Coming Home

Sorry for the delay, we have been home since December 20, but with the holidays and all...

Anyhoo, we got a cab to Manchester Airport as the second day of the snow delays were starting to destroy Heathrow and Gatwick air travelers down in London. We spent the night at an airport hotel and headed to check in early. The line was winding through the terminal, and all our bags were overweight. I shifted and restowed, and eventually we just paid to check an extra bag. We sat on the runway for a while, but after a second coat of de-icer, they let us take off for Philadelphia.

After our run-in with the Customs Man, we sailed on into Charlotte right on time.

If you're interested in seeing where we lived over there, here are some pictures. Hope you enjoyed the blog!

PICTURES OF OUR HOME AWAY FROM HOME

Chasing the Weirdstone in Cheshire

OK, we're almost home, but we had one more adventure to squeeze in (if you don't count our grand return to Waterworld tomorrow).

We have been reading a local classic adventure book called The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. It is set in Cheshire (the next shire to our west), and tells of the adventures of a brother and sister and their adventures in a place called Alderley Edge. The have dealings with dwarfs and little goblins called svarts and a mean ol' shapeshifter named Selina Place. It's all very Lord of the Rings, really, but a great story unto itself. The tale is built around a legend in the area about a wizard that lives in a secret tunnel in The Edge with an army of sleeping warriors. There is a map in the book, and we saw the other day that Alderley Edge is a real place, so we decided to see if The Edge itself was a real place.

Our pictures can pretty much tell the story from there...

CLICK FOR THE ALDERLEY EDGE ADVENTURE

Hanging Close to Home in Staffordshire

After the Marathon di Italia, we decided to stay close to home this week. We were able to get a short field trip in on Thursday, that, though rushed, was educational and fun as well.

The kids and I took advantage of Mom’s endless grading during this late semester and headed to Stoke and then took the train southeast. Down in that end of Staffordshire (our home county), you find the seemingly unassuming village of Lichfield. There would not be much to it except that it was the home of two imposing figures in English history as well as one of the country’s most imposing cathedrals.

Allow me start with a quick background story. Last Christmas, we were down at my mom’s house and I was looking for something to read. In perusing the Great Books collection there, I seized upon the volume by an author by the name of Boswell. Now, at risk of exposing my ignorance, this name meant nothing to me, but if you share my cloudiness, let me tell you that Boswell is famous for pretty much inventing the idea of the Biography. He wrote a biography of his friend Dr. Samuel Johnson in the late 1700s, and this has endured the test of time as the primary example of biography in our time. Now, don’t think for a minute that I held onto this giant tome and read the gripping story of Dr. Johnson from beginning to end, in fact I shoved it back on the shelf and snatched up the most recent Newsweek. As I flipped through, I came to the Books section of the magazine, and found a story about some recent biographies that had come out for the Christmas season, in case you didn’t guess, the central theme of this article was all about Boswell’s work on Johnson. This was all within maybe a ten minute period.

So, when I started learning about the area where we would be living in England, I discovered that Lichfield was in our neighborhood, and that Samuel Johnson, who just kept turning up, was actually from Lichfield. In addition to this, so was Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of my boy Chuck, and that his work was an important influence on his grandson’s. So, thusly and therefore, we decided to knock out one day trip southeast before we packed up for home.

The train and lunch schedules conspired against us, however, and we ended up finishing lunch in Lichfield around two. The train was heading home at 3:36, so we had to hustle. We snapped some pictures outside the big Cathedral, but skipped a trip inside, first because of time, and second because after all the churches we’ve seen…anyway, we headed on to Erasmus’s house. We watched a video and learned about some of his inventions (independent carriage axles, handwriting copying device), his work as a physician, his time as the premier poet in England, and also his work in animal origins, including where he said that all animals are clearly related at some level – almost a hundred years before his grandson got on the HMS Beagle. It was completely fascinating, and very hands-on as you can see in the pics. But, we had to hurry on out, and as a result, could not even get over to Samuel Johnson’s house at all. This was not a tragedy for the kids, but I guess I’ll just have to figure out what the universe was trying to tell me some other way. We made it back to the station with moments to spare, but the bus hit rush hour and we got home just in time for Sawyer to head to Tae Kwon Do.

