First, we must apologize for not getting out a holiday letter last year.  Rest assured: if you did not get a letter from us, it is not because we dropped you from our list, or because we love you any less, but because we were slackers and did not get a holiday letter out to anybody last year!  Though, in our defense, there were extenuating circumstances last winter.  More on that later.  :-)  At any rate, this somewhat extended holiday letter will have to stand for two years.

Intrepid explorers, about to set forth to plumb the depths of the Grand Canyon. From left to right: David, Susan, Jenny, Tim, and Emily. (Terran behind the camera.)

We rang in the 2010 New Year at Susan’s parents’, visiting with them, with her brother and his wife, and with Susan’s grandmother, Emmaline.  Though we did not know it at the time, this would be our last chance to see Emmaline before she passed away.  It was a wonderful visit, and we treasure having had that late opportunity to spend time with her.

In March of 2010, we had the opportunity to spend three days hiking in the Grand Canyon with our friends David (from Boston), Jenny (from Chicago), and Tim and Emily (from L.A.-ish).  It was an amazing and beautiful trip.  Susan and Terran had visited the Canyon a couple of times before — once on the rim, and once hiking and rafting — but this was our first chance to do the classic “hike all the way down and all the way back out”.  In that late springtime, we hiked through the snow and ice at the rim down to shirt-sleeves at the bottom.  We enjoyed a night camping near Phantom Ranch, on the Colorado River, and a night at Indian Garden, halfway up.  We got to enjoy many vistas of the Canyon and the river, and the pleasure of making dinner in a driving snow storm at Indian Garden.

No snowstorm can come between our adventurers and dinner!

At the end of April, we lost Susan’s grandmother.  Her passing was a deep blow to the whole family, but it was clear at the funeral what a legacy of love and strength she left to her descendants.

Almost in counterbalance to loss came news of new life.  When Susan returned to Albuquerque, in early May, we discovered that she was pregnant.  All of a sudden, there were new priorities and a flurry of new preparations.  On the positive side: a new child-to-be.  On the negative: the immediate onset of morning sickness.  (Or, perhaps more properly, “morning, noon, and night sickness”.)  We took some time to circulate the knowledge to the family, but by late June, the word had made it around.

From Beirut to Jerusalem

That June took us on new adventures.  Terran had a scientific conference in Israel, so we spent almost a week exploring that fragment of the world.  Haifa, Acco (Acre), Jersusalem, Gesthemene, the Temple Mount — places overflowing with history and religion, where the two are interwined and written into the very stones.  It was an amazing experience and a fascinating view of places that had just been names in history books.  The Hospitaliers’ fortress at Acco; Richard the Lionheart versus Saladin; the Via Doloroso; the Wailing Wall.  It all brought home some of the history of blood and pain of the region, but also the sense of profound beauty and sublime power of some of the ideals we inherit from it.  Also food.  Israeli hummus is da bomb. Yum.

Susan at the Templars' Fortress in Acco/Acre.

From Israel, we travelled on to London for the wedding of Terran’s adopted sister Marilisa to her beloved David.  It was convenient to be on the right side of the ocean, at least, but the flight between the two is still a bit long, and by this point Susan was a little exhausted.  (To tell the truth, Terran was a bit tired too, but he at least wasn’t battling pregnancy.)

It was wonderful to see Marilisa and David and get to spend some special time with them leading up to the wedding.  We did little touristing, but a great deal of visiting with old UK friends and meeting new ones.  (And, somehow, we got conscripted into helping with wedding preparations.  A very great deal of origami.)

While we were there, though, this year of chaos sprung another tragedy on us.  On July 1, Terran’s mother, Barbara, passed away.  That was a huge shock and unexpected and it cast a shadow of pain across events.  Terran and Susan flew back to Kentucky to arrange the funeral.  In spite of the tragedy, it was powerful to discover just how much Barbara had been a part of her community and how deeply and widely she was loved.  In an odd stroke of fortune, the plot beside Terran’s brother Lucas was still available, and we were able to bury them side-by-side.

