Who: a couple (including one heavy Beatles fan) + teen

When: end of August, during International Beatles week

Booked in advance: National trust tour of John & Paul childhood homes, Casbah tour, Fab4Taxi tour, Cavern tickets, train tickets from London

Probably everything except the National trust tour (and the train tickets) doesn't have to be booked in advance (esp. the Cavern tickets would be an overkill) if your visit *isn't* during the Intl. Beatles week.

Hotel: The resident. We got a room where the teen's bed was on a different level than the parents' bed (which was in an open area upstairs [a bit hard to explain, look on their website]). After the Premiere Inn where we all stayed in one room in London, this was definitely an upgrade, since everyone had a bit more privacy. The location was excellent. They don't have breakfast, but there are at least two breakfast places literally across the street, which was fine for us.

Transportation: We mostly Ubered, and it was pretty good (a few minutes wait, drivers didn't cancel, reasonable prices). We took the bus once, paid to the driver with a credit card. The schedule on the transport app and on Google maps wasn't very accurate, and we ended up waiting quite a while. Also, the first bus just passed us by without stopping (probably we didn't make it clear we wanted to board by waving at it?). The experience was still quite fun since it was a double decker and we sat at the top in front of the big windows.

Day 0: We took a train from London Euston at 18:30.

(1) You can get reasonably priced advance tickets, if you book when the tickets sale open (it was 3 weeks before on a weekend for us, but you can look at the Avanti West coast website and see for which dates tickets are available. You can also ask for an email reminder when tickets open for a specific date). Great thanks to the people on TA that assured me that there's no need to be stressed out because no tickets were available for purchase two months before the travel date!

(2) There was a disturbance the day we traveled (cattle on the rails?), Euston was packed with people waiting for their train to be announced, and a few trains were cancelled. Luckily, ours left only 10 minutes late, but was packed with all the people from the previous trains. We booked seats in advance, but we were quite stressed regarding asking people to move if someone took our seats by mistake (could be that it would be fine, we didn't really know what to expect). So we basically dashed to the train when the barriers opened (we saw the correct platform on the national rail website). All in all we made it to Liverpool mostly as planned. The train was great, it even had wireless chargers for the phone at the table between the seats.

We got something to eat at Euston before we left, so we took a taxi to the hotel from the Lime St. station (very close), and called it a day.

Day 1: We had tickets for the Casbah tour at 11 am, and it's a 30 minutes car ride from the hotel. We originally thought to go to the Beatles Story museum before that, but decided to sleep in instead, and got a late breakfast at a place across the street from the hotel around 9:30. We ordered an Uber to the Casbah, and it arrived promptly and was a smooth ride. There were about 10 people at the tour with us, and it started a bit late. The guy that gave the tour was very entertaining, and it was pretty cool to see the club and hear the stories. I think it was definitely worth it. The tour was about an hour, and after that we walked a bit to get to the main road and get an Uber to Speke Hall where the National trust tour started.

The tour was booked at 13:30, and to be on the safe side we decided to be there a bit earlier. This was again a 30 min Uber ride, which started with a mini bus ride back to the city.. There are two locations where this tour starts, and it's of course better to book the one closer to the city (when we booked, this one was already sold out). We went to John's house, and then to Paul's house. At each house you can take photos outside, and there's a tour guide waiting to take you inside. It was extremely cool, and the guides were excellent.

At the end of Paul's house tour the mini bus driver pointed us towards the bus station. We waited for quite a while but eventually a bus came and we took it back to Liverpool One, a nice shopping area near the hotel. We got a late lunch / early dinner at a tappas place, and wanted to go to the docks. It was crazy windy though, so we decided to go back to thr hotel and chill a bit before our Cavern visit. We watched the show with Paul visiting Liverpool a few years ago on Netflix, and it was kinda neat to see all the places we visited that day.

We bought tickets for the Cavern in advance because it was Beatles week (you can use the tickets to come in any time after 11am, and can go out and come back all day, but we didn't actually use that). We arrived around 8pm, and it was packed, with two shows going on simultaneously. It's kind of neat to hang out there, they have quite a lot of memorabilia, not only Beatles stuff. We had some drinks and then went back to the hotel.

The whole area of the Cavern is very lively in the evening, also the street of the hotel is full of bars and entertainment. I was actually surprised they opened so early (and shops closed so early). Surprisingly, we didn't hear the noise from the hotel, or were just too tired to mind.

Day 2: we booked the Fab4Taxi tour at 9:30, so we got an early breakfast, checked out of the hotel and left our stuff there. The tour picks you up wherever you want, and takes you around to see the houses they lived in, and all of the interest points (including strawberry fields, which is a bit further out). It was interesting, the driver told us a bunch of stuff we knew already from the National trust tour, but also had a lot of new information. The Paul tv show we saw the day before was also good for giving more depth to this tour.

The driver dropped us of at the docks after the tour, as we wanted to visit the Beatles story museum. It was about 12:30pm already and we had a train to catch at 16:00, so there wasn't a lot of time. We spent about two hours at the museum, which was neat, and gave a more orderly exposition to the story than the bits and pieces we've seen so far. It was also cool to see the places we've already been to shown in context. There's a cafeteria and a shop as well there, but the cafeteria is in the basement and since the sun came back we decided to walk along the docks to the Beatles statue.

This was a really nice walk, many people were out and the docks were quite lively. It was also sunny with no wind so we enjoyed just chilling a bit. Near the statue there was a live homage show (with paid entrance) which was also a nice surprise. From there we walked back to the hotel, took our stuff and then took an uber to the train station. We had some time before our train left, so we grabbed some food and rested a bit. At 4pm (on time!) We boarded our train to continue our adventure in Edinburgh.

In total, these were intense Beatles themed 48 hours. I may have over done it with the pre-booked tours, so we didn't have enough time to just enjoy the city. Still, it was a great experience to be in these iconic places.