Now, over to the Sportsdesk…

On Saturday, a local Stoke City football fan that I met while watching the game at the pub, Andy, picked Sawyer and I up at the flat and we headed into Stoke proper. We stopped by the pub for a pre-match pint with some of the notorious Stoke fans -- the loudest in the country according to their tickets. If the pub was any indication, they were not exaggerating.

We took a double-decker shuttle from downtown to the nearby Brittania Stadium for the big showdown with Blackpool, which had only been promoted to the Premier League this season, but were proving pesky to several teams. Stoke, which has been back in the League since 2008, went into the game ranked 7^th of the 20 teams in the division, just a few points behind the big boys like Chelsea and Manchester United. Sawyer and I had tickets in the family section, which means that instead of sitting with foul-mouthed, drunken hooligans, you sit with foul-mouthed, drunken hooligans and their kids. (This was not a problem for us though, because we ride the city bus everywhere already and hear it every day, and fookin shyte isn’t even officially forbidden in our version of English or I obviously wouldn’t write the term here.) At any rate, we were in the second row looking across the goal box as the first half ended in the traditional 0-0 tie, as Stoke had a goal called off ridiculously by the officials about midway through. Blackpool stole a goal early in the second half, and despite the good guys outshooting them two to one throughout the game, absolutely NOTHING would go in for the Potters. We went home frustrated, but with a Premier League game under our belts, and a big goose egg on the board for all our sports efforts in this country.

Ryder Cup – Monstrous washout AND America loses… Scotland v. New Zealand rugby – hometown Scots drubbed 49-3… England 1, France 2 in Wembley… and now our hometown Stoke crumbles to Blackpool before our very eyes… I don’t know if it’s a curse or not, but I imagine the local clubs will be happy to get rid of our sorry Yank luck before the new year begins.

And, speaking of which, we have one week to go, so you might hear from us one more time, but otherwise, we’ll be seeing you soon!

THIS JUST IN!

As we were going to press (as in, as we were sitting in the flat on Sunday thinking about tromping through the cold to somewhere with wireless that we could update this blog), we flipped on the telly for a moment and saw that ‘Guinness World Records Smashed’ was on, so we turned it over there. On the screen was a guy doing a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded. We recognized his hair immediately, but we had to wait for the blindfold to come off… IT WAS THE GUY WE HAD FILMED ON THE TRAIN FROM BIRMINGHAM after we saw ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream!’ (See Nov. 10 entry). We jinxed him on this too, just as he was unable to approach his record time for us on the train, he fell way short of the world record for blindfolded cubing on TV. But hey! We know a semi-celebrity, so it’s all good. Talk about a small island!

CLICK HERE FOR PICS FROM LICHFIELD, THE STOKE GAME, AND THE RUBIK’S MASTER STOLEN FROM TV

On to Bergamo

ANOTHER LINK TO THE SAME VENICE/BERGAMO PICTURES

You may recall that the original plan for the Italian trip was to fly from Liverpool to Milan. FYI, on Ryan Air, when they say “Milan”, they actually send you to the town of Bergamo. It is within an hour of Milan, so that says to me that some airline conference somewhere included a vote that somehow makes it okay for them to lie about some things. Anyway, by the time we realized that we would be flying into Bergamo, we had already booked a hotel room (non-refundable) in Milan. We found the shuttle from Bergamo to Milan, and were ready to submit to this extra travel when, as you may recall, our flight to Milan (Bergamo) was canceled. A call to the Hotel Demo in Milan confirmed that non-refundable meant exactly what it sounded like it meant.