But in the midst of tragedy, life and beauty remained.  We were able to return to London in time to participate in Marilisa and David’s wedding and to dance with them in celebration.

We returned to the States and had to face clearing out Barbara’s house and settling her affairs.  We remain immensely grateful to a handful of friends and family who were able to donate time to help with this monumental task.  Among those were our friends David and Jen, who dropped everything and came from Boston to help out.  Terran’s cousin Tyson came and helped fix up the house, as did many of Barbara’s close friends — Rudy, Amanda, Sonja, Susan, Doris, and so many others.  We literally could not have done it without them.  Thank you all.

There is little noteworthy in the intervening months.  But this chaotic and overwhelming year drew to a close with a beautiful event.

Autumn on her 0th birthday.

Autumn Alice Emmaline Anne Rati Lane was born at 4:07 PM (MST) on December 23, 2010.  It was a good “birth experience” (in the odd nomenclature of the childbirth world).  The hospital staff were uniformly wonderful to work with — knowledgeable, skilled, friendly, and supportive.  We got to bring her home on Christmas day, 2010, to sit in the light from our Christmas tree and watch It’s a Wonderful Life, while cuddling the baby and eating Chinese carryout.

Woo.  Parenthood has been a…  Big adjustment.  For one thing, not so much travel to talk about in 2011.  On the flip side, though, we got to witness Autumn’s first year. We’ve been through the night feedings, seeing her first smiles, watching her learn to wield her fingers, rolling over, crawling, and now she’s almost walking.  (Update:  As of Dec 19, 2011, we have officially declared her “toddler”.)

Mommy and Autumn on her second Christmas.

At each stage, we get a few more glimpses of the person she will become. She is full of the delight of discovery of the world.  She is social and cheerful and affectionate and full of laughter and entropy.  She notices every new thing (and wants to stick most of them in her mouth).

It’s not been without stress, though. Autumn has serious acid reflux. Making sure she’s on the right medication has been an ongoing challenge.  But the doctors have been great to work with, and we are optimistic for the new year.

So that brings us up to the end of 2011.  As we look forward to Autumn’s first birthday, we are headed off to spend a week in Chicago with Susan’s side of the family. Wish us luck!

Much love to you all, and hoping to see you in the New Year!

Happy Holidays!

– Susan, Terran, Autumn, & Mist (the cat)

P.S.  We know that we’re terribly, abysmally far behind on our travel blog.  We have two more posts from Scotland to do, let alone hiking the Grand Canyon!  I’ll just plead technical difficulties compounded by new parent difficulties.  But the blog software seems happy again, so we hope to start getting some of the back-blog up!  Be sure to check back later (or, better yet, subscribe to the RSS feed.  :-)

I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

Indeed.  Almost definitively so, one would say…

But Susan had never seen this particular big hole in the ground, though we’ve toured Carlsbad Caverns a few times and we love that cave system.  So while we were in Kentucky, we decided to take a day and zoom down to Cave City (no shit — they really named the city that) and see Mammoth Caves…

This is mostly pix.  I’m going to try an experiment and use WordPress’s “Photo Album” feature.  (Because inserting every picture manually is excruciating in this software.)  Feedback welcome on whether that’s a good idea or a bad one.  As always, you should be able to click through individual photos to get the full-size view.

Leaving Britain is a particularly strange feeling.  In so many ways, it feels close to home — not just the (mostly) shared language and history, but just the feel of the place.  The green and the trees hearken back to my earlier life, growing up in Kentucky and Indiana or living in the Northeast.  The intermittent misty and sunny weather that remains temperate through the summer evokes echos of the Pacific Northwest and the Canadian Rockies, where I came of age.

More than that, it has been a year of personal growth and change.  I have had some excellent research interactions, of course, and have learned a great deal scientifically.  I had some valuable time to think and experiment and hack a bit myself.  I have a stronger sense of some directions to explore.

