Problem Solved

In honor of Mother's Day, my darling daughter found an electronics shop open and hoofed it down there while I lazed in front of our local Starbucks watching the Thames roll by. So I'll share just a few with you right now - it's late and we just got back from the neighboring pub where I discovered two things:
   1) All Englishmen are NOT good at darts.
   2) There are some, not sure how many yet, but some nice Manchester United fans.



The view from our room at the Strand Palace Hotel

The view from our Starbucks to the Thames

 

Cecil Court AKA Diazon Alley

Our first Full English

Our first Full English (breakfast) was at three in the afternoon at a chain restaurant just down the street. Tomorrow we will have one at Simpson's on the Strand - historic & pricey. Stay tuned.

Mixed blessings

One always hopes that holidays will be filled with fun and adventure, new experiences, new friends and a wealth of photo ops. I can honestly say that today had all those things and I look forward to sharing many of them. Today also had a personally horrifying accident, a mortifying incident, rain, another mortifying incident, a camera issue, an enormous disappointment, and some pain. I do NOT intend to share any of these - don't ask. At some point, in a couple of months, I will find it all very amusing, then we'll talk about it.

Although the camera issue will prevent me from posting any photos today or tomorrow (everything but restaurants are closed on Sundays), it is fixable and recoverable.

We had sunshine this morning and after a good solid night's sleep we got an early start. We were at the nearby Starbuck's five minutes before it opened and sat out front in the sunshine gazing one short block to the Thames. It was one of those moments where I turn to my daughter with an enormous grin and say "We're in London. That's the Thames. I am one happy camper." We had a nice chat with a Englishman who lives in New York, and got to know a lovely barrista named Megan. We will be seeing quite a bit more of her I suspect.

Our first stop of the day was Cecil Court, a small pedestrian alley off the infamous Charing Cross Road loaded with old bookstores and other ephemera and print shops. The storefronts were all Victorian and there was a blue plaque indicating that the 8 yr old Mozart had lived there in 1764. It is also believed to be the inspiration for Harry Potter's Diazon Alley. It was heaven for this book-lover. In particular, the Children's book shop that specialized in first editions and noted illustrators made a strong attempt on my spending money. Since any one of the books would have effectively demolished my spending money, I was able to resist. The antique shop was just chock full of wonderful small and very expensive items. I did find a lovely small handpainted enamel of the Tower Bridge which I couldn't resist. It will go in my guest bathroom. Why, you ask, would I want to put something like that in my bathroom?

This should answer that question

We moved on to Leicester Square expecting to spend a good hour sitting there soaking up the ambiance and taking pictures of the new Charlie Chaplin/Little Tramp statue and the big Shakespeare statue in the center of the square. What we found was the staging area for a parade celebrating the 2557th anniversary of Buddha. We happily followed the parade into Chinatown (in the middle of London's Soho area) which is where we were heading anyway. The best part of the rather uninspiring parade was the two dozen adorable little Asian girls in their best dresses carrying small spring bouquets and the one adorable little blonde.

London's Chinatown is neither old nor very big. What it is, is full of restaurants. Every variant of Asian cooking is to be found there and we found one that served some terrific dim sum.

Our day ended with the FA Cup game. I won't bore those of you who are not remotely interested in football (that's soccer to you back home) with any details except to say the game is the culmination of countless games between teams at many levels. I am delighted to say that the underdog, the team with a small budget, relatively unknown players, a good guy owner, and a popular manager - a team teetering on the brink of relegation - thrilled us all in the 90th minute and made football history by vanquishing a team currently in second place in the top league with a virtually unlimited budget, world renowned and extremely well paid players, and a coach with a short fuse. It was brilliant!

As we were leaving Chinatown we passed a betting shop showing Wigan at 15 - 2 odds. We joked about placing a bet on Wigan, just for the fun of it, knowing we would be throwing our money away.  It would have been a very good idea.

Location, Location, Location

A universal truth – whether or not you are talking about real estate or the distance from the location where you exit your Heathrow flight to where you board the London Express train that takes you to Paddington station. Let’s just say it is a pretty long walk, which is another way of saying that pretty much every muscle and joint from my hips down are feeling the pain this morning.