This rehash of some of the last entry’s information is necessary to help explain why we didn’t fly out of Venice (which Ryan Air calls the airport in Treviso where they fly that is actually a 45 minute bus ride from Venice, see above apparent vote). We had decided in the post cancellation powwow in Liverpool to keep our flight from Bergamo to Liverpool instead of changing it to Venice to East Midlands because we already had bus and train tickets home from Liverpool. And all this is why on Sunday morning we left Venice and headed to the little known city of Bergamo at the foot of the Italian Alps…whew!

We had one last gelato (that a video will prove is excellent according to Savannah), and boarded the train. This got us as far as Brescia and allowed us to see some beautiful views of the Lake District and Alps, despite the fact that we were looking through snow to see it. A trundling train from Brescia dumped us out in Bergamo in the late afternoon, and we walked to our first hostel. It was fine, if you don’t mind the slamming and banging about of college students well into midnight hour.

We went out for dinner around five and realized that you can’t go to dinner in Bergamo until seven. We had a drink and snack at one place, checked some toy stores, and made our way to a promising little Italian place just off the main drag in the lower city right near where we were staying. It was fine, but not quite up to the Venice standard, though the pasta and butter seemed on par. We could see the upper part of the city from where we were, but it just seemed a little too far away to get to, and the kids were going to rebel against walking, so we went back to the hostel and fought through the noise and got some sleep.

After the most continental of breakfasts at the hotel, we had about an hour before we needed to head to the aeroporto. I found the location of the Association Montessori Internationale world headquarters training center, the existence of which was the only reason I had been previously familiarized with Bergamo itself. We hoofed it through a wet snow to go and visit for a few minutes, and were gently chastised for not calling to schedule an appointment. After this, she was nice enough to let me get a look at the classroom and say hi to the group of 16 doing their year-long training. It was interesting to see, but we had a bus to catch, so we snuck our way down the tiny sidewalks that were climbing up to the old city, and reached our stop with minutes to spare.

Another Italian travel tip: It’s hard to figure out how to pay for the bus in Bergamo. We ride A LOT of buses in England, but since the only bus fare we had paid in Italy was a clearly understandable shuttle with a window at the Treviso Airport, it was a surprise to get on in Bergamo and have the driver completely inaccessible. There was a nearby machine that people were sticking tickets into, but we didn’t have a ticket, and hadn’t been shown anywhere to purchase one. So we sat and stood on the crowded bus, and rode to the airport. Then we got off, and walked into the airport. So, if you don’t hear from me for a while, you might assume that I have been tracked down by the Transito Autorito di Italia and taken to the gulago.

Upon entering the terminal, the most obvious feature was the serpentine line stretching back from security. It was a bit terrifying to watch it grow as we stood at the Ryan Air counter, and we actually started hoping for a delay to our flight’s departure. As we took our place in the security line, it was impossible not to think about being careful what you wish for.

We got a one hour delay that lasted about two hours, and the snow continued to fall throughout this time. The flashbacks to Liverpool were haunting. Finally, we loaded buses to take us across the tarmac to the steps that put us on our last ever Ryan Air flight. Our train from Liverpool had its flux capacitator go out as we pulled into our station, so we considered ourselves lucky for a change. Then the bus was on time, but it had no heat. We were home, frozen and exhausted by eight.

Viva di Italia! Buongiorno!

The Big Ol' Trip to Italy (and it's accompanying nonsense)

Oh, just the view out our hotel window...

In case you haven’t seen it on the news, or gathered it from these entries, the weather over here became winter a few weeks ago, and it refuses to let up. It came into play big time for us as we embarked upon our biggest trip of all, the excursion to Venice and northern Italy.