But much more than that, it has been a year of learning about the greater world and our place in it.  History, art, culture, language, politics, religion.  Food, fashion, fun.  I feel that I have a fuller or richer sense of the tides of culture.  Countries all face the same problems, but different countries resolve them differently, and we both have some better senses of what the spectrum of choices is.

In flight, now, the great steel flying machine boring a hole through the sky above Ireland, heading for the North Atlantic.

Moments and memories flit through me…

Arriving in Spain eleven months ago, now.  Confusion and panic, plunged into a world we didn’t fit into, uncertain if we could even pay for our apartment.

Snow in London, paralyzing the city.  Two days later, a train through the fairy-gilded countryside.  Sunlight gleaming on snow in the trees and on the fields; a Dickensian scene.

Treading the streets of Hardy, Halley, and Hawking; Tolkien, Carroll, and Lewis.

A whirl of castles, fortresses, and palaces: El Escorial, El Palacio Real, El Alcazar de Segovia, Alhambra, Pembrokeshire, Warwick, the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Versailles, Castle Howard, Schloss Marienburg, Earl’s Palace, Edinburgh.  Centuries of might, power, prestige, wealth, fear, and blood.  Some standing still proud and strong, some crumbling and struggling against tides of time and entropy.  All showpieces, now, for adventurers, curiosity seekers, history fanatics, and tourists.

Snippets of history assembling.  Fitting together growing fragments of the great mosaic.

The sense of wonder and excitement as cafés and headlines in Madrid were filled with Obama’s victory.

The awe of touching stones laid down a thousand years ago by the cathedral-builders…

… or laid down two millennia ago by the Romans, as they grasped the world in their palms.

… or five millennia ago by the now-nameless neolithic farmers, circumscribing the heavens with stone.

… or eight millennia ago by the mesolithic hunter-gatherers, laying their treasured dead into barrows for reasons now lost in entropy and age.

Plays in London’s West End and English-language movies at the foreign film theatre in Madrid.

The ocean surging against cliffs in Scotland and Wales; mist above the sea.  The sea, the sea, the sea, stretching out before us, a reminder of how small these islands really are, for all of their deep history and vast influence.

The whirl and bustle of the great mercados of Madrid, a foodie’s heaven, if only you can speak enough Spanish to order the jamon.

The decaying Victorian majesty and grunge of the London Tube, its subterranean labyrinth inviting visions of fairies, just beyond sight in the hidden recesses, driving the trains, or sometimes not, at their whim.

Jamon and pisto manchego.  Fish and chips at the pub.  Chocolate con churros, merluza, cochinillo, cocido, and the best calamari in Madrid.  Steak and kidney pie, cumberland sausages, scones and cream tea, Victoria sponge cake. Ordering Indian and Chinese for delivery.

The gleaming modern efficiency of the Madrid Metro, jewel of Madrid’s recent public works and their charming, self-aggrandizing pride in it. Posters of the Sphinx or the Statue of Liberty peering excitedly down the steps of a Metro station: “El Metro que todos quisieren tener.”

The green, green, green of Britain.  Trees and grass and flowers and rolling farmlands.  Even in the concrete jungle of London, the locals have striven to set aside greenspace.  And the greenery fights for itself: grass springing forth from every crack or crevice in the concrete, moss or ivy spreading over every wall, unless vigilantly fought back.

The grand, tree-lined boulevards of central Madrid, evoking Nineteenth Century splendor and imperial power.  The arid clime, so achingly reminiscent of Albuquerque and the desert Southwest of the US.

The digital map informs us that we are over the coast of Greenland now.  Halfway to Chicago, or thereabout.

But, really, what has mattered most are the people.

The kind and enthusiastic woman across the courtyard from us in Madrid.  Discussions in our halting Spanish about sharing the clothes line and the state of the weather, and her pledge of friendship on the day we left Spain.

The supervisor at the Manor House Tube station in London, who cheerfully sorted us out, from helping us get to our house in the first place, to helping us find our way to the New Year’s celebrations in the city.

