When you’re in a foreign country….be a tourist!

The best piece of advice I got when we first arrived, was be a tourist.  You might now be living in the UK (or planning to), but you will be a foreigner for a very long time.  You have no knowledge of the area, you don’t know the history or the landmarks.  The best way to integrate yourself into your new country and your new life…is to explore.

The person who told me this also told me to buy a travel guide for the part of the country I was settling in, but of course you can’t buy English travel guides in England!  Go figure.  So I had to get creative.

I am well aware of how expensive this can be and I have become queen of cheap outings and budget tourism.  Unless you are fortunate enough to land a high paying job, you will find making ends meet a bit of a struggle at first, which means luxuries such as travelling and exploring are not on the priority list at all.

And yet it can still be done!

As a family, we take at least one day per month to go for a day’s outing, and with careful planning, we even manage a weekend away once a year (see my blog here  on the £200 weekend away last year).  We pack a picnic so we aren’t spending money on expensive restaurants and we hit the road looking for adventure.  The biggest thing for me, is the cultural immersion on these outings, along with our kids we are seeing, learning, exploring and widening our horizons.  And the kids get off electronics for the day!  Winning!

To keep us motivated and help plan our next outing, we bought a wall map of the country and we add a coloured sticker to each town or place that’s we’ve visited.  Slowly, our map is filling up and we have built an amazing memory bank of the things we’ve seen and experienced.

Having some fun with the Banksy street art

So how do we do it?  On a super tight budget?  Here are my tips for being a (skint) tourist:

Start local

Of course the best place to start is in your own town!  

Join community groups and pages on social media, look for a museum or tourist bureau and ask locals for some ideas of things to see and do (small pubs are also great for this).  You’ll be surprised by how much you can do in your own back yard so to speak.  

In our town, we started with the local museum which is free to visit and asked the volunteers there for some tips and interesting things to see.  We joined their newsletter and take part in the events they plan…they can be really fascinating and are usually free.  

In addition to that, we joined the library and asked the staff there too.  From their advice, we found a book of walk in the area, discovered nearby henges, and also spoke with knowledgeable historians that volunteer once a week to answer questions like ours.  

None of this cost us anything at all, just time and we quickly got to know the town as if we’d lived here for years.

Google is your best friend

Once we decide on a place to visit I do two google searches: “free things to do in…” and “unusual things to do in…”.  You will be overwhelmed with your choices but prepared for loads of walking, most of these activities are….well, active!  

From a simple search and some time on the net, we have done the most mind-blowing activities…for example:

o   A self-guided walking tour of Banksy street art in Weston-Super-Mare (google him if you don’t know who he is).

o   A free guided walk of Bath, paid for by the mayor and open to everyone. 

o   A free Balloon Fiesta, where we watched over 100 hot air balloons take to the sky in the early morning 

o   A self-styled day “tour” of Gloucester visiting free sights that are photo-worthy.  This included a ships ‘graveyard, GloucesterCathedral (one of the filming locations for Harry Potter), and a forest sculpture trail.  Incidentally, this outing cost us less than £15 for the day excluding our fuel and picnic lunch – we paid for two parking charges and bought two packets of Cotswold Fudge to nibble on.

There’s no end to what you can do for free or for a tiny bit of money.

Bristol Balloon Fiesta 2017

Follow the tourist bureaus

Major towns all have them, and so do the different regions.  Again, google will help you – “xxxx tourist information” will give you a few links but the first is usually the tourism board.  Poke around on their website, look for lists of activities such as “free”, “family-friendly”, “dog-friendly”, “adventure”, etc.  You’ll find some history about the town or area, in addition to events to look forward to.  

I can find a dozen things to do on these websites and all that remains is to pick your favourites and work out the rest of the details.

Try a membership

National Trust and English Heritage both offer memberships, and both Scotland and Wales have similar – for an annual fee you can visit and use any of their properties for a period of 12 months.  

For us, National Trust is the favourite because of the diversity and large number of properties to visit.  In one weekend, we justified the cost of membership in the savings on door entry fees.  That particular weekend, we went to 3 different places in Dorset and by the time we’d tallied up the door entries and parking charges (most National Trust properties offer free parking for members), we realized that we would have spent more than our membership fee!  

After that, it’s become a staple on our outing…going to Gloucester?  Pull out the guide book and look what is in the area to visit.  Feeling a bit of cabin fever in the winter?  Spontaneously take a drive somewhere close by to get out of the house and enjoy a country walk.  

We’ve been to breathtaking parks, lovely English manor houses, really old castle ruins, hunted for dinosaur fossils and literally stood on the edge of the country, on a cliff with a view as far as the eye can see.

Hot tip – some National Trust properties are right on the coast, where the good beaches are, and your membership will get you free parking in some cases!

Be creative!

All of the above should give you plenty to work with but you can also think out of the box.  Our town is on a canal and we poked around the Canal and River Trust website, only to discover that they regularly have free activities.  

From this, we discovered that you can hire a canal boat for a day – one of the nicest days we had was chugging along the canal in a little boat, complete with tiny kitchen and loo.  You see the country at a slower pace but you also see a view you never get to see.  Bonus experience is opening and closing the locks yourself and manning the swing bridges.  This is just one example and there are loads more.

Exploring the canal for a day

Plan, plan, plan

Logistics is quite a challenge sometimes.  You need to properly plan parking, and the distance you will walk from the car etc.  Plan your picnic, plan the order of your stops.  Spend the time on this ahead of your outing so that your day is stress free and fun!  Everything, literally everything, is online so you should have all the information you need at your fingertips, just dig around and make notes.  I have an A5 notebook where I jot down websites, postcodes, prices, parking lots and a whole bunch of things I see while I’m online and don’t want to forget.  I print out walking maps ahead of leaving and anything else we may need.  This time is well spent, so don’t skimp on the planning phase.  And you learn a bunch of stuff while you’re at it!

If you want to follow our experiences and outing, I share a lots of this on my Instagram page @saffasintheuk.  There you will see some of things we have got up to recently and anything we do.  

Please do connect and share what you’ve been up to, I’d love to see your tourist experiences!

Forests can have Cathedrals too!