We were set to take discount carrier Ryan Air out of John Lennon Airport in Liverpool, and it was sunny when we got there. Then it started snowing again. They put up an hour delay. They announced the gate, and we went there and got in line. And waited. And waited. And then, they canceled the flight. Then we stood in line, and waited….and finally got to the Ryan Air ticket window. We had already lost a non-refundable hotel room in Milan for that night (Wednesday), and we were booked into a hotel in Venice the following night, so when we were hearing that there were no Ryan Air flights from Liverpool to Milan until Saturday, we were concerned. Luckily, they did a flight to the airport near Venice on Thursday; unluckily, it was flying out of East Midlands, not Liverpool. We got a room across the street and determined to start again on Thursday.

The first of three trains took us from Liverpool, through Crewe (where we had started the day before), and then within spittin’ distance of our flat as we wound across the snowy middle of England. It was still snowing when we got off the bus that connected our third train to Derby (Dahh-by) to East Midlands Airport. But, believe it or not, we loaded up and took to the skies on time, and were getting onto a shuttle into Venice by dinnertime. We had no trouble finding our hotel, and were gazing out our window on to the Grand Canal before bedtime. So, of course, bedtime became dinnertime as I jumped across the street and grabbed a pizza. Guess what! The pizza was fantastic! -- excellent meal numero uno in Italy.

We got up the next day to chilly temperatures and flooded streets and doorways. The tide was exceptionally high and, as is often just the way in Venice, water was everywhere. We hung out in the room a while and relaxed (we hadn’t slept too well, though there are no cars in the city, the boats under the window sill can make quite a racket). The water receded and the wind calmed and we took to the streets. I did my best to follow the map to the Piazza San Marco (that’s what y’all would call St. Mark’s Square), but Venice is simply the biggest maze ever devised by humanity. Even with a map, it is just an absolute labyrinth. Lisa and I loved it, but – and stop me if you’ve heard this – my daughter does not like to walk for extended periods of time, and my son just quietly tolerates it then starts sympathizing with the girl in the evening debrief. We wandered quite aimlessly for a while before reaching the Piazza, but the whole city is just beautiful, so once I tuned out the whining, I had a blast. We had ducked into a dark restaurant where there was clearly a mafia meeting happening, and had a decent meal, but we found a very good place for dinner. The food was the only saving grace of Venice for the kids.

Day two was a bit more organized once we had our bearings. After the water went down again, we headed into the rain for the church where Titian’s painting of The Assumption of the Virgin Mary is the centerpiece. They wouldn’t let us take pictures inside, but check the slideshow, you’ll recognize the painting. Titian is also buried in the church, and there is a wood carving by Donatello, that depicts an emaciated John the Baptist, one of my favorite characters in history. Donatello may be one of the lesser known of the big Renaissance artists – not to mention most underrated Ninja Turtle – but he sure could whittle.

After the church, we had another spectacular meal, three courses for Papa G, and then waddled down to the Galleria di Accademia, the premier art museum in Venice. We pushed the kids past a million paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance period of Venice’s history, some simply enormous, and several by people I had heard of. There was a John the Baptist there that took the cake, full gore of his beheading, the kids thought it was something.

All this, of course, was just filler until we could eat again. We got some pictures from the Accademia Bridge with the Church of the Saluti in the background (it’s the church you picture when you think of Venice), and we took a little gondola ride across the Grand Canal for 50 cents apiece. Check that one off the list. After some down time, we headed back along one of the main drags, and ended up in a restaurant that seemed more touristy than we wanted once we sat down. However, the food was every bit as good as the rest of our meals, and probably the best spaghetti with meat sauce I’ve ever had in a restaurant. And I should know, because I’ve eaten a lot of Chef Boyardee. I got a quick jaunt back out into the streets when Lisa went back to the hotel with the kids, it was peaceful and pleasant, just like I expected Venice to be. I can’t imagine what made it feel so different than it did in the day…

We had to get up the next morning and get to the train station to head to Bergamo. We still had our tickets to go from there back to Liverpool. I’ll pick up there tomorrow to spare you the drama of our trip home…

Arrivaderci!

