By Jim Hunt for the News and Journal
For each of our granddaughters, we allow them to pick somewhere in the world to travel to for
a special trip with their grandparents. Ali, our oldest granddaughter, chose Vienna, Prague, and
Bratislava and when she was fifteen, we headed overseas and enjoyed our adventure. Next in
line was Avery, who was ten years old at the time and she chose Paris and Amsterdam.
We thought about her young age and discussed with her parents and concluded that she was
mature enough to go. The trip was amazing and went off without a hitch. This year was our
third granddaughter’s turn to choose, and she decided on London. We think it might have been
the pictures of the London Eye, a huge Ferris wheel that is on many of the pictures of London.
Emery is also ten and a very confident and smart young lady.
Planning an overseas trip with your grandchild can be a daunting task and lots of details need to
be attended to. Getting a passport is not as quick as it has been in years past and I had to make
sure that her mother got the application in early, as a delay would be disastrous. It is also
necessary for the grandparents to prepare legal forms to allow permission to take the
grandchild to the hospital, in the event of an accident or a medical emergency during the trip.
Booking the air travel and hotels is another important task and I try and do enough research to
ensure that the trip is as headache free as possible. Since my daughter and son-in-law live just
outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, I thought it would be best for us to fly a non-stop flight
from Charlotte to Heathrow Airport in London. This made for an easy flight with no stopovers,
that can mess up even the best laid plans.
Finding a good hotel for the stay is also important and I have found that Google Maps is a great
way to explore the area outside of the hotel virtually, so you have an idea of the type of
neighborhood the hotel is in and how far the hotel is from the sites that you would like to visit.
The Google “Street View” is very helpful, and you can ‘walk’ around the hotel and check out the
actual pictures of the hotel and the surrounding areas. It is always easy to just book at hotel
next to a famous site and be right there.
The problem with that approach is that the prices of hotels located in the best areas are also the most expensive. Checking out London, one of the world’s most expensive cities, I was not going to pay over $800 a night for a hotel room and needed to look for a good location but not the best location. I was fortunate to find a wonderful hotel near the Waterloo Underground Station and close to Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, and the London Eye. It was around $200 dollars per night and included a buffet breakfast each morning.
The next step was preparing an itinerary for the trip and deciding what we would do each day
and how far the various sites were from one another. My wife spent some time and had listed
several things to do each day. We also received some help from our friend’s son, Andrew, who
works in London and is familiar with what might make for an interesting trip. This proved
invaluable and as an added plus, we got to meet up with Andrew during our trip and have lunch
near his office in the financial district of London.
The planning for the trip and booking the flights, hotel, and tours, took many months and as
Emery’s Spring Break neared, we confirmed all of the details and were ready to embark on our
London holiday. I’ll be sharing the exciting details of our trip in the next few columns. Look for
columns on the historic sites, like Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and many others. Stay tuned…