Live from Leeds

Greetings gentle reader. I'm writing to you from Leeds, England. My trip is winding down now. I've been here since the Sunday before last; in Europe, that is, I didn't just stay in Leeds. I've been to Wales, London and Paris. I've seen and done so much. I'm not sure how I'm going to handle telling you about it all. I don't think that I'll do another inclusive play by play like I did with the Thanksgiving trip. I think I'll just tell you stories as they occur to me, but I did want to give a shout out while I'm still here.

It's been a great trip but like any trip there were mishaps. I flew Luthansa into Munich for a five hour layover. I was beat, unable to get any real sleep on the 7 hour flight across the Atlantic. I ended up leaving both the case for my prescription glasses and more importantly my cell phone laying on a seat in the Munich airport. I already had the phone on airplane mode so I didn't think about it. Just as the plane was taxiing out of the berth I thought I'd check, just to make sure. That's when I discovered that it was gone. The Fundburo found it, but unfortunately they won't ship out of Germany. It was an old phone and needs replaced anyway. It's been instructive to be without. I'm constantly reaching for it, if only to check the time.

Then, on my first trip out, only a few blocks from Shoshana's apartment I slipped on the ice and fell. I almost caught myself but still went down. Shosh said it was funny, after she made sure that I was OK. She thought I was going to recover too, and then I just sat down. She said it was rather graceful actually. I guess I was both deft and clumsy at the same time.

We rented a car to tour Wales. The rental guy never told us that it was a diesel. I almost put unleaded in the darn thing. It was a near miss that would have ruined both the car and the first stage of my trip. We lucked out on that one. What saved us was another mishap that turned out to be a blessing in disguise: I couldn't figure how to open feul tank hatch. I tried to pull it open, push and release it, then looked everywhere for a switch to no avail. Shoshana got frustrated with me so I said, "You try it." She couldn't figure it out either. While moving the keys to see if they were hiding something she noticed that it said "Diesel Only" on the back of the fob. It turned out that the hatch opened with a push and release, but you had to have the right "English" on it.

I can't really complain about the weather but we did have a hike planned in Snowdon National Park that was supposed to give us spectracular views of Mount Snowdon and other landmarks that I can't pronounce the names of. All we could see was fog, but hey, we still had a good time. The higher we got the foggier it got, and the deeper the snow got too. We lost our path and had to follow our own footprints out. The sun shone the next day.

OMG, driving was a trip. Being on the wrong side of the road wasn't so bad, but the roads are narrow as hell and there are often stone walls in leau of shoulders. They were windy too, in the mountains. I had to keep reminding myself that the highways were in fact wider than Robinson Road, where I live, and that I drive that road at 50 mph all the time. We had the GPS set on a town in southern Wales but it turned out to be so much work driving through the mountains, and the twists and turns were making Shoshana carsick so we switched it to our actual destination at Bath, England. Sure enough we started going east, but then it had us turn down what looked to be a long driveway. No, it was a road, one lane to accomodated two way traffic. What gets me is that there was actually a villiage back there! Shoshana said, "Now you've had the official UK driving experience." I include this little vingette in a list of mishaps which in point of fact it's wasn't. We returned the rental car rather dirty, but without a scratch.

Let's see, I lost a glove in Bath, though that's no great deal. Still, I look like a Michael Jackson want-a-be in some of Shosh's pictures with my one gloved hand.

I'm afraid I'm getting old. I haven't sucumbed to wearing glasses all of the time but when viewing art I do wear my prescriptions. They tend to alter my depth perception though and I must have tripped on stairs and minor floor undulations a hundred times. Then when I take them off again there is an ajustment period back to my unaided vision.

I'm not actually sure if I can blame it on that, in fact I'm sure that I can't, but I ran full into a glass door when leaving a Paris cafe. That was Shoshana's favorite, she couldn't stop laughing. It's a good thing she'd just emptied her bladder or we might have had other troubles.

So I've got one more day here in Leeds and then it's up early to head back to the States. Keep your fingers crossed that none of my mishaps from here on out are worse than those I've already endured. I've had a wonderful trip. I'll try to share some more of it with you, pictures as well.