Wednesday Evening

It’s a rainy evening and although the day touring Buckingham Palace and attending the crass, raunchy, smart, funny Book of Mormon were good things for a London Day there’s been such tragedy in a friend’s life everything seems skewed and rather hopeless. Such awful things can happen in an instant. Makes me want to wrap Teresa in a big fuzzy blanket and never let her near danger of any kind. Can’t do that can we?

I’ve been rather listlessly writing for a couple of days. May as well post it with any decent pictures I have and then mostly sign off for the duration of the trip.

Tuesday Morning (Wonder why it’s in this order but everything has a reason?)

8am on the ‘terrace.’ Ah yes, the good life in London. It seems though stories about rainy foggy chilly London are all made up. As far as I can tell the temperature is perfect. Mostly sunny. 61° right now, 73° later today. The terrace is full of vines with the sweetest smelling white flowers. Are these honeysuckles? I think so. Whatever they are is what mornings, every morning, should greet us with…fragrant possibilities for the day.

Wednesday Morning

One of those SuperTourist days ahead. Buckingham Palace Tour and the Book of Mormon in the West End. Hmmm. It’s 4am now and how do I feel about all of this perfect day-ahead activity in the Big City? A little tired perhaps. It’s that time toward the end of any longer trip when there are still nifty experiences ahead but real life is imposing itself around the edges—crowding out the carefree!

The difference with this particular trip is not really experiencing much of that old mid-journey let-down because Teresa’s been with me. She really is an exceptional traveler. Easy to please, comfortable in new places with new people, and ever curious. But now she will start her new job in just a little over a week, her first professional engineering gig and I’ll go back to the same old apartment, same old job, same old town, same old me. It feels like I’m having a little more trouble with that idea than usual. Maybe I’ll write a lot about post-travel ennui to get me through the first week back. It also feels like being older is adding a layer of something beyond just the customary muscle bone organ sensorial twinges. Ah yes, the pre-dawn lament from a barely bearable hotel room near the end of a trip.

Back to Tuesday. 11.9 kilometers. Wednesday I want some cabs and/or the tube I think. A small break please. Tuesday turned out to be our shopping day…so actually there was an additional few k’s walked in Fortnum and Mason’s and the Daunt Bookstore. Love those places. Love them. Fortnum and Mason’s, so elegant and rich and pretty and just right for an every-few-years small splurge. We had wine and appetizers and then tea and jam shopping. Nice nice nice. And Daunt, which I had never heard of, is quite a splendid bookstore with sections by regions, mixed fiction and non-fiction. Could have been an entire day, week, more there. Time and money permitting. Which they are not. Permitting. Almost as wonderful as Clarke’s on Long Street in Cape Town.

Walked around. Buckingham Palace, Carnaby Street—of Twiggy fame, yes? Teresa had no knowledge of Twiggy or Carnaby Street but the latter had an eccentric card/souvenir shop of the first order which we both enjoyed.

Checking in on HuffPost and proud of being a Democrat…don’t have to be embarrassed to show my US passport…unlike last week.