After 28 days in England and Wales, what I loved and didn't love about Britain

" The bacon is like heavily salted ham and OK, too salty. We missed our crispy American Bacon."

In the UK it's generally back bacon that you'll get, in the US it's streaky bacon (not popular in the UK), although you can get it here.

The television in the evening was amazingly boring, with few good shows.

Biased I know but it may be a result of being exposed to too much American TV.

I find TV in America to be full of shows that are full of constant dramatic music, flashing quirky camera angles and constantly fast paced. I believe it's because commercial breaks are so frequent that the producers have to ensure that the viewer retains attention and is not tempted to flick the channel elsewhere, this is also the reason for the continuous "coming up...." previews before the commercials. I find it impossible to watch American TV as I simply can't get drawn into a programme, the exception are those channels that do not have commercial breaks.

I agree about the snooker and the darts, bores me to death but there's inevitably a decent documentary on somewhere, most notably BBC4.

I'm surprised you found the sausages at breakfast more akin to a hotdog. Of course I can't vouch for what you were served but the typical British sausage is coarse, a far cry from a close textured sausage such as a frankfurter. British sausages bear more of a resemblance to American breakfast sausage. If you're eating German style sausages as part of an English Breakfast then I can only apologise on behalf of those who value a proper, traditional breakfast (potatoes don't belong in an English breakfast, it's a recent phenomenon to incorporate the hash browns of an American breakfast, sacrilege if you ask me).

Very glad that you enjoyed your stay and your fish and chips!

If Geovagriffith is like me, a good British TV comedy or drama was probably the goal. I've been disappointed more than once to turn on British TV and find only American reruns (or darts or snooker).

I love British television especially dramatic programs, sports coverage and late-night news.

Glad to hear you had a wonderful time! You went to some great places. Good choices you made there.

We also enjoyed the fish and chips during our trip last spring.
We love Indian and Thai food, so we also had that while in England.

Agree about TV programs. The best program we could find one evening was a talk show with Martin Clunes as the host. Boring. Another channel had re-runs of the American program The Big Bang Theory, a marathon of this.
We searched for BBC4 or channels with programs about historic homes or British history, but nothing like that was ever found. We were hoping for a good British TV comedy or drama, but did not find one. Perhaps our hotel cable system or whatever had a limited number of channels, and they had not paid to get the good channels!
The news was the best thing on; interesting.

Looking forward to reading your trip report if you write one!

The most watched channels (BBC One and ITV) don't usually run any imported material in the evening and haven't done so for the best part of 20 years. American programmes turn up on lesser channels as by and large they don't tend to get a significant audience. The earlier evening tends to be rather overloaded with serial drama (soap) and factual which is rather different from the USA and understandably hard to follow for a visitor.

Hotels generally these days provide a fairly full selection of Freeview TV but in some more remote areas the channels are more restricted in number.

The ones with a poor selection of free channels tend to be those either stuck with old systems, pushing pay-tv or both. Once for me the system was actually swapped over mid stay.

We were so lucky on our trip to the UK the end of August. When we came back to our hotel the end of the day, playing each night in the 2 weeks we were there were Midsommer, Lewes and Vera. What a wonderful day to end a day!

Glad you had a good time. With enough visits you get used to driving on the left. In many places the street signs are there, but are lower to the ground and hard to see since they are often hidden by parked cars. You are totally correct regarding parking. It can be a pain. I’m glad there are differences in the food and tv. It’s fun watching current episodes of East Enders or Midsommer Murders (with a different inspector Barnaby). If everything was just like in the states there would be no reason to travel. I’m used to the tomatoes and beans at breakfast and look forward to some of their tv shows. Just like hagus in Scotland, the sausages are different depending on where you are. On my first visits over here, it was the sausages texture I had a hard time getting used to. It can’t all be Bob Evans. Same for the bacon. At the hotel I’m at in London right now, it’s about the same as in the states. It difficult to find bad fish & chips or Indian in the UK.

In the rural UK and many small towns, we have had good navigational luck if we forget about street names or cities/towns and just figure out how to put the postcode into the GPS/sat nav system at hand.

I'm a coffee and pastry kind of breakfast person, and find even Tesco to have a tasty selection for that kind of nosh.