Author: Emma Hecht

Location: Liverpool, England

Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

I’ve always been a pretty big fan of The Beatles. So, my friend Claire and I bought the $77 , 9 hour bus tickets to Liverpool for the weekend for a Beatles tour. We got in at 6:30 am and were exhausted from a good night of restless sleep. It was also about 30 degrees Fahrenheit and we were in jean jackets and leggings. So, we found the nearest Starbucks, which opened at 7 am, ordered hot chocolates and went to their upstairs lounge. We stayed there for a couple hours, warming up and planning our day and, of course, napping, until everything opened up. After finally leaving Starbucks, we wandered around a huge outlet mall (mostly looking at shoes) until our Beatles tour.

On the tour, the guide, who talked quickly and in a relatively strong accent, told us all about how the Beatles started, their drummers before Ringo Starr, their managers, and their childhoods. We drove past the childhood houses of each of the four. And stopped at Paul’s and George’s.

Here I am in front of George’s childhood home:

We also stopped by Penny Lane (and got to see most of the things that Paul sings about in “Penny Lane”):

Strawberry Fields was another stop. It’s not a strawberry farm but was a Salvation Army children’s home, which is now closed.

After the tour, Claire and I went to the Cavern Club, a nightclub that is the “birthplace of the Beatles,” where the first started playing and became popular. We didn’t stay for very long, but long enough to hear the band play “Twist and Shout.” We headed to the Hard Day’s Night Hotel, where we heard from our tour guide we could get Beatles themed drinks.

We were tired from all that sitting on the tour bus and sitting in the hotel bar, so we decided to head back to our Airbnb for a good night’s sleep. As we settled into bed, a wasp crawled onto my computer screen. As amateur wasp handlers, Claire and I asked our Airbnb host, Lilian, if there was anything she had that would kill a wasp. Lilian, a champ, came right upstairs, trapped the wasp under a mug, and let it out the window. In the morning, she served us a great breakfast, gave us recommendations on where to go in town, and drove us to the train station. 10/10 recommend Lilian’s Airbnb.

Sunday was a little more relaxed. We walked around the city for a while and ended up going to a cat café! None of the cats were really very interested in us, but we had more hot chocolate, so it worked out.

The next stop was the Liverpool Cathedral. It’s a beautiful cathedral, but also has one extremely unique feature. Underneath their lovely stained glass window, there is a pink neon sign. It reads “I Felt You And I Knew You Loved Me.”

Our last landmark stop in Liverpool before taking the bus back to Cambridge was the Radio City Tower, a radio and observation tower. It used to serve as a revolving restaurant but was closed due to health concerns. Now you can still go up in it (which we did!) but they’ve replaced a sit-down restaurant with a vending machine, and the tower no longer spins.