About the Webmaster
Or should that be Webmistress? I've never been totally sure. Regardless, I am Laure-Anne Hastings, born in London but raised for the first decade and a half of my life in America. Having a large and loving family in England meant lots of trips back and forth across the pond called Atlantic, at least twice a year every year until I turned 16.
When I chose to attend a public school in England rather than finishing high school in the US, I knew my parents were privately thrilled even though they complained publicly about the expense. All it meant was more trips back home to London and points north - to see their beautiful daughter, of course. Actually I think they spent even less time at my finishing school than I did, which was as little as possible to still fulfill the requirements for my diploma.
Now that I've a family of my own, and we have settled again in America, I've probably spent more time on trans-Atlantic planes than most tourists to the UK have spent actually enjoying the countryside and seeing the big city. We make it a point to go "back home" as we call it two or three times a year.
All of that was to establish one simple fact - I know how to tour England (and the rest of the nations that make up the United Kingdom) on all kinds of budgets. My parents were well-off and in my childhood we travelled in style. My husband and I make a good living, but our travel experiences have all required penny-pinching and arranging our visits around a smaller budget. For all these reasons, I consider myself something of an expert at touring my favorite country in the world, whether you've got a fat wallet or you are looking to save money.
LondonForLess will be the first of a couple of travel education sites I plan to build, this one aimed at people who want to have the full UK experience without paying full price. The resources and links here are all collected to help you spend as little cash as possible and still enjoy everything England in general (and London in particular) has to offer.
Just so you don't think all I ever talk about is travel, England, and foggy London, I'll share my relatively new-found obsession with the opera. It happened by-proxy, thanks to my husband's lifetime love affair with the art, a love that led to his job at the head of a major operatic board.
I admit it, I'm actually something of an opera junkie now. It happened over a decade of marriage to a man more familiar with La Traviata than the backs of his own hands. But I must admit my favorites are modern works, much to my husband's chagrin. He won't even attend Shastakovich's modern masterpiece The Nose with me when it pops up every three or four seasons, grumbling about the bad influence of postmodernism and the MTV generation.
I did somehow convince him to see Bartok's ultra-modern work Bluebeard's Castle. I believe I used the fact that it's the only opera written in Magyar, an obscure European language only spoken by a few thousand people, to get him to finally take in a piece of work written after 1900, and though he still complains ("All that NOISE! And nothing HAPPENING!") I watched his face as the show ran on and yes, he did enjoy it.
Well that's enough about me and my new opera obsession. Please consider all the links and information here a gift from me to you - and share it with friends and family travelling to my beautiful home nation. You simply don't have to spend as much as you might think to have a fantastic UK vacation. Leave me a comment about your own experiences, and who knows - maybe I'll incorporate it into the site! Goodbye for now, and I hope to see you soon on the Thames or in Piccadily Circus wearing a big smile and (somewhere) a not-so-empty wallet.
When I chose to attend a public school in England rather than finishing high school in the US, I knew my parents were privately thrilled even though they complained publicly about the expense. All it meant was more trips back home to London and points north - to see their beautiful daughter, of course. Actually I think they spent even less time at my finishing school than I did, which was as little as possible to still fulfill the requirements for my diploma.
Now that I've a family of my own, and we have settled again in America, I've probably spent more time on trans-Atlantic planes than most tourists to the UK have spent actually enjoying the countryside and seeing the big city. We make it a point to go "back home" as we call it two or three times a year.
All of that was to establish one simple fact - I know how to tour England (and the rest of the nations that make up the United Kingdom) on all kinds of budgets. My parents were well-off and in my childhood we travelled in style. My husband and I make a good living, but our travel experiences have all required penny-pinching and arranging our visits around a smaller budget. For all these reasons, I consider myself something of an expert at touring my favorite country in the world, whether you've got a fat wallet or you are looking to save money.
LondonForLess will be the first of a couple of travel education sites I plan to build, this one aimed at people who want to have the full UK experience without paying full price. The resources and links here are all collected to help you spend as little cash as possible and still enjoy everything England in general (and London in particular) has to offer.
Just so you don't think all I ever talk about is travel, England, and foggy London, I'll share my relatively new-found obsession with the opera. It happened by-proxy, thanks to my husband's lifetime love affair with the art, a love that led to his job at the head of a major operatic board.
I admit it, I'm actually something of an opera junkie now. It happened over a decade of marriage to a man more familiar with La Traviata than the backs of his own hands. But I must admit my favorites are modern works, much to my husband's chagrin. He won't even attend Shastakovich's modern masterpiece The Nose with me when it pops up every three or four seasons, grumbling about the bad influence of postmodernism and the MTV generation.
I did somehow convince him to see Bartok's ultra-modern work Bluebeard's Castle. I believe I used the fact that it's the only opera written in Magyar, an obscure European language only spoken by a few thousand people, to get him to finally take in a piece of work written after 1900, and though he still complains ("All that NOISE! And nothing HAPPENING!") I watched his face as the show ran on and yes, he did enjoy it.
Well that's enough about me and my new opera obsession. Please consider all the links and information here a gift from me to you - and share it with friends and family travelling to my beautiful home nation. You simply don't have to spend as much as you might think to have a fantastic UK vacation. Leave me a comment about your own experiences, and who knows - maybe I'll incorporate it into the site! Goodbye for now, and I hope to see you soon on the Thames or in Piccadily Circus wearing a big smile and (somewhere) a not-so-empty wallet.