So I never did tell you about my trip to the UK, the pubs and castles and ghost tours and musicals and comedy shows and fish and chips and stone circles and the rest of it, as much of the rest of it as you can fit into two shorts weeks in the country, split between London, a few days in Scotland, and then down to the capital of Wales and points west back to the nation’s capital.

I told you about the Volcanic Ash Cloud of Doom, which represented, let’s be honest, only a small inconvenience, a longer train ride, emails for a refund, and not even a very interesting story to go along with it. I even made it home on time.

I returned almost two months ago, almost to the day, the long, tired flight home on April 23, an Air Canada employee noticing the same date on my passport and wishing me a happy birthday. The bad George Clooney movie on the plane, the chicken parmigiana in a plastic dish, and my inability to sleep in flight.

The trip had a particularly leisurely pace, at first owing to jet leg, but then because it just felt relaxing, which was, after all, part of the point. Sleeping in on Nicole’s couch, finding a place to eat breakfast and drink coffee and read the morning news in the Guardian (how very cliche), find an activity or two to fill in the day, and then dinner and a pub with Nicole at night.

The trip included many of the things you’d expect I suppose, my first time in the London or anywhere in the UK, hitting obvious landmarks like the Parliament buildings (closed on account of the election), Westminster Abbey, a ride on the clipper up the Thames to the observatory in Greenwich, St. Paul’s Catherdral, the British museum, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, et cetera.

At night we found food at places like Brick Lane and a few good pubs, including a “hidden pubs” walking tour that was mostly places Nicole had been to before. There was the Ghost Bus Tour, which was actually quite hilarious and what I would imagine a ghost tour organized by the Monty Python folks would be like. The Legally Blonde musical, partly for irony but it was actually quite good, too, and a Jimmy Carr stand-up show in Woking.

Nicole came to Scotland, overnight on the train, and then a two-day Loch Ness tour with a hilarious nationalist Scottish guy who reminded me of my old news editor, and a (very brief) dip in the Loch itself, which was by far the coldest water I’ve ever been in. And I ate haggis, which was spicy and crunchy and delicious.

And then Nicole had to return to reality and I was on my own in Cardiff, Wales, which reminded me a lot of Halifax and where I saw Ricky Gervais tell jokes in a big theatre, and then the Roman baths in Bath and stone circles in Stonehenge and Avebury, which is larger and older but less complex than Stonehenge but quiter and by far more interesting.

I rented a car, driving on the left through rolling green hills filled with sheep and cows to Stonehenge and Avebury and I managed to pop a tire, which wasn’t free.

And then it was over, and when I returned to Pacific Standard Time to a city under grey skies (it was, you wouldn’t believe, so sunny there), I slept for days and didn’t unpack fully for weeks.

For more photos: Picasa web albums

And here is a video I made: