Weekend to Channel Islands for $665 a Person
We did a Memorial Weekend trip to the British Crown Dependencies of the Bailiwick of Jersey and the Bailiwick of Guernsey. Freddy did a nice job detailing the sites in this post.
The goal of this post is to explain how we did the trip for $665 a person. Granted some costs aren’t included in that total. For example, I forgot what we paid for airport parking, gas, meals, Uber rides, and trains to change airports in London. I guess it would be fair to assume those costs added an additional $250 to the cost for each traveller.
What a great weekend filled with lots of fun with the people we met in the pub combined with the beautiful sites of these two lesser known islands.
If you’re more of a person who prefers graphics over verbiage, feel free to skip down to the graph below where I summarized the trip in detail in an easy-to-read spreadsheet.
We booked our tickets in October (I always like to buy early. When I see a good deal, I book) for a May departure for $474 each. Of course, since airfares from Detroit are so costly, this meant another departure from Toronto; a four hour drive away. Since we had a 10:00 p.m. departure and I get off work at 4:00 p.m. it was going to be tight to make it. In order to be able to make my flight, I took Uber to work that morning with my carryon in tow and Freddy picked me up from work so we were able to be on the road as soon as I left work.
We arrived in London at 10:05 the next morning. After clearing immigration and customs we set out to change airports. Getting from Heathrow to Gatwick is a bit taxing, but doable since the infrastructure is set up for this journey. Just look for the train kiosks located throughout the airport to purchase tickets. These machines accept credit cards which makes it even easier. Since we had a six hour layover and we were hungry, we ventured off to Paddington Station where I was to meet up with friends on my return. I wanted to find the place where we were planning to meet so I wouldn’t be late and miss them. Once I had my bearings, we stopped for a nice breakfast and went on to Gatwick Airport.
We arrived in Jersey around 5:00 p.m.. Since we weren’t planning on doing much that evening but having dinner, a few beers, and recovering from jet lag we thought it made no sense to pay for a car rental just to drive to the hotel since we were planning on exploring Guernsey the next day and we wouldn’t be able to use the car we were renting in Jersey. Did we ever learn a lesson in St. Helier, Jersey. If one wants to eat, do so before they start drinking. It must have been around 7:30 p.m. by the time we were settled and set out to explore the city for a bite to eat. Every restaurant we went to had stopped serving food and was only serving beer. We must have walked to over 15 restaurants before we finally found one that was actually serving food. It turned out to be a lovely meal; one that I will always remember.
The next morning we were up early and off to explore Guernsey. Unfortunately, I had no sightings of the famous Guernsey cows while we were there. As I mentioned earlier in this post, Freddy detailed the sites in this post. We picked up our rental at the airport and set off to explore. We had less than 10 hours to see the island and we felt that was plenty.
Upon arriving back in Jersey, we then procured our rental for the remainder of the trip. When we got back to the hotel’s pub we were greeted by our new friends who filled us with laughter until the pub closed and the owner kicked everyone out.
We spent the following day exploring the Island of Jersey and went back to the pub to hang with our friends before getting kicked out at closing again. The owner would just announce closing by yelling, “Drink up and get the f*** out!” We ended up walking to a dance club with some of our new friends and had a good time before deciding that we had better hit the hay for our flight home the next day.
It turned out that we could have partied all night. Our 10:00 a.m. flight was delayed by four hours due to the heavy fog that moved in that day.
Needless to say, we arrived to Gatwick rather late, but there was still hope that we could make our flight at Heathrow. We met up with a man who had a taxi waiting and we agreed to split the fare with him. Since we just had carryons, this man held us up greatly as he waited for his bags to arrive. We arrived at Heathrow just as our flight was boarding and we were denied access through the gates since the bar code on our boarding passes had expired. If we hadn’t waited for that man’s bags, we would have made our flight. But there is a silver lining. British Airways booked us on a flight home the next day, paid for our lodging, meals, transport to and from the hotel and I was able to meet up with my friends without having to be rushed.
~Bella