The Nicaraguan expat we met in Spain who hated the US for its role in the Contra-Sandanista civil war that destroyed his country and his family.

The Kosovan taxi-driver in London who loved the US for its role in the Kosovo war and stopping the horrors of ethnic cleansing.

Elaborate Christmas lunch at the warm and welcoming house of my postdoc’s family.

The brusque but secretly friendly proprietor of the corner store near our place in London, who just smiled when we returned for the fourth time in a day for something forgotten, saying “It’s ok — this is your store.”

The delightful B&B hosts in Pembrokeshire, who welcomed us into their house and shared their joy in Wales with us.

Gaming with friends back in the US — a touch of familiarity and comfort for expats far from home.

The shopkeeper in Spain who sold us pillow cases when we had no Spanish whatsoever, who cheerfully passed the dictionary back and forth with us to help us through the transaction and who, at the end, complimented our Spanish, “¡Su español es muy bueno!”.

A group of hostellers in Orkney, with whom we stayed up too late dissecting the state of the world and the best travel destinations on five continents.

And all of the beautiful, wonderful, warm friends we found in London: Writers and musicians and gamers and engineers and hackers and teachers.  Who, most of all, made London feel like home, at least for a time.

Over the North Atlantic again, closing in on the coast of Canada.  The flight attendant brings us a snack of fruit and crackers and lovely stinky cheese.  We marvel a bit at the luxury of flying business class.

I titled this post “Leaving the Shire, Mr. Frodo” because I can empathize with some of Sam’s feelings.  For one thing, the echos of Middle Earth are all over Britain — you can see Tolkien’s roots in the thatched roofs and hedge-rows, the towers and spires, the barrows and standing stones.

But it’s a deeper feeling than that.  Sam was leaving home for the first time — first setting foot beyond his native lands, starting out on a grand adventure that would change him deeply.  We are returning from a grand adventure — admittedly not as grand, nor as hazardous, as Sam’s — but I can feel some of the wistfulness and conflicts that he did.  Transitions are potent.  We return to familiar places and people that we love, but we leave behind fascinating places and discoveries and new people to love.

But more opportunities to return, to visit new friends, and to explore further.

The road goes ever on…

Passing over the Great Lakes now.  We are close.  They feed us again.

It has been such a strange year.  There were plenty of stresses, from discovering the failure modes of the international finance system, to wandering lost at Barajas airport in search of our cats, to staying in touch with friends and colleagues five thousand miles away, to planning the next bit of local travel and tourism, to trying to pound a new language into our aged cortices by exposure and sheer force of will.  At times, we were exhausted by the overwhelming intricacy of life maintenance when your home isn’t really your home and every transaction has to be coordinated across two continents and up to five countries.

Landing gear down.  Seats and tray tables up.  Machines off.

But it has also been an incredibly… Fulfilling/enriching/educational/exciting/exploratory/wonderful/creative/social year.  All wrapped up in complex feelings — joy, loss, excitement, fatigue.  The sense of our perspectives stretching, like muscles, sometimes a little bit too far.  Homesickness for two homes.

Landing in Chicago; back in the US.

We are home.

This was a big leap for us.  Mostly, we’re pre-planners.  Not at the fine-grained, “from noon to 1:30 we’ll be at the Cathedral, then we’ll have lunch at the Café de la Vache Morte until 2:09, then…” sense. But we both are really uncomfortable until we know where we’re sleeping that night.  Once we have some sort of housing set up for each night of our trip, we’re all adventure, but we’re on edge until then.  So heading for Amsterdam on the spur of the moment with no hotel, hostel, or even camping spot was a bit nerve-wracking for us. This was compounded when we arrived to discover that the tourist information desk (who can normally point you to some place to stay, in most European cities that we’ve been in) was already closed for the day.  Woo.  Cast adrift in a big city where we don’t speak the language.  Tourist nightmare.

Fortunately, the Amsterdam train station really is in the heart of the tourist district (or, perhaps, vice versa), and there are about a dozen hotels in line of sight as you step out of the train station. The first one we stepped into had a vacancy that night.  Score!

