It’s spring, and I celebrated “Aprille with his shoures soote” by heading to England for a dose of literary pilgrimage, much in the spirit of my third and latest essay for all the sins, “And I must follow, if I can.” (Issue 3 is up in its entirety, and it’s great, go check it out!)

We hit London, Bath, Lyme Regis, Portsmouth, and Brighton in 6 days (whew!).  Literary moments included seeing the musical of Matilda (Roald Dahl), a  walking tour of literary London in Bloomsbury (Virginia Woolf and her cohort, Dorothy Sayers, Randolph Caldecott, TS Eliot, and more), saying hi to Shakespeare and Austen in the National Portrait Gallery, more Shakespeare, not to mention Beatles lyrics and more in the British Library, and that was just in the first two days.  We also visited the Jane Austen Centre, the Assembly Rooms, and the Circus and Crescent in Bath, strolled the Cobb in Lyme Regis, and said “A little seabathing would set me up forever!” at least twice in Brighton.  And I had a lot of Horatio Hornblower (CS Forester) feels at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. We also drank a lot of tea, and ate a lot of scones and Welsh rarebit. It was a stupendous trip.

Here are a handful of snapshots of some of the gorgeous, inspiring, hilarious, and memorable moments from my whirlwind Jane-Austen-inspired vacation: