When my friend Emily told me she was officially coming to visit (as in the plane tickets were booked), I was really excited for our first house guest and our first visitor from home. Some of the excitement drained when I found out she had a nasty cold the week before she was supposed to arrive. And then I happened to catch a cold too. Seriously, what are the odds of both of us being sick when she was scheduled to visit?!

With this in mind, I had to figure out what we were going to do for the seven days she would be with us. I thought the smart thing would be to have a “big” day every other day of her stay. She arrived on Easter, so I still had my Easter dinner planned (complete with a glazed ham, of course!). But other than that, we had a low-key day since Andrew and I were tired from waking up early to drive to the airport, and Emily was tired from a very long flight! We did get several games of Bananagrams in though!

Monday was another pretty low-key day, since I thought Emily might want to sleep in a bit. I introduced her to the show “Dexter,” and she quickly got hooked on it! We also made some Easter/spring cookies. I had postponed making them so that Emily could help.

Our first actual outing was on Tuesday. I had looked up a few places that were about a two hour drive away, and one place that looked interesting to both of us was Somerleyton Hall, near the east coast of England.

We brought our umbrellas, but we had a fair amount of sun that day! The tour was very informative, and we even got to go through their maze in the garden. We worked up an appetite just in time for sandwiches and tea.

Our sandwiches were really good, and we also got scones with clotted cream and preserves– yum! I could probably eat English scones with clotted cream and preserves every day, they are that good.

Wednesday was another fairly low-key day, although I did take Emily on brief tours of RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath.

I spent most of the morning sleeping, since my cold decided to get worse instead of better. After spending some money in the gift shops on souvenirs, we went over to where Andrew works for a tour of an F-15. I think a lot of the info went over our heads, but it’s always impressive to see the aircraft up close!

We had another excursion on Thursday: to Chilford Hall Winery! It’s down near Cambridge, and it’s a fairly small winery. We were given money by Emily’s parents to do the full tour here (coffee on arrival, tour, tasting, and 2-course lunch, then a bottle of wine to take home) for an early birthday gift for Emily. It was really a great tour, and the wine was delicious!

For dinner we took Emily to a local pub:
Friday was another fairly low-key day since the night before turned into a late night! A few of Andrew’s friends came over, and Andrew really wanted to light a fire outside. 🙂 I took Emily to meet a friend of mine for lunch on base, and then we just ran errands until Andrew was done with work.

Saturday was our big day in London! We drove to Epping, where we took the Tube into the city. After figuring out where we were (parts of the Tube were shut done for renovations, so we didn’t get off where we had planned), we walked to the Tower of London, which is where we spent most of the day.

After getting some dinner at a pub near the Tower Bridge, we walked down to London Bridge to get on the Tube to go up to Westminster. I would have felt bad if Emily didn’t get to see Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey!

On Sunday, Andrew had homework to do, so I took Emily to base for some last-minute shopping and souvenirs. I also stopped by Tesco to 1) show her a British grocery store, and 2) to pick up some good British cheese to try before she left! After dinner, we enjoyed our souvenir bottle of wine from the tour on Thursday with the extra mature cheddar I picked up. It was early to bed, because we had to get up early to get Emily to the airport for her 10:15 flight!

Andrew had to work on Monday, so I was on my own navigating my way to Heathrow. We hit some terrible traffic (“queues likely” was an understatement!), but I got Emily to her terminal with enough time to get on her flight (which, thankfully, was delayed 30 minutes). It was a quick vacation, but I think we got a lot of fun things done in those seven days! And, yes, I will write more detailed posts about each of our excursions, but this was our week in a nutshell. 🙂