and extensive cultural traditions (whiskey, kilts, Highlands, we-don’t-like-the-English, etc.), makes folks much more inclined to portray themselves as Scottish than British. My roommate Finlay is a perfect example of this — he was born in England and is half-English, but asserts to everyone that he is, in fact, Scottish. He even knows the haggis poem.
All this history adds up to an underlying sense that being British is not the greatest thing, and there is a subsequent decline of patriotism across the Isles as a result. Americans, despite the entire history of let’s-eliminate-all-Native-Americans-from-America-because-we-love-Manifest-Destiny, feel super patriotic on average and generally love being from here.
Funny enough, the less someone travels abroad, the less patriotic they feel. There’s something to the fact that traveling abroad makes me realize all the great things there are back home — don’t miss the sun until it starts to snow kinda vibe.
But I secretly know that everyone wishes they were American. Yee haw! 🤠
Some notes on my writing process:
Since I’ve written a lot of blogs now (my post count is now at 62!), I wanted to describe my writing process for creating these bad boys. Not only might this inspire you to start or improve your own blog, but it’ll also serve as another great archive of my writing style and methodology. I’m 100% sure it’ll evolve again, and being able to see the intermediate steps retroactively is super interesting.
Broadly speaking, writing a blog episode involves two main things:
Recording the thoughts/experiences/events that happen during a particular day/trip
Crafting these recorded experiences into a cohesive, pleasant-to-read story
Basically, I need to record what happened, and then make that recording interesting to read. Interestingly, both of these steps have seen significant evolutions over the years.
Let’s start with my Version 1.0 — back when I first started Adventure with Dennis, I’d open Apple Notes each evening and write, from memory, all the things and thoughts that happened throughout the day. After a few days, I’d paste these raw notes into the online Substack editor, edit the raw notes into a flowing story, and add pictures throughout. There’d be some minor style adjustments and whatnot each episode, but the general process stayed the same.
This initial version had two main problems — I can only remember so many things accurately so the blog’s memory resolution was lower than it could be, and writing the blog directly in the Substack editor made the final product have too much media in the actual text. The editor has a top navigation bar where you can add crazy fonts, pictures, video, text, and footnotes in the drafting process, resulting in episodes with too much distracting media that interrupts the flow of reading. Check out some of the first episodes to see what I’m talking about.
The first evolution to my writing process happened during the sorority brunching quest — after brunching at the first house with Ariv, I started writing text notes, and he recorded a voice memo directly into shared Apple Notes! This saved so much time for remembering what happened, and crucially, increased the memory resolution of the brunching experience.
(When I mention memory resolution, I’m referring to the level of detail and quality of your memory recordings (i.e., how much detail can you remember after an event has happened). It’s much higher when recording voice memos than by typing at the end of the day, which I found improved the quality of the final blog significantly.)
The best part of this strategy is that Apple automatically makes transcriptions of the voice memos, which I then directly paste into Apple Notes rather than having to type out what happened each day by hand. For my UK trip, I made the action button on my iPhone activate a voice memo, which made it super easy to record voice memos throughout the day. So after a few days, I’d have an Apple Note, full of voice memo transcriptions that described, in detail, what I did the last few days.
The second evolution of my writing process happened in the drafting phase — I mentioned that I used to write the final draft directly in the Substack editor; now, I draft the final blog in Apple Notes, which forces me to make the story itself flow well before any media is introduced. This also allows me to write blogs offline on my laptop, since the Substack editor doesn’t save drafts offline. Trust me, I learned that the hard way in Paris.
I’ve found that I much prefer drafting in Apple Notes than in the overwhelming Substack editor. Notes is simple. Notes is clean.
Notes is pure.
The other funny thing to mention about the drafting process is that although I start off with the same voice memo transcriptions, the final result 100% depends on my mood and what random trains of thought I follow that day. If I were to write the same blog 10 different times from the same transcriptions, I’d end up with 10 very different final drafts. It’s like the seed variable in machine learning that affects the final, semi-random result.
Once the final draft is written in Apple Notes, I paste that into the Substack editor, then add photos, videos, and audio at the end. I try to keep the amount of media in the story minimal, and add the rest of the photos at the end in a media appendix. Thank you Ben for that suggestion!
All this results in a blog with higher memory resolution, less interrupting media, and offline drafting. Huge dub.
Lastly, I want to mention why I don’t do vlogs and only write blogs. I was asked a few times about this, and after thinking about it all of April, I’ve come up with the following reasons:
The beauty of recording voice memos and writing is that I still live in the moment, and record my memory of the moment after it passes. If I were to vlog, the actual memory itself would be recorded, and therefore, I wouldn’t be living in the moment. If I were to have vlogged during the organ performance in Edinburgh, for example, I wouldn’t have had nearly the same religious experience that I had
The process of writing is extremely hard, and learning to write well has sharpened my wit tremendously these last two years. That skill is something I want to continue to hone, and one I can’t with vlogging
The memory resolution of the vlogging would actually be lower than in a blog episode, since I couldn’t actually convey what I was thinking at the time unless I did a mega-cheesy voice over. With writing, I easily do that all the time
Writing is a lot more timeless — I go back and reread things all the time, but rarely do I rewatch old videos
Learning to edit videos well takes a long time and not something I want to commit to right now
I also want to mention that I like starting off my blogs with the travel from the previous episode’s location. I find it adds a great contextual setting for the blog and sets the scene for the greatness to come. So the Ireland blog started off at the Bristol Airport, the Liverpool one with me at the Dublin airport, and so on.
Lastly, you may be wondering why the episodes are so detailed and what the point of all this is. Well, it’s so that decades in the future, I can reread all these and remember exactly what happened back in the day. So when you read that I took a shit at 3 pm on Saturday, April 24th in the Scottish Highlands and you’re thinking “who tf cares”, I care. I care because it was so scenic and memorable, and I want to remember it forever.
I also love the idea of someone one day re-creating my exact trip when I become rich and famous and well-known, but maybe that’s just my super egotistical I’m-the-center-of-the-world Americanness shining through. Who knows?