It’s been a few years since I’ve visited the UK, so this year I decided to head back and spend some time with the family. I decided to go back for my Dad’s birthday (so that meant November) and also decided to visit on my own.

Taking both James and Abi out of school is never a good idea, especially for James as he’s a junior in high school. Add to that the fact that a UK trip for the kids is not a real vacation. For them a vacation requires a pool and (usually) nice weather. Visiting family and friends houses and drinking tea doesn’t really count. Sure they’d like to see the family (grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins etc.,) but I can’t afford two major vacations a year so they didn’t come. Not too bad for them but crappy for Lisa who I know would have loved to visit family. Oh well.

So once I had the date I needed to decide what I was going to do – who to see and when. This is slightly complicated by the fact that my family all live in different parts of the country.

Amazingly my first attempt at an agenda was accepted by all and saw me doing the following:

• Meet my sister Jane at the airport and spend the weekend with her in the Cotswold’s
• Drive to Wokingham in Berkshire to spend some time with Nikki, one of Lisa’s sisters
• Drive to London and get some pictures in the city (1 day of selfish photography)
• Drive to Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent to spend some time with my Dad
• Drive back to London to spend some time with my younger sister Kate

What made this itinerary great was that my whole family was going to join me at Kate’s for Dinner on my last Sunday, and my brother Alex was going to accompany me on the entire trip, taking a week off work himself.

This was going to fantastic!

I should say here (as my family will read this 🙂 that this was a family visit. Any opportunity to shoot was purely a bonus; it was family first, pictures second.

That said, everywhere I went everyone said, “Let’s go and take some pictures I know some great places”

So how did it go? Well I have to say I had a blast, it was lovely seeing my family face to face – sometimes Skype (while good) just isn’t enough. I won’t bore readers of this blog with sloppy family stuff but needless to say I’d been away too long and it was good to visit everyone.

On a pictures front (that’s what people really come here for) I had a load of fun. I’ve never really been to the Cotswold’s and I have to say it totally lived up to its beautiful reputation.

Going into London was also a lot of fun and I got some cool pictures there too.

When visiting my Dad’s house in Kent, we also drove down to Hastings for the day and I got some great pictures there (even found time to get some proper British Fish & Chips and cup of tea in a “chippy” – took some pictures of that too 🙂

My last day with the family ended with some family shots that I’ve included here so they can download some copies.

This was a 10 day trip and I took a LOT of pictures, I’m posting here just my fav’s, and to show you where each image was taken I’ve broken the images up into location categories.

Some of these are just fun pictures for me, but there are some nice shots of the UK (for those who haven’t visited).

Hope you enjoy viewing these as much as I enjoyed taking them.

A small aside before you view the images, I should call out that just before visiting the UK I made the bold (very scary) decision to change all my camera gear. I’ll be posting what I did and why, but needless to say, ALL these pictures were taking with a mirrorless 16MP APS-C camera. If you want to find out more, check out my (soon to be posted) “Going Mirrorless” posting.

Enjoy

P.S. For some reason my Blog won’t let me post a posting with 50 images 🙂 – what a surprise – so this posting contains Family Pictures, other postings contain images from places I visited in the UK.

Family