Originally written November 2021
Estimated reading time: 19 minutes
Click to view the complete photo collection of this trip
The Story Behind the Trip
Some moments, you can feel them building—like the way anticipation swirls in a glass before that first sip. For those of us who live for travel, the months of 2020 were an exercise in stillness: the Big 10 Basketball Tournament was cancelled, our anniversary trip to New Orleans was postponed, and the world was moving into an unfamiliar quiet.
Then, just before Christmas, Katy handed me a single sheet of paper. Flight confirmations. A 2.5-week journey to the United Kingdom, scheduled for late April 2021. When your mind isn’t expecting travel, it takes a moment for recognition to arrive—but once it does, pure joy floods in.
The plan was straightforward: fly to London on September 22nd, drive south to the Jurassic Coast near Weymouth, and spend time hiking that legendary stretch of English shoreline. Then, on the 29th, fly north to Islay, a Scottish island we’d been dreaming about for years. Finally, return to London for a few nights before heading home.
We’d been vaccinated. We’d waited. We were ready to see if the world was ready to let us back in.
Part One: The Jurassic Coast
Arrival
The COVID test came back negative. Grateful for that particular negative.
We cleared Heathrow in minutes—the airport was moving at a fraction of normal capacity. The customs agent asked about our destination, listened warmly when we mentioned Islay (“My family’s from there,” she said), and waved us through with genuine enthusiasm. No scrutiny of vaccination documents. Just a human connection and a blessing for the road ahead.
Driving on the left side takes less recalibration than you’d think (see this for more about driving on the left). By the time we pulled into Weymouth after a 160-mile drive through the English countryside—stopping briefly to see Stonehenge blur past in the distance—the day had earned itself. Our Airbnb welcomed us, and sleep came fast and deep.
Weymouth: A Town Built on Change
We woke to a place that had been quietly reinventing itself for over 250 years.
In the 1750s, Weymouth was a modest harbor town when a Bath gentleman named Ralph Allen discovered something miraculous: seawater. His physician recommended bathing in it for his failing health. He bought a house, spent three months a year taking the cure, and helped pioneer the very notion of the seaside resort.
But the town’s real transformation came in 1789, when King George III arrived—not for scandal or intrigue, but for his health. He bathed in the sea each morning from a specially designed bathing machine, and the royal seal of approval transformed Weymouth into the most fashionable watering place in England. Within years, elegant Georgian terraces rose along the seafront—Royal Crescent, Royal Terrace, Gloucester Row—each one catching the sea light and holding the memory of an era when seaside elegance meant something specific: restraint, geometry, the belief that beauty and health were inseparable.
We stayed in one of those Georgian neighborhoods, surrounded by architecture that whispered of centuries past. The town that George III loved was still there, still welcoming, though now it served families with children and walkers exploring one of Earth’s greatest geological treasures.
Walking Through 185 Million Years
The Jurassic Coast stretches for 96 miles along the Dorset and East Devon shoreline—a UNESCO World Heritage Site that reads like a textbook written in stone. Between roughly 66 and 252 million years ago, layer after layer of sediment accumulated here. The desert became a shallow tropical sea. The sea advanced, retreated, and changed composition. Each layer tells a story; each layer holds fossils from creatures whose world is now unimaginably distant from ours.
Our first hike took us to Durdle Door, a limestone arch carved by patient millennia of wave action. The path climbed 400 feet through sunlight and green, and with each step, the Jurassic Coast revealed itself: cliffs that hold Triassic red sandstone, Jurassic limestone studded with ancient ammonites, Cretaceous chalk deposits gleaming white against the sky. Here, at Lyme Regis and other points along the coast, a young woman named Mary Anning spent her life collecting fossils in the early 1800s—specimens that would help establish the entire science of paleontology. She was discovering ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs when most of the world still believed in a young Earth, unchanged since creation.
We walked slowly, stopping when light hit the stone in a particular way. Over 20,000 steps that first day. Ninety flights of stairs. By evening, we were beautifully tired, grateful for a quiet dinner and an early bed.
The second day brought Portland Island—a 9.25-mile walk around its perimeter, mostly gentle, mostly just being in a landscape that has spent 185 million years becoming what it is. The Isle of Portland is connected to the mainland by Chesil Beach, a barrier beach of astonishing geometry, also part of the World Heritage Site. Walk along it, and you’re standing on an 18-mile pebble beach that has sorted itself by size and composition through centuries of wave action.
Bride Valley: Where Wine and Kindness Intersect
By our third day, we’d learned something important: the best moments come from saying yes to small invitations. We’d emailed Bride Valley Vineyard on a whim, asking if we could visit. Mo, one of the managers, had written back with a warm welcome.
