1. London. 5/5/2022. Travel has returned… Sort Of

Greetings from London-

After several planned trips “across the pond” and an equal number of cancellations, we finally took the plunge and decided it was safe to go to Europe. We are still hoping to do a more exotic trip to places we have yet to see, but most of those places don’t yet seem ready for us. Still we were anxious to see Mike’s nieces (one in London and one in Geneva) and their combined three kids all of whom are under 5-years-old. When we last saw everyone the kids were little slugs… now they are real people with personalities… and opinions!

It was a very very long day, so this note will be short as it’s already after 1 am here and I’ve been up for about 30 hours.

We arrived in London at about 6:30 am on Thursday; left SFO st 12:20 on Wednesday. Flight was fairly uneventful except that despite rebooting multiple times, they could not get the video monitors to work without freezing every 10 minutes into a film. They actually had a pretty good array of films, including several of the 2022 Academy Award winners and other prize winning films that I had not yet seen. Still, the lack of visual stimulation enabled me to finesse another chapter of my book and helped me move closer to completion (I’m aiming for summer). So it wasn’t all bad and far more productive than anticipated.

We trekked to Heathrow Express (about a mile walk, maybe more, from the Queens Terminal 2) and went straight to Paddington where we got a taxi to Shoreditch where we are staying, at the rather hip Mondrian Hotel. Since it was way too early for check-in, we headed to the rooftop deck for breakfast and then sat in the lobby for about an hour before finally getting into our room.

At around 11am we finally got our room. Mike immediately hit the bed and was out like a light. I showered and headed out to see what was new in East London. Mostly I just strolled for about 3 hours and took advantage of an unusually nice day.

I can report that Shoreditch gets more hip and upscale with each visit. 

I met up with Mike at about 6 pm and we headed to his niece’s house in Leyton—in East London. It’s a working class area that is rapidly gentrifying. They have a cute house and we got to see the garden and backyard they did during Covid. And the best part was seeing Finn, now just a little past three. He appeared to know us, but I’m sure there was a lot of prepping on that before we arrived. He’s super cute and like hundreds of thousands of other kids spent more than half of his life at home with his parents and has only recently begun full time pre-school. 

Once Finn was settled and asleep we had dinner and got caught up on life over the past 28 months. They had initially planned to have a friend watch Finn so we could all go out for a quiet meal, but she went into early labor and was having her own child (a bit early). So it was takeout from their nearby Ottolenghi… not a bad option. Since both Emma and Hem have to be up early for work and to get Finn to “school” (he was previously at the “child-minder” – gotta love those British terms—for a few hours on certain days and apparently on and off due to covid… so now, he’s in a more “official” child care center, which is privately run but receives government subsidies. It’s new and he’s not totally gung ho about it yet.

We decided on a taxi to get back to Shoreditch, and then it was email catch up… and now I’m signing off. Tomorrow we are on our own and will reconvene with Emma, Hem, and Finn on Saturday morning when we all head to Brighton by train to go to the aquarium and walk the boardwalk.  

Best – Fern.. More to come…