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PICS AND VIDS FROM OUR ITALY TRIP

A Pilgrimage Across the Salisbury Plain

“…Before the dawn of ‘istry, there lived a strange race of people – the Druids. No one knows ‘oo they wuh, or, wha’ they wuh doin’, but their legacy remains, hewn, into the living rock … of Stone’enge.”

– Spinal Tap

The kids and I finished up work Wednesday morning and jumped onto a bus to the surprisingly close by attraction of Waterworld. I know, it sounds cold – and for Kevin Costner aficionados, horrifying -- until you realize that this indoor, heated water park is the perfect place for winter fun! The mercury has plummeted over here, to the tune of the snowiest November in two decades, and last year was their snowiest winter in half a century, so the drama is building steadily. We needed a warm-up and you can see for yourself how perfectly Waterworld fit the bill.

Thursday saw the ASU students join us for a Thanksgiving feast (I know there are some of you out there jealous of them for getting my turkey this year), in fact I just had leftover sandwich number four before I sat down to write this. It brought a little taste of home to the proceedings over here, and it seems pretty obvious that most everyone is going to be ready to get back to Boone in just a few weeks now.

Friday we rose and grabbed an early bus to the train station for a three hour plus ride to the middle of the fat bottom of England and the ancient town of Salisbury. We walked past the tallest cathedral in the country (maybe Europe?) and went into the county museum. They had some great primers on Stonehenge to help us get ready for the morning, plus a keen section on rock music in Salisbury. Check the photos for more on this. After dinner, we took a cab through the snow to our hotel far out of town, but more in the neighborhood of Stonehenge, a Holiday Inn at a place called Solstice Park near Amesbury.

Our room and breakfast were nice, and we were out the door and into the blustery cold by 11. We had a couple of maps and a couple of potential destinations. We also had about a quarter inch of snow on the ground. We started the pilgrimage to the west, but after reaching Amesbury had to go underground to avoid a giant traffic roundabout, and when we emerged and walked a mile or so, I wasn’t seeing any of the landmarks on my map. Then I saw the sign for Woodhenge. We had toyed with the idea of going by Woodhenge to whet our appetite, but in the weather, I wasn’t so much going there on purpose. Anyway, we were there and we checked it out, and then took to the paths that crossed directly across the plain and away from the car traffic… but very much through the snow.

It was cold, and we were alone on the paths with nothing but sheep for company. The paths were easy enough to follow, and it was easy to feel the millions of pilgrims that had been making this same journey for the last several thousand years all around us. We finally got a view of the monument across the plain, but our feet were wet and our toes were getting more numb by the minute. The last push across an open field took us to The Avenue and we made our way to the stones. (Okay, first we made our way to the WC and the hand dryers were we defrosted our socks, shoes and toes, and then we got hot chocolate.)

I didn’t know what to expect tourist-trap wise, but I’m pretty impressed with how they handle the historic majesty of Stonehenge. The stuff is underground and out of sight if you are looking across at it, and most of the drama is intact. There is no doubt that it is thoroughly impressive, but I have to admit that it was colder than we wanted it to be. The wind was howling on the hilltop, and we gave them rocks a good look and then headed for the warmth of the wind-free subterranean gift shop.

We were soon back in a taxi to Salisbury, and later on a 5:45 train north to home, secure in the knowledge that we had completed a trying pilgrimage to one of the greatest wonders of creation. All in all though, the kids would probably tell you that they would have rather gone back to Waterworld.

We’re off to Italy Wednesday morning. We fly into Milan, spend the night and then take the train to Venice. We have two nights back in Milan after that and fly home Monday. You probably won’t hear from us until next Tuesday, so have a good start of your December. We’ll be home soon…

Papa Glenn out.

CLICK HERE FOR THE STONEHENGE AND SALISBURY PICTURES

The Prodigal's Return to Oxford

It’s been 20 years and 20 weeks since I stepped off a bus in Oxford for the first time. My fellow history students from the University of Georgia would be spending six weeks at Jesus College, right in the center of one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Those weeks changed me dramatically, I returned to the states not only more versed in the goings on of the English Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy, but much more aware of the kind of person I wanted to be. Not only that, but there was one night there that I reached out and grasped something that stays with me to this day, however that is another story for another time.