The drive there was itself a lesson in English beauty—narrow, winding country roads that seem designed to slow you down, to make you notice. We arrived at a small vineyard tucked into Dorset’s rolling countryside, and Mo met us with the kind of genuine warmth that can’t be manufactured. Upstairs, she introduced us to her partner Graham, and then—casually, as if we were already friends—she mentioned the name of the vineyard’s creator: Steve Spurrier.
This was the Steve Spurrier. In 1976, Spurrier orchestrated the “Judgment of Paris,” a blind tasting that shocked the wine world: California wines could not only compete with French wines, but also beat them. It was a moment that fundamentally shifted how the world thought about wine. And here we were, in his vineyard, tasting his work.
The day unfolded like a gift. We joined a Michelin-starred restaurant’s vendor tasting—the only such restaurant in Dorset. Mo and Graham welcomed us into their professional world as if we belonged there. We tasted, we listened, we bought four bottles carefully chosen to carry home.
Before we left, Mo gave us directions to Hive Beach, then said four words that changed the afternoon: “Trust me.”
Katy drove while I navigated, and I photographed what would become some of our favorite images from the entire trip—a narrow coastal road winding through clifftop landscape, light changing by the minute, the English coast revealing itself in layers. That drive became the model for what made this trip work: saying yes, following directions from someone who knew, and discovering that sometimes the best moments aren’t on the itinerary at all.
Plymouth and the Mayflower
We’d learned to be flexible. What began as a day in Weymouth became a train ride to Plymouth, where we met our son Bruce (who was studying medieval history at the University of Exeter) and spent a rainy afternoon in a museum dedicated to ships, history, and the ordinary lives of extraordinary times.
The Mayflower sailed from this harbor in 1620, carrying people who wanted something different enough to risk everything. Plymouth itself held the memory—not just of the Mayflower, but of Sir Francis Drake, who allegedly played bowls on the Hoe before the Spanish Armada arrived. The museum didn’t focus on legends, though. It showed us the material reality: cramped ships, terrified people, the weight of commitment and hope.
We walked back to meet the train, our Dorset Cremant waiting in our luggage, ready to be opened on the morning we’d fly north to Scotland.
Part Two: Islay—Where Whisky Teaches You About Time
Arriving on the tiny Island
There’s a particular magic to flying north toward Scotland. The landscape transforms beneath the wings—the manicured English countryside surrendering to something wilder, rougher, more honest. At Glasgow airport, a rainbow greeted us, a small arc of color against the gray Scottish sky, as if the place were welcoming us home.
But the real revelation came on the short flight from Glasgow to Islay. As the aircraft descended, the island revealed itself in layers: moorland the color of burnt sienna, cliffs dark against the sea, narrow roads threading through a landscape that seemed to have forgotten the modern world entirely. The view from the window was so vivid, so suddenly real, that words felt like they were betraying the experience. We’d known, intellectually, that this small island—3,000 people, eight distilleries, standing stones older than most civilizations—would matter. But knowing and witnessing are entirely different things. The beauty wasn’t just in the scenery. It was in the feeling that we were descending not into a destination, but into something that had been waiting for us.
Understanding Whisky Through Patience
Most distillery tours follow the same trajectory: malted barley arrives, is soaked, heated, mixed with water, fermented, distilled, and aged in barrels. The science is consistent. The storytelling varies.
But the warehouse tour—that’s where you actually meet the whisky.
Our first tasting was at Laphroaig, booked months in advance. Four of us sat in an intimate room while a guide brought out barrels we wouldn’t find in any store. These were single casks, bottled in tiny quantities and available nowhere else in the world. We tasted three expressions slowly, letting each one teach us something about cask type, age, and the particular alchemy that happens when wood and spirit age together.
We left with two small bottles, chosen carefully, and a new understanding that some things are worth waiting for precisely because they can’t be rushed.
Ardbeg came next, a different philosophy. They don’t let you take samples home—the resale market for rare bottles had become too tempting. You taste on-site, in the moment, and that particular scarcity makes the tasting feel more precious. The six expressions they poured showed us the full range of what one distillery can create: from light and flowery to dark and peaty, each one carrying the Islay character—that distinctive earthiness that comes from the island’s peat, the maritime climate, and the particular way the Scots have learned to transform barley.
But then came a 33-year-old single sherry cask, distilled in 1975, bottled in 2008, and only 415 bottles were ever produced. The moment it touched my lips, I understood why people spend lifetimes chasing whisky. This wasn’t about strength or conventional smoothness. It was about time made liquid. Thirty-three years of wood and spirit in dialogue, each influencing the other so completely that you couldn’t separate one from the other anymore. It wasn’t the best alcohol I’ve ever tasted—that phrase felt too small. It was the best conversation I’d ever had with a glass. The kind of experience that reminds you why patience matters, why waiting is sometimes the only way to create something that couldn’t exist any other way.