We went out for a late dinner, discovering that, for reasons still mysterious to us, Argentine Steakhouses were the thing.  We discovered at least six of them in a ten minute walk of our hotel. ¿Por qué hay muchos resutrantes Argentinos en Amsterdam?  No lo sé. But they made yummy steak.  Mmmm….

The train station is also, incidentally, in the heart of the (in)famous Red Light District.  Wandering around to and from dinner was amusing.

The next morning, we were kicked out of our hotel because they had no vacancies for that night.  Bleh.  Fortunately, the tourist hotel-finding service was open at that time of day and they set us up.  (From watching the chick who was running the desk, I think that a big part of her skill set is sizing up people as they walk in the door to calibrate their finances and desperation so that she can put them into the most expensive place they’re willing to accept.  She was pretty good, but we still managed to walk away with a reservation at a better hotel for cheaper in a nicer part of town.  Score again!)

On the street where we lived (very briefly, anyway). The Nova, on the right, is our home-for-a-day.

The contorted hallway into our hotel room: upstairs, around the back, and down to a small landing to get in.

We basically had one day in Amsterdam, so we tried to make the most of it.  We started with the floating flower market, home of a bewildering bevy of botany:

Part of the flower market. The flower stalls are on the left, built on houseboats floating on the canal, but spilling out onto the street.

Susan delighting in a blinding bunch of blossoms.

More flower market, with the Krijtberg Church in the skyline behind.

(It’s a “floating” market because the flower stalls are all on houseboats sitting on a canal.  But these are house “boats” in the same way that many mobile homes in the US are theoretically relocatable — the house boats are permanently anchored and tethered to the dock, and the stalls are effectively fixed structures that spill from their boats across the moorings and onto the street.)

As we left the market, we ran across the Krijtberg Church:

Facade of the Krijtberg Church, down the street from the Flower Market.

One thing that caught my eye about this church is that the stone walls were painted.  This is a big contrast from many of the churches we’ve seen, where the stone is left raw.  The unpainted stone is majestic and imposing in its own way, but the painted stonework is actually closer to the way many would have been decorated in the medieval era.

A painted ceiling vault in the Krijtberg.

From there, we found our way to the Anne Frank House — the warehouse building in which Anne and seven other people spent four long years as refugees, hiding from the Nazi occupiers.  By request of Otto Frank (Anne’s father and the only survivor of the war), the house is left largely unfurnished.  The very emptiness of the rooms is sobering now, loaded as they are with a weight of history and experience.

On the way back toward the center of the city, we found the Nieuwe Kerk (“New Church”) — which means that it dates to only the fifteenth century.  Today, it has been converted to essentially a museum, as far as I can tell.  It felt odd to wander around one of these vast cathedral-style buildings that is now devoid of chairs, paintings, decorations, and most of the accouterments of an active, living church.  But there are still fascinating and beautiful bits left to see, and they are renovating parts of it.

Modern stained glass window in the Nieuwe Kerk.

New Church Chandalier

A large part of our Amsterdam experience was just getting a feel of the city as we wandered around.  Like Venice or Stockholm, Amsterdam is a city of water, built around a network of canals so that the city almost blends into the ocean.  While we were there, it was misty and rainy the entire time, adding to the feel of a city at one with the sky and the sea.

Life in the "Venice of the North", where water and city blend.

In the Seventeenth Century, Amsterdam was a thriving city of international trade and commerce, and was possibly the wealthiest city in the world in its day.  You can still see the heritage reflected in the architecture today.

Seventeenth century merchant houses. The slant out over the street is not decaying architecture -- it's deliberate, to allow heavy crates to be lifted up to the warehouse upper floors by way of block-and-tackle suspended from the hook above the topmost window.

A more modern building, "in the style of".

Amsterdam is also a vibrantly pedestrian and bicycling city.  Like many European cities, it is much denser and yet much smaller than similar US cities.  That makes it more feasible to get places on foot or bike, and the latter was incredibly popular.  We were awed by the multistory bicycle parking garage outside the train station.

