Somehow it feels like it has been forever since my last Free Range Hobo post… but perhaps that is because so much has happened since March and my 40th birthday this year. I talked a lot about Carli on our Dominican Republic trip and, well, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of her on Free Range Hobo! This past week… we made some promises to each other, and a wedding is going to follow! I’m so very excited for everything going on in life right now, including my wonderful fiancé! I am so happy, Honey! I hope you’re reading this and thinking of me while I am away!
Suffice it to say Carli has come into my life… and changed it for the better in so many, countless ways I couldn’t begin to describe them here! Maybe someday, maybe closer to the wedding so I don’t forget this feeling or let any of it fade over time (I doubt it will! hehe!), I’ll write some down – but for now… back to the subject of this post – and my activities over the next twelve days… because they’re exciting too for all different reasons!
Today… I’m at home, the car packed full of my standard travel kit – clothes, chargers, medications, power converters, all the things you’d normally need overseas. Today I fulfill a promise I made to my niece at her ninth birthday party. Her present was a book of travel locations from all over the world – a traveler’s guide to travel really – and a note. That note read that someday… when she was old enough and her parents agreed she was old enough… I’d take her anywhere in the world that she wanted to go – except Disneyland!
It’s been a few years, she’s a teenager now, and for her privacy I probably won’t mention her again here unless she asks and is okay with it but when I bugged her again a few years ago about if she’d picked a travel location… she responded in one of the best ways possible: “Well, I’ve been really into the Harry Potter books and movies… could we go see where they were filmed, and written?”
And so an idea was born – a “Harry Potter” trip. Thinking about it, and referencing others who have done the same like this post from TrippingOnTravel, we began to plan the trip. I pulled in a travel agent, we ended up agreeing that the whole family would go (Me, and my sister’s family of four – including my niece), and this evening we fly out of Denver headed first to London, England – where we’ll see the Harry Potter sights, maybe get a photo at Platform 9 and 3/4ers. We’ll spend a few days there before flying to Edinburgh, Scotland… where we’ll wander around even more Harry Potter areas – scenes where the movies were filmed, hotels where the books were written, as much as we can fit in. Finally, to complete the tour, we’ll head to Orlando, Florida – stopping by the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Orlando Studios (yep, we’re going to end up at a theme park anyway but… I mean how can your turn down going into Olivander’s wand shop?!?) for a couple of days, as well.
Along the way, of course, I’ll share photos of the trip, my experience of it, and any fun happenings from along the way my sister’s family lets me include. Normally I post about others a bit wantonly, but… this one feels a bit more personal. Expect mostly stories about the trip and experiences itself – and we’ll see how comfortable we all feel about sharing our family fun and adventures on the ‘personal’ side along the way.
We should arrive tomorrow in London, and pretty much lose a day to the time moving forward. We’ll land late morning and then not be able to check into the hotel until about 3PM, but luckily we’re staying at the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel, which sits right on Kings Cross station (where much of the train scenes, including the aforementioned Platform, were filmed) – so we may be able to get some early Harry Potter items in even before we see what our accommodations look like! The fun is only just beginning, for sure.
It feels good to be able to offer this opportunity to my niece – a trip like this one with the now-shuttered “People to People” organization is what really kicked my wanderlust into high gear when I was young. With any luck, she’ll take a shine to travel and make it a passion of her life, as well. Hey, an uncle can hope, can’t he?
