Chewy There are a lot of people who use England only for their airports and for good reason. As a ‘central’ hub between many international destinations, England is a logical stopover or connection point for many travellers and airlines, regardless of itinerary. Whether you’re living in Manchester and looking for Manchester airport parking for your flight to Scotland or coming from Venice and only catching a connecting flight at Stanstead, England is one of the most obvious destinations for getting to where you want to go.
Many people who decide to do a Europe vacation make London either their first or last stop, or sometimes both, depending on where they are headed next. Particularly if you reside in North America and are flying on a discount airline, this is the most economical way to get back home. While Heathrow is the most logical airport to fly out of due to it being the busiest and most famous, depending on your destination you may not be using it. This can come as a surprise and a shock to many people, who may have been looking forward to being in this world famous airport only to find themselves heading to one of the ‘other’ airports in the London area.
Some people only have their England experience as bookends of a larger vacation, maybe due to the expensive reputation the country has or that, if you are from an English speaking country, you feel you already know most of what it has to offer due to common ancestry. This is unfortunate as England has so much more to offer than just what you learn in school or see in the media, but even still the high points of many tourist’s sole England experiences often include looking for parking at Gatwick airport en route back home.
It’s not surprising then that many English citizens have a fairly dismissive attitude, often bordering on resentful, of those who think they have seen their country because they used it as their first port of call in the United Kingdom or Europe as a whole. Particularly if people claim to have ‘seen’ England but it’s only been London, you can understand how someone from Coventry, Newcastle or Liverpool might resent being skipped over. Sure, many of these locations have airports but the chances that someone is connecting through one of them let alone getting out and taking in the surrounding area is remote.
For all the modern advances in transportation and including those less modern, like overnight buses and rail trips, many of these out of the way locations are getting more attention than they were hundreds of years ago. Stansted airport parking wasn’t really a priority in the old days because air travel was a mere fancy and most people didn’t get much beyond their own homes. Be sure you get out there and see what a place like England has to offer and don’t just consider it a stop over or obligatory port on the way to somewhere else. You’ll be amazed at what you discover.