Bicycle parking garage outside the main train station in Amsterdam.

For the evening, we found a small, traditional Dutch restaurant near our hotel.  It had all the character — irregular rooms in a (probably) Seventeenth Century building, low ceilings, dark wood.  And amazingly good food.  I had a stellar split pea with ham soup (not exclusively local, I have to admit, but highly yummy) and a sampler platter of different smoked fish.  Mmmm.  Susan beat me on soups, choosing an eel and mustard cream soup.  Sounds counterintuitive, I know, but was fabulous.  For a main, she had salmon with Gouda sauce. It was also excellent, and the fish was top-notch, but the sauce was not as exciting as it sounded on paper.  Altogether, however, we were double-plus pleased with the dining experience.

(For the record, we verified that the cheese is pronounced “how-dah” in English transliteration.  Only the “h” sound happens somewhere behind the uvula, and neither of us can precisely reproduce it.)

Finally, gratefully back to our hotel, and the next morning we headed out regretfully, feeling that there was much more to explore in Amsterdam.  Well, someday we’ll hope to return.

Little news from there.  Long train ride back to Hannover, lunch at the train station there, plane back to Stansted airport, train back to London, bus back to our neighborhood, feet back to our house, where our lonely kitties were anxiously waiting to welcome us home.

The next day, we were off to Bad Salzdetfurth via Hannover. We made it there just in time for the skies to open up and dump on us as we wandered clueless from the train station to the hotel.

We have no pictures of the town or of DFDF, I’m afraid. (So we could tell you anything outrageous about what was there and you would have no choice but to believe us. Bwahahaha!) Suffice it to say that it was a fantastic weekend — relaxing, beautiful music, and we met a whole pile of wonderful, friendly, welcoming people. Among the musicians there were:

• Ju and Katy (GoHs)
• Schattenweber
• geBorgt
• Playing Rapunzel
• Steve Macdonald
• Sib Machat
• Alexa (website unknown)

Some of these we knew from other gatherings and venues. But many were new to us. The point of DFDF is to feature German filk musicians, so a lot of the lyrics were in German and went by us. But the music was still beautiful and we just let it wash over us and through us. A good time was had by all.

On Monday morning, as everybody was leaving the con, Sib very generously took us out to the local castle, Schloss Marienburg:

Schloss Marienburg, outside Hildesheim, Germany. Looks like a fairy-tale, doesn't it? Wait'll you see the inside...

This is a Nineteenth century castle in the Gothic Revival style.  For a time it served as a local seat of power for the Guelph nobility in the Hannover region, and it was given as a present by George V of Hannover to his queen.  (I’ve never gotten a birthday present that cool!)  We took the tour, which, in addition to the beautiful art and architecture, featured an in-depth discussion of the royal family trees. Including details (that I have now lost) about how the British Monarchs are tied into the German royal family of that era.

We absolutely loved the spiral stairs in the castle. The best part was they didn't go anywhere! Totally decorative.

View of the courtyard of the castle.

Our host very kindly dropped us back at the train station at Hannover in the early afternoon. Now the real adventure began. We had a couple of days before our return flight and we had no reservations for anything nor specific plans. There was plenty left to see in Germany, of course, but we really had wanted to make it to one more European country while we were on this side of the pond. We discovered that we could still get a train to Amsterdam so we took the chance and went...

Next up: Hit and run Amsterdam!

So this all ended up a bit long (because I’m uncontrollably verbose), so I’m cutting it into three parts.  Here’s part 1:
On a rather spur-of-the-moment decision, we headed to Germany at the end of May.  There were two big reasons to go: to briefly visit Susan’s third cousin, Karin, and her family in Wiesbaden, and to hang out with musicians and SF fans at the DFDF filk convention in Bad Salzdetfurth, outside of Hannover.  And we were taking some time on the tail end to explore a bit further, in the hopes of maybe checking another country off our list while we still had the chance.  The Netherlands came to mind.

