UK Summer 2008: Arrived in Sunny UK from Misty Iceland. July 23 and 24, 2008

Most likely the last communique.. Unless something extraordinary happens. We return to the sates Sunday morning. Started out early today (Wednesday) to drive from Budir to Rekyjvik to catch the flight to London… It’s really just a 3.5 hour drive, and the flight was at 4, but it was raining and windy (what else is new) and Richard and Elizabeth (not big on driving, as Richard doesn’t have a license and Elizabeth only drives very occasionally, although they do have a car in Geneva)… were a bit worried..

Couldn’t have been traffic, since you only see a car about every 10 minutes out here on the Peninsula…. Anyway, we made our way to the big city (where we are told 60-75% of Iceland’s population lives) and strange as it may seem, Rekyjavik felt like a metropolis after only two days in the countryside. The drive was uneventful, just hundreds more waterfalls, glaciers (which are receding at about 100 meters per year), thousands of sheep and Icelandic horses… Flight to London was a bit late, and getting the rental car took longer than anticipated, so we really got on the road (British side driving which always takes a while to get used to, especially with a stick shift using your left hand) at about 9:30 just as it was getting pretty dark…

Found our way to Bath pretty easily… until the very end… but eventually made it to the hotel at about 11:40 pm.. Of course restaurants were all closed and we were pretty hungry — having had a fairly hardy breakfast about 16 hours earlier, and a small snack on the flight about 5 hours earlier… We had already phoned the hotel and they said that if we got here before midnight, they could order a pizza delivered to our room… so we were motivated to make it on time. The hotel is small.. and given the prices in England it’s modest (only about $300 per night!)… It’s certainly not 4 star!!.. Kind of British elderly kitsch..

We’re on the third floor.. no lifts… (ADA is not a big deal in Europe). But its a great location. Anyway, the main staff were gone by the time we got here.. and the night guy — sweet, but not too knowledgeable — had a lot of trouble finding the number for the pizza delivery service.. Turns out he’s from a small town in Slovakia (that we visited many years ago) and is clearly not accustomed to having guests register during his watch. Tomorrow we head out to Stonehenge.. and to see the famous “crescent” here in Bath… and Friday we’ll spend the day in Oxford… Saturday we drive to London to see Mike’s nieces.. and then back to California on Sunday.. Thanks for bearing with me as I do these daily notes..

Cheers – Fern

July 24: Drove out to Stonehenge thru delightful villages with sod-roofed houses hugging the road. Stonehenge was interesting but I admit to being even more fascinated with the throngs of tourists — mostly German and Japanese — taking photos on cell phones and trying to make it look as if they were holding up the stones. Had a surprisingly good lunch at a little bar on the way back. Walked all around Bath in the afternoon and circled the famous royal crescent. Impressive but not kept up as well as I’d expected.

Ok. Signing off. See you all stateside.