On the other hand…I am looking out my hotel window at 5 in the morning and I see a blue neon light reading “Savoy Theatre” above a Union Jack sign reading “Let it Be…Beatlemania returns.” Next to it is the grand entrance to the Savoy Hotel – stuff of legend, a near replica of the image on one of my postcard from the 50’s. Even the taxi’s look almost the same. The guest list looks something like this: George Gershwin, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Noël Coward. Edward VII, Enrico Caruso, Charlie Chaplin, Harry Truman, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Babe Ruth, Laurence Olivier, Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, and the The Beatles.

Above the hotel I see blue sky and I know that if I were to pass through that famous entrance and walk out the other side, I would be looking at the Thames.

In about an hour, I will step out the entrance of my distinctly less luxurious hotel (yes, I could clearly hear my next door neighbor snoring through the paper-thin walls last night) and I will be standing on The Strand.

Well worth the walk.

Timing is Everything

My Mom had a rule for unacceptable conversation at the dinner table known as 'The Four D's' -  dirt, disease, death, and dentistry. It was not a joke, and in truth it pretty well eliminated distasteful topics. Well this entry is going to address two of them, disease and dentistry. But don't worry if you happen to be munching on something at the moment, there will be no details...

I have a collection of photos taken on previous trips to England that highlight the numbers 1 through 30. They are sent as daily emails marking the countdown to someone's upcoming trip to Old Blighty, so I began sending them on the 9th of April to my daughter and son-in-law in anticipation of our next big adventure. These daily missives are meant to be reminders that you need to be finishing up your itinerary, buying a few new outfits, getting your nails done, and doing all the fun little things you must do before you head to the airport.



Somewhere in London

When this one went out I was incapacitated with my first ever attack of sciatica - which made walking extremely painful.




Entrance to Winchester Cathedral Close

When this one was sent I was sitting in the dentist chair with a painful toothache of mysterious causes.




Tintagel in Cornwall

This one marked the day we started fitting my new upper partial plate - a process fraught with trial & error pain. You guessed it, my old one broke.




Jane Austen's last house in Winchester

This one went out today. After a three vicodin night, I'm on my way to the oral surgeon to see if he will pull the bad tooth this close to a flight. If not, I don't even know what my options might be...but none of them will be good. (I could have saved  lot of gas money if I had just pitched a tent in my dentist's parking lot)




Market Day in the Cotswolds

I can only pray I will be walking and chewing by the time this one goes out.





Canal Boat

Yes, timing is everything. No denying it, my timing on the lead-up to this trip has been dreadful, but when this one goes out - come hell or high water - I will heading to the airport.  I hope it will be with pretty toenails, a new haircut, a suitcase full of new clothes, and a detailed itinerary...but if not, I have a bottle of vicodin and a cane.

The Domino Theory

The Domino Theory originated back in the good old cold war days when I was just a kid. It was explained by President Eisenhower as: "...broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences."

As we have all learned since those days, the Domino Theory applies to things other than politics and fascinating YouTube videos. A very expensive Domino Theory seems to be going on inside my mouth recently but you don't want to know about it and I don't want to talk about it.

However, something resembling Ike's 'most profound disintegration'  is also taking place in my condo. It all started with what seemed like an innocent plan to get rid of a very large stash of old magazines. There were two stacks of mags in a closet and about 20 mag storage boxes in the studio. It made sense to work on them while I wasted much of my weekends watching Premier League Football (British Soccer) so I started bringing them into my bedroom where I have a small table set up. Makes sense, right?

First domino falling...I keep a stash of magazine pages to make envelopes, I keep them sorted. So the single page stash came into my bedroom so I could sort and file as I went along.
Second domino falling...Some of the pages didn't fit in the storage boxes so I made them into envelopes as I went along, which meant I needed to bring in the box of envelopes (sorted, of course) to file as I went along.
Third domino falling...I kept finding pictures and articles that I thought certain friends and family would enjoy so I sorted them out into a couple stacks to be mailed in my handmade envelopes.
Fourth domino falling...So many wonderful photos I needed to save for reference, which needed cropping, sorting and filling in the two big bins of hanging files which - you guessed it - came into the bedroom.
Fifth....Sixth...Seventh...

It might still have ended safely if I hadn't reached the years of British travel & history mags. In addition to reference photo clippings, scrapbook photo clippings, reference travel articles, and bits for my Anglophile friends, I had to put aside articles pertaining to my upcoming travels.

