Cheers

Back to the UK to warm up, where cold is better understood than Greece.

We always start with a visit to Liverpool. To prevent overstaying our welcome and limit school week distraction, we did 2 quick dog sits in the Liverpool suburbs

Formby was our first sit. Highlights:

It was near the Red Squirrel preserve, nice place to walk the dogs. Gray squirrels are crowding out the native red squirrels. Unfortunately, we did not see one. Fun fact, gray but not red squirrels like hazelnuts so contraceptive-laced hazelnut butter is being trialed. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/where_to_see_red_squirrels
The owners preteen kids were nervous about meeting us because they had never met Americans before.
This family had done day trips to Spain- early morning flight out of Liverpool, a walk and dinner in Alicante, then evening flight back. With discount airlines, cheaper than a night out in Liverpool.

Next up was on the Wirral peninsula, the Irish sea side of the Mersey river. Our sit in New Brighton might have been one of our favorite sits. Two big English style golden retrievers (more like hairy labradors), exceptionally nice hosts, comfortable and fun house plus a wonderful elderly neighbor named Ken-who the dogs demanded to visit on each walk. The town was cute too.

From Liverpool we took a day trip to Chester, which is a perfect storybook version of an English town. We walked the city walls around the cathedral, passed the horse racetrack, strolled along the river, looked over the ruins of a Roman amphitheater (in most European cities it seems) and looked over the super cute main street.

We wrapped up this trip with a packed short stay in Manchester. Everything was better than expected. The museums were particularly good; the traditional Manchester museum at the University, the European museum of the year https://www.museum.manchester.ac.uk

The People’s History Museum, the national museum of democracy (oh so needed now) https://phm.org.uk

Patricia’s favorite, the Manchester Art Gallery (https://manchesterartgallery.org) which had a wide variety of pieces, with the information placards next to the pieces just as varied; some traditional descriptions, some written by 8 year old visitors, some a comment on a current event of the time, others gossip about a piece or observations by the museum’s security staff.