Taking Off #4: Glimpses of an Itinerary

Over the couple of weeks since I last posted about EuroTour2020 (as I’ve come to think of it), I haven’t at all been ignoring the subject. Over the next few days, I’ll be updating my page of questions-and-answers with some new information. In the meantime, I thought I’d talk about the process of organizing our list of destinations.

In the previous  post about the trip, I covered the first-cut list of “we need to visit here” cities. That list was vaguely organized chronologically, top to bottom (not counting the USA cities at the end), but we hadn’t given really serious thought to much beyond the names of the cities themselves.

The current “official” list includes about a half-dozen more cities (with — yes — a few more thrown in even later). It’s also better organized to suggest, y’know, first we’ll go here, then we’ll go there, and so on.

I tinkered with the sequence quite a bit, and even started to drill down to consider how we might go from place to place. But the more I thought about it, the more I recognized in the process a waste of time and energy: we plan, you see, to plan almost no specific details along the way. We don’t know how long we’re going to stay at place X (or whether indeed we’ll stay there at all, vs. just blow through for a brief visit). We consquently can’t make lodging arrangements much in advance, book transit in advance, purchase event tickets in advance…

…except: we need a place and a time to start. That’s the focus of the rest of this post.

We’ve always taken it for granted that we’ll start in “England,” by which we mean not just that country but also Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Ireland proper. It’s the one place in Europe which we’ve visited, and that for only a measly week, and so it’s the one place we know we need to see more of and what (more or less specifically) we want to see and experience while there.

But our ignorance — well, let’s say our naivete — hinders us. On that previous trip, we stayed in two locales: the town of Ludlow (in the northwest) and in London itself. For years, we’ve read and heard the names of English counties — all those -shires, don’t you know — but have almost no concept of where they lie, geographically. (Exceptions of course for those with compass points in their names — Northumberland, “Wessex,” etc.) Where to start narrowing down, then…?

Our general criteria:

• We want to spend at least a couple weeks just in the London area.
• We want to stay on the north side of London, to facilitate visits to areas of interest up there without having to pull up stakes and relocate for real.
• We prefer places with easy mass-transit travel to as many other places as possible — i.e., places not requiring us to drive.
• We like the idea of genuinely staying someplace: a place with easy access to cultural and other landmarks in the city and elsewhere, of course, but also (for lack of a better word) livable in its own right — a place with lots to explore (and be comfortable with) for days at a time.

Then The Missus came across a recent (April, 2019) list of “50 best places to live near London.”

Granted, this list comes from the glossy periodical Country Life, self-described as “the Quintessential British Country Magazine.” Wikipedia:

The magazine covers the pleasures and joys of rural life. It is primarily concerned with rural communities and their environments as well as the concerns of country dwellers and landowners and has a diverse readership which, although mainly UK based is also international. Much of its success has historically been built on its coverage of country house architecture and gardening at a time when the architectural press largely ignored this building type.

So, perhaps a bit, er, snooty? Or let’s say “exclusive.” (I can’t honestly judge, though, never having seen let alone handled an issue.)

But the Country Life list was a place to start. It’s even divided into two separate, not-quite-overlapping lists: best places to live, and best places for commuters to London to live — even better!

(Without boring you with all the details — the usual “build a spreadsheet with a couple dozen columns [blah-blah-blah]” stuff — I’ll just direct your attention to the map at the top of this post. (Or, if you prefer, you can just open a larger version in a separate browser tab/window here. If you’re feeling really adventurous or in more need of control of things, visit the Google Map itself.)

Taken altogether, the map is a zoomed-in Google Maps view of the area surrounding London (that’s the star at the center: roughly, Trafalgar Square). The two jagged-circle areas centered on London mark (approximately) 25 miles straight-line distance from the star, and 50 miles. You can also see a “pushpin” for every place in the Country Life list, and the pushpins are sort of color-coded:

• Yellow: the town is on both the “best places to live” and the “best places for commuters” lists.
• Blue: the town is on the “best places to live” list, but not the “best places for commuters” one. (There only a few of these.)
• Orange: the town is on both lists, and on the desirable (to us) north side, but outside about a 25-mile distance from the city.

(Note: one yellow pushpin lies outside the 50-mile circle; it’s the village of Dunchurch, which lies about 80 miles north-northwest of London. Country Life says it’s within an hour’s train ride of London, but I find this hard to believe unless they just mean “an hour’s ride to the outermost fringes.” Dunchurch might not be a bad place to relocate to, though, as a central point for exploring more northerly locales once we move on from London.)

The line isn’t perfectly horizontal, and doesn’t cross through Trafalgar Square — I couldn’t make it so with the limited Google Maps tools — but it denotes the north-south midpoint of the area under consideration.

A bit of careful counting will tell you that five yellow pushpins on the north side of London lie within 25 miles’ distance of the city’s center; the second-choice orange pushpins (north of London, but outside the 25 miles) number fourteen.

Translation: we still don’t know where we’ll start, but we feel a heck of a lot closer to knowing it!