Lagavulin offered different lessons: impeccable education, excellent whisky, but nothing that felt truly rare. That’s the gift of tasting systematically—you learn that excellence comes in many forms, and sometimes the most valuable experience is encountering the truly unique.
The Rainbows
From the moment we arrived on Islay, rainbows appeared.
Sometimes just a fragment, vivid against gray sky. Sometimes, full arcs stretch from one end of the island to the other. One day, as we drove to Bunnahabhain, a rainbow seemed to grow larger with every mile—doubling in size, intensifying in color, until it felt less like meteorology and more like a blessing.
We photographed them obsessively. We mentioned them to bartenders and shopkeepers. At No. 1 Charlotte Street, a tiny pub attached to a bed and breakfast where we spent two evenings, we mentioned our rainbow observations to Ann, the bartender.
“I’ve seen white ones,” she said casually.
I’d never heard of such a thing. But Ann was right. On misty days, when fog replaces rain, the light diffracts differently—droplets are smaller, colors scatter and blur together. What you see is a ghostly, almost colorless arc: a fogbow. It happens in exactly the kind of coastal mist that Islay knows well.
In that moment—standing in a tiny pub on a Scottish island, learning about a phenomenon I’d never imagined existed—I understood the real value of travel: it teaches you how much you don’t know. It teaches you to be surprised.
The History Written in Stone
We hiked to Kilchoman’s early medieval church, where a Celtic cross has stood for 1,300 years. Stand before something that old, and you feel time’s weight differently. Not as abstract, but as something you can nearly touch—all the centuries compressed into stone, weathered and patient.
The American Monument came next—a hike out to the Oa, where a lighthouse-shaped memorial sits on cliffs 130 meters above the Atlantic. In 1918, two American troopships—the Tuscania and the Otranto—sank off these cliffs. Hundreds of American servicemen drowned in the cold water. The memorial, built by the American Red Cross in 1920, marks their graves. Many were buried at Kilchoman Military Cemetery, with their headstones still visible; most were later repatriated, while some chose to remain.
Walking to that monument, we were walking through actual history—not a museum display, but the real landscape where real tragedy had unfolded. The Irish Sea didn’t care what nations we represented. It didn’t spare Americans or British sailors. It just moved with its own ancient rhythms while people aboard sinking ships struggled against the cold.
The Ferry to Jura
We had ninety minutes. That’s all. The ferry from Islay to Jura leaves several times a day, and the return ferry to Islay was waiting.
But ninety minutes on Jura—with a car rental and time to drive—turned out to be exactly right. The drive around the island was spectacular: narrow single-track roads, mountains rising bare and steep, coastline that seemed to edge toward nowhere in particular. We reached the distillery before closing time (Katy got a pint at the bar), and we made the return ferry with minutes to spare.
That’s the gift of travel flexibility: sometimes the wrong amount of time becomes exactly the right amount because it forces you to appreciate efficiency. You don’t waste a moment wondering what else to do. You just move, and notice, and go.
Food as Evidence of Care
The best scallops I’ve ever had came from Islay. Not just at one restaurant, but at several. Wherever we ate, they were exceptional—sweet, perfectly cooked, tasting unmistakably of the sea.
When a place does something this well, you taste it everywhere. It’s evidence that someone cared enough to get it right. The island’s restaurants source from waters you can see from their windows. The food arrives fresh, prepared with respect.
That might sound like a small thing, but it’s not. It’s the difference between eating and dining, between fuel and nourishment, between passing through a place and actually being present to it.
The People
The people of Islay are outstanding. This wasn’t exceptional hospitality—it was the baseline. Everyone welcomed us as though we were the most interesting thing that had happened to them. The bartenders knew the islands and their stories. The distillery guides genuinely wanted us to understand what we were tasting. The shopkeepers asked where we were from and why we’d come, and seemed genuinely interested in the answers.
This is a gift that can’t be manufactured. It comes from living on an island where tourism is a fact of life but not the entirety of life. Where people have their own businesses, their own communities, their own reasons for being there that don’t depend on visitor satisfaction. And yet, they welcomed us anyway.
Part Three: London Revisited
The Thames and County Hall
We’d been to London a dozen times over thirty years. We knew it. We had history there. But this time, we stayed on the Thames itself—at County Hall, next to the London Eye, on a river we’d never really engaged with before.
The Thames is tidal. We learned this by walking its banks at low tide and discovering small “beaches”—sandy stretches normally underwater, exposed only when the river receded. The water level had dropped so far that we could see the actual riverbed in places, reminding us that this city flows on water as much as it walks on land.
We walked with no particular destination. Crossed bridges, watched the city move around us, and eventually found ourselves at the Millennium Bridge—a pedestrian crossing that offers perhaps the finest view of St. Paul’s Cathedral in all of London.
St. Paul’s: The Architecture of Resilience
St. Paul’s Cathedral stands as perhaps the most visible symbol of London’s ability to rebuild itself. It’s also, architecturally, a profound act of compromise.
In 1666, the Great Fire of London consumed most of the medieval city. The original St. Paul’s—a timber-framed Gothic church with a tall, unstable spire—was gutted. King Charles II commissioned the young architect Christopher Wren to design a replacement.
Wren had studied in Rome, drawing inspiration from classical architecture and the grandeur of St. Peter’s Basilica. He envisioned something radical: a building dominated by a dome, the first major English cathedral to feature such a thing. But the clergy resisted. They wanted something that looked like an English cathedral. So Wren learned the art that would define his career: the art of designing what you truly believed in while appearing to compromise.
He submitted multiple designs, each nominally more conservative than the last. But as construction proceeded behind scaffolding—unseen by the clergy—he made changes. He built supporting pillars far stronger than necessary. He reverted to the dome design he’d always intended. The final result bears little resemblance to the plans the bishops approved, but that’s because Wren understood something fundamental: great architecture requires both vision and patience.
When we walked into St. Paul’s on our final days in London, we were walking through the triumph of a long commitment. The dome dominates the interior—a feat of mathematics and determination, completed in 1711 after 36 years of construction. It’s survived the German Blitz during World War II, when bombs fell all around it but somehow missed it entirely. It stood through the pandemic. It’s still there, still magnificent, still reminding us that what we build can outlast our doubts.
Westminster Abbey
We’d been to Westminster Abbey at least six times before. Every time, it’s the same: awe-inspiring history, the sheer weight of centuries, the sense of standing inside a building that has watched empires rise and fall.
But we’d never seen the new section, opened in 2018. It took a pandemic and a daughter’s graduation in 2019 (which fell during crowded-queue times) to finally make room for exploration.
The new section showed us medieval manuscripts, artifacts, and the kind of intimacy that a crowd doesn’t allow. For five extra pounds, you get access to something most visitors never see. That felt like a fair trade.
We did a 4.6-mile walk from the Abbey through St. James Park toward Buckingham Palace, past the site where they were setting up for the Queen’s Baton Relay. It was autumn, clear, around 62 degrees—the kind of London weather that reminds you why people have loved this city for centuries.
St. John and the Unexpected
For years, I’d tried to get a reservation at St. John, a restaurant where “normal” food is explicitly not the point. Everything there is first-rate, but welcoming to everyone. It’s the kind of place where high craft meets genuine warmth without hierarchy.
I’d finally booked a table before leaving Indiana. It turned out to be fantastic, precisely because it was strange. The food surprised us. The sourcing was impeccable. The staff treated us as though we were the most important guests in the restaurant, even though the place was clearly full of regulars.
That’s the thing about truly great restaurants: they don’t function through exclusivity, but through excellence. Everyone is served the same attention, the same care, the same belief that what’s being served matters.
The Cinema and the Final Night
On our last full evening, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d been to a movie theater. So we caught the new James Bond film at the IMAX near Waterloo, the kind of cinema experience you can’t get at home.
What made it extraordinary wasn’t the film itself—though it was fine—but a particular moment of folding: the theater we were sitting in appeared in the movie. We were watching a scene unfold in a building we were literally inside. For a moment, fiction and reality occupied the same space.
A few pints after. A Botanist gin. Then, as the night deepened toward early morning, the realization that the journey was ending. We’d been gone for almost three weeks. The world had kept going without us. Our house was waiting. Our regular lives were waiting.
Epilogue: What Travel Teaches
Some people travel to check boxes. To say they’ve been somewhere, to collect experiences like souvenirs, to take a photo, and move on.
We travel differently. We travel to be present in places. To notice. To let landscapes and people and food and history settle into us slowly, the way good whisky settles into a glass.
This trip taught us what the pandemic had begun to suggest: that the world is still fundamentally kind. That people want connection more than they want protection. That the best moments are almost never the ones you plan—they’re the detours, the invitations, the moments when you say yes and see what happens.
We came home:
– with bottles of wine and whisky.
– with photographs of rainbows, stone, and light hitting water.
– with memories of conversations with people we’d just met but will remember for years.
But mostly, we came home with a reminder that travel isn’t about collecting destinations. It’s about understanding that there’s far more to the world than you know, and that’s exactly why it’s worth exploring.
The Jurassic Coast teaches geology by letting you stand on it. Islay teaches patience through whisky and stone. London teaches resilience through architecture that has survived fire, bombing, and the passage of time.
And if you’re paying attention—if you slow down enough to notice—the world keeps teaching you, one moment at a time, one conversation at a time, one perfectly prepared scallop at a time, that the best reasons to travel have nothing to do with distance and everything to do with connection.
We’ll be back. Both to these places, and to the kind of presence they taught us.
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