Against this backdrop, we grabbed a taxi from the train station and dropped off our ridiculously heavy suitcase on the top floor of an old school guesthouse on the south side of town. It was much closer than it looked on the map (the town really was as small as I remembered), so we set out for Christ Church Meadows and the accompanying college.

You may not know that Oxford University is actually a collection of somewhat independent colleges in the same area. As I said, when I was there, I attended Jesus College, but you will also find Trinity, Hertford, and about 20 others, each with a list of acclaimed alumni. It was a close run for most famous until a few years ago, but now Christ Church is easily the biggest draw to outsiders. The fame that once rested squarely on the shoulders of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of a couple of books about a little girl named Alice), is now overshadowed by the backdrop of their Great Hall. Yes, eleven prime ministers took their meals there in their college days, but none of them are as famous as the Gryffindors and Slytherins who ate there in the first two movies of the Harry Potter series.

It costs 12 pounds for a family to walk through this college to see Harry’s dining room (which is only barely recognizable among the numerous paintings of Christ Church alumni that returned to the walls after filming). The supplemental draw of the hall is the stained-glass window containing tiny characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that is just about too high to even see, much less get a good picture of (it’s in the gallery, have a look for yourself). Adjoining the college is the cathedral, a very impressive structure in its own right, but when you add the two pianists that were preparing for the night’s concert, it is rather overwhelming.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PICTURES AND VIDEOS FROM OXFORD

We continued on from Christ Church to Jesus College to rouse some dormant memories for Papa Glenn. It felt good to walk the paths and to see our own Great Hall again. I realized that I couldn’t quite remember how to get to the classroom where we studied, but my dorm and the college looked exactly as I remembered. We tromped around past the Bodleian Library and some of the other areas in my old neighborhood, and then made our way to Carfax Centre where the best fish and chips in the world were no longer being sold from a little hole in the wall. Carfax is all chain stores and generic now, too bad. We grabbed some Italian at the English version of Olive Garden and headed back to the guesthouse.

I wasn’t done however. I let the family hit the sack while I trudged back to town. I had a mission. If you read the Golden Compass books by Philip Pullman, you might be aware that a central theme of the book was that there was a portal in Oxford to other worlds. I’m not completely crazy, but I thought it was worth a look if I was here. At the very least, Pullman lives in Oxford, and I wanted to run into him and tell him the story about what had happened to me here in 1990. Long story short, no portal, no Pullman, but I did run into a couple of Canadian rescue pilots that were over for simulator training. We had a great conversation about the area, and they told me about a meteor crater in northern Quebec that I had never heard of. Portal? I’ll keep you posted.

I awoke slowly, and we had the inclusive full English breakfast at the guesthouse. In case you are not familiar with the English Breakfast, it is always as follows: bacon (which we would call ham), a sausage link (which is mushier inside than ours), an egg (usually poached-ish), toast (which is often fried in batter to make it less good for you), and, believe it or not, regular old baked beans that run all over everything. To this you can often add a cooked to-mah-to and mushrooms, if you’re insane.

After breakfast, we had to get out of the guesthouse by 10, but our train didn’t leave until 2:30 -- the perfect window to finish up the Harry Potter theme in Oxford. The new movie was released the night before, and there was an 11:15 showing. It was great. We got to the train on time, and were home around six on Saturday evening. This gave us a nice day off Sunday so that I could start writing these two books you have been subjected to over the last couple days.

We’re having Thanksgiving for the ASU students Thursday, but we will not be able to watch any football. This will be the first time this has happened to me in ever. On Friday, we get up and head south again, this time to see “the living rock of Stone ‘enge” (cue the dancing dwarf Spinal Tap fans!).