I drove on the left side of the road and lived to tell about it

Hello blog world. I'm back.

I had a great time with my parents. I met them at the hotel in London, we hugged, and it was as if I had never been gone. The only thing that was weird was that this place where I've been living was totally foreign to them. I forget I'm in a different country sometimes, everything just seems normal to me now. It took my mom the whole trip to figure out the money, which I don't even think about now. After spending a few days in London, we rented a car and drove south to Portsmouth so my dad could see the HMS Victory - the oldest floating naval ship in the world. It was something I could have cared less about, except that I like to think that my lifetime of my dad dragging me around to various historical and scientific sites, as well as every national park and wildlife preserve we pass on the highway, has in some way made me a more interesting person. I intend to do the exact same thing to my kids. If I ever meet a guy interested in naval history we'll have something to talk about for about five minutes. My favorite places we visited were the Cotswalds, which is where you will find all the cute cottages and thatch roof houses all situated in villages that are so cute and perfect you'll feel like you stepped onto a movie set. We also took a personal C.S. Lewis tour in Oxford with a guide that was a real character. It was so neat to learn more about Lewis, see his house, eat in the pub where the Inklings met, and sit in the pew he sat in for church every Sunday. I am determined to read more of his stuff this summer, and I want to see the movie The Shadowlands. Finally, we made our way up to the Lake District. I had been there before with Ashley back in the fall, but since we had a car and could go up all the deserted mountain roads, I feel like I experienced it all in a new way. It's absolutely one of the prettiest places I've ever been. My parents and I hiked up some peaks outside of Keswick. The climb was a killer, but there is nothing like sitting on the top of a mountain looking out at peaks and down at valleys and lakes and small little villages. On one of the peaks, we were above the clouds, and it was just such an incredible thing to experience the beauty of creation in a new way.

I didn't really take many pictures this trip, but here's a few.

Dad in front of The Kilns (C.S. Lewis's house)

Thatched roof cottages in the Cotswalds:

The beautiful Lake District: