As a traveling nurse practitioner, it’s difficult to plan out your vacations unless it’s truly last minute, because you have no idea where you will be later on in the year. I usually just plan my trips for the year and make my locum assignments work around them.
Before my next assignment, I had a planned trip to Europe with my family. We decided to go to London for the first time, since it finally peaked our interest after watching the show “The Tudors”. I had an amazing time in London; it definitely exceeded my expectations. There is just soooo much to do there!
We enjoyed going to Hampton Court Palace to see where Henry VIII once lived. We also loved the National Portrait Gallery because we were able to see all of the portraits of the Tudors and Stuarts and other royal families that we were used to seeing in books or online. I loved visiting Westminster Abbey, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the British Museum (where I got the see the Rosetta Stone!).
London was a lot more diverse than I expected. They had a lot of Arabs, Indians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans. At the same time it was very clean and people were nice and respectful. Using public transportation was straightforward. Fortunately for us, the pound went down after Brexit, so everything was pretty affordable. We enjoyed having afternoon tea in London as well.
We continued our trip to Ireland, hoping that being in the countryside would provide us with much needed rest and relaxation. Dublin was also pretty diverse – with plenty of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It was interesting to learn about Ireland’s history and how the English preferred to settle in America over Ireland, because there were constant uprisings and wars throughout Ireland.
We lucked out with some great weather in Ireland, as sunshine is pretty limited there. The picture above is us visiting St. Patrick’s Cathedral. The grass in Ireland was just as green as we imagined it to be. My favorite part was visiting the Cliffs of Moher (pictured below).
We ended the trip in France, since we like to go every year, as we have family that lives there. Paris is my favorite city in the world so I enjoyed promenading the Champs Elysees and eating macaroons any chance I got. We rode bikes around the Notre Dame and along the Seine River.
We wanted to visit a new section of France, so we agreed to go to Normandy. We took a day trip to Isle St. Michel, which is a magnificent church on top of an island. Sometimes the tide is high that you can only access the island via boat, other times you can take a trolley over the bridge.
After a fun 3 week trip to Europe, I returned home to start my next locum tenens adventure!