I can still walk in my bedroom but just barely. The massive influx of clippings has necessitated the purchase of several additional storage bins waiting to be filled - I may be crazy, but I am organized crazy. I'll be lucky to finish going through the articles for the rapidly approaching trip, so I will come home to a bedroom filled with hours and hours of sorting and filing waiting for me. Oddly enough, this would be quite satisfying if not for one major problem...by then the EPL season will be finished and I'll have nothing to keep me stuck in my bedroom for hours each week.

The good news? I have dumped at least twenty big brown grocery bags of torn down magazines into the recycling dumpster.

I came across an interesting undocumented quote recently: "I keep records, if you don't keep records you're just a hoarder." Well, I keep records, and files, and folders...sorted by subject, color, or usage.

"I'm not crazy, my mother had me tested."

On Safari in Montana

My cousin lives about 15 minutes outside of the very small town of Absarokee in Southeast Montana. Visiting there is always a pleasure - I love my cousin & his wife, I love Absarokee, and I love the trip from Seattle across to Eastern Montana.

In 2010 I visited for a wedding and late one afternoon my cousin took me for a ride up into the hills to enjoy the scenery and the wildlife. In addition to a pair of Sandhill cranes, we saw 275 deer. I am not stretching the truth - there were three of us in the car and we counted very carefully. In fact, we surely must have missed some. There were a few small groups of 15 or so, most of them consisted of groups of 2-5 grazing peacefully. I very badly wanted to see some elk - or even 'an' elk, but the closest we came was a man on a bicycle that had us fooled for a few minutes. (you are more apt to see an elk than a man on a bicycle in the Montana mountains) It was an amazing experience, this was not 'managed' wildlife - this was the real thing.

Last August year I visited again and requested that we find time for what is referred to as The Safari. My cousin and his wife take this drive fairly often, with varying routes, depending on the amount of time they want to spend and where they want to end up. They always count the cranes, and the deer, and the elk. Their all time record is something over a thousand total.

We set off in the afternoon a little early for the deer to be down grazing, but we had planned a dinner out so it was in fact a little late when we started spotting deer. Just as previously, the deer were plentiful and the total grew rapidly. Pretty soon we were well over 200 (counting several Sandhill Cranes) and I was wearing a permanent grin.  I was quite pleased, but still holding out hope for a couple of elk.

And then it happened. We came around a long slow curve in the road and we saw elk - lots of elk, lots and lots of elk - spread across four or five hills. It was breath-taking to see this enormous herd moving slowly across the hills almost like a cloud shadow. As soon as we took in the vision, the sound hit us. This herd was almost equal parts cows & calves, and as they traveled they kept in constant communication. It was surprisingly loud and unlike anything I had ever heard before. It was a sound experience that will stay with me forever.

Just a fraction of the herd

There were a couple of other trucks stopped along the road, binoculars out. And we spoke softly among ourselves, spooking the elk only slightly.  I wanted to take pictures, but more than that I just wanted to stand and watch and listen. So I did, openmouthed and a bit verklempt. There was no way we could possibly count this herd, it was the largest my cousin had ever seen, but we estimated upwards of 300. I couldn't even begin to get them all in my camera viewfinder. Eventually, an approaching car at one end spooked the herd enough that it turned on itself. My cousin, educated in animal behavior, decided we needed to move on as the signs of stress were becoming evident among the cows with calves.

We counted at least another 100 deer on the way home - and it would have been more but we ran out of light. They are hard enough to spot in daylight, but they fade away entirely as dusk deepens.

Speculation was that extensive forest fires in the mountains had driven the elk down as one large group. I choose to believe it was just time for me to see some elk - lots and lots of elk!

Mr & Mrs Heron

Anthropomorphism: Any attribution of human characteristics (or characteristics assumed to belong only to humans) to other animals (or birds)

I have mentioned before my great good fortune in living near a heronry. This morning, as I do as often as possible at this time of year, I stopped for a few minutes to drink my Starbucks and watch the birds. This is what I saw...

Mr & Mrs Heron perched on either side of their nest at the top of one of the trees, looking rather bored with the world. Before long Mr Heron took off and flew over my head to a stand of trees within my view. He wandered around a bit until he found just the perfect twig then soared back to the heronry, circling once (so everyone would take notice that he had brought home the PERFECT twig) and then landing right next to Mrs. Heron. She smiled, I presume, took the twig from him and turned to the nest to insert it in the very spot she had in mind for improvement. As she leaned forward to do this Mr Heron seized the opportunity and jumped her bones.

Awwww, Nature!

Mr. Heron Choosing his branch