First night – dinner with friends. Jet lag busting begins.
Our hometown newspaper, The Seattle Times, runs a reader contributed Rants and Raves column. Readers send in their good and bad experiences and the paper publishes them. It provides us much entertainment and, we realized, has become part of our vocabulary.
And a proper London welcome from this canal boat kitten.
Rave: Love the cats on canal boats. They always make me smile, and good on the boat owners for having cats.
Kitten enhance!Walking off jet lag on the Regents Canal.
Rant: traveling east is so much harder than traveling west, jet lag wise. During the first few days there may have been some strongly worded promises to only travel west in the future.
But wait, from Seattle to London traveling west? Well, visiting Asia would be a rave. What made this trip so tough was our flight delay of 2 hours which meant we arrived at our hotel at 5pm instead of 3 pm. We planned five nights in London to acclimate before heading on to the rest of our trip. Tenby Wales and then hiking Offa’s Dyke.
The Ardman exhibit at the Young V&A. Ardman Studios of Wallace and Gromit fame.All the models were so detailed.
Rave: a well curated exhibition diving into an artistic process. Stop motion animation is so much more detailed and layered than I knew.
The Curse of the Wererabbit.The Wrong TrousersOne of our happy places, top of a London double decker.A well lit little library in Islington.
Rant: When I’m navigating in London and my wife says “It’s a grid!” London is decidedly NOT a grid and I wish she would quit saying that.
Mudlarking. Collecting bits from the Thames River banks. Only allowable with a permit.Rave: That first proper British pint. Always a joy. Not cold, coolish-room temperature.And breakfast with a pot of tea. Absolutely a rave.If it wasn’t raining this little tea house near Temple underground station would have drawn me right in.But we were meeting our friends Kathy and Mike, our travel companions, at The Courtauld Gallery. Here, Berthe Morisot’s painting of her sister, Edma, who was also a painter but gave it up when she married.
Rave and Rant: Museums that display female artists and museums that don’t.
An apothecary jar with a cat or leopard depicted. The best cure for jet lag? Walking in the sunshine with friends. Second best? Walking in the rain with friends.Oh, and Scotch Eggs.The Covid Memorial Wall caught us all by surprise. At a time when Covid response is being relitigated in the US, it was a sober reminder of how awfully impactful it was around the world.Big Ben in the sunshine. First time I’ve seen it without scaffolding in ages.
Rave: Cities that take care of their historic landmarks.
Top of the bus across the Tower Bridge at sunset. Definitely a Rave.Caffeine break on a patented “Rich without maps” walk. Six miles, no map checks until it’s time to get back to the hotel. Allowed: checking position of the sun and noting where buses are headed.The Vaudeville Theater for a show.Six. Fun. Fast paced. So clever. Visually stunning. Rave! Always an Underground photo.We need to keep our walking fitness levels up, so off for five or six miles on the Regents Canal. The gang. We’re working on our Offa’s Dyke trail names.Who loves a canal path? Me!Any walk needs a good rest break. Islington.The Engineers at the Engineer Pub, Primrose Hill.Refueling at Pembroke Castle in Primrose Hill.Thursday night outside a pub in Whitechapel. We were amazed at how busy Thursday was.Rich, Cheryl, Kathy, and Mike. Look out Tenby Wales, here we come.
After decades of living and working in wonderful San Francisco we gave it all up to travel the world. Not owning a car allowed us to save money and live hyper-locally. Now we’re living around the globe. Follow along to see where we are and what cats I manage to pet.
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Less Car, More Life 