Now…  Those of you who know the geography of Northern Europe might just recognize that these three locations are not particularly close together.  Yeah, well, we know.  This was compounded by the fact that the best plane tickets we could get were round-trip through Hannover, which is close only to DFDF.  But what the heck — the view from the train is pretty.  ;-)

Absurd amounts of backtracking

Flying into Hannover, we had reservations on a noon train to Wiesbaden.  Unusually, the plane was early, so we had time to kill. We kicked around Hannover’s downtown a bit, running across this large church at the market square (the Market Church, strangely enough).  I know that iconography changes over time and means different things to different people, but we couldn’t help thinking that it had a bit of an identity crisis…

Church steeple in Hannover. Note the inverted pentacle and Star of David.

On to Wiesbaden.  We got there in early afternoon and weren’t scheduled to meet Karin until the next morning.  So we took the afternoon to explore it.  We didn’t really take any pix of oldtown Wiesbaden, but it was a pretty area — very 19th century.

One of the centerpieces is the Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme (baths). Wiesbaden is, of course, built on hot springs (thus the “bad” in the name), and had Roman baths there once upon a time.  There weren’t formal baths there again until the early 20th century, when the town was developed as a bit of a tourist resort, as I understand. Capitalism is alive and well there today, and the elaborate bath/day spa is happy to exchange hot water for your euros.

The hot water was truly delightful, and extremely relaxing after a lot of travel stress.  The interesting thing, to us as Americans though, is that this spa goes for the whole Roman attitude, down to the communal nude bathing.  That’s right — no clothes allowed anywhere in any of the pools.  This is such a blatant violation of all of the American nudity taboos that it took us a while to really process.  We found that it was hard to “just not think about it”, which would be some sort of ideal, I suppose, but we found that there does seem to be a common behavioral standard that simultaneously acknowledges the need for privacy and the utter lack of any possibility of privacy.  There’s a sort-of casual glance-near-someone look that says, “Yes, I acknowledge your presence and I won’t bump into you, but, no, really, I’m not staring, I promise!”

The other thing we observed from the nude bathing experience was that we might all have less body-form angst if there were more public nudity.  It does set the mind at ease a bit to know that you’re not the only one who doesn’t have the body of a Hollywood star.

Back to our hotel for the evening.  One fun bit of multicultural travel experience: the fellow running the desk that evening spoke about six words of English, which is about three times our German, so there was a bit of a language barrier.  However, it turns out that he spoke French and Susan and I both studied French in High School.  Our now-ancient memories of French conjugations creaked rustily into motion and we were able to achieve a low level of mutual understanding.  I was even able to ask for a city map (Avez vous un plan de la cité?) and be understood on the first try.  We felt unjustifiably tickled, and our years of HS language classes were vindicated.  Woo.

The next morning, Susan’s cousin Karin met us and we went for a spin around the town with her and her son, Lenard.  (Karin’s husband, Ulrich, wasn’t feeling well and didn’t join us.)  We rode the funicular:

View from the water-powered funicular in Weisbaden.

And toured the Russian Orthodox church:

Russian Orthodox church in Wiesbaden.

(Apparently, this is the seat of Russian Orthodoxy for all of Germany.  There was an elaborate story to explain why this was so, but I have forgotten most of the details.)

Karin et al. were lovely hosts and we had a delightful time with them.  Ulrich felt better by the evening, so we got to see him a bit before we hit the sack, and we all had a fascinating conversation.  We were sorry that we had such a brief time there, but it was good to see them again nonetheless.

Susan with her cousin, Karin, and Karin's son, Lennard. Lennard is the blond one.

Next up: on to DFDF!

We visited the Tower of London twice.  (Thus actually paying for the Historic Royal Palaces membership.  Heh.)  So some of these pics are from winter (Jan) and others are from spring (May).  So if you detect strangely vanishing and returning greenery, that’s why…

The name is a bit misleading and inclines people who haven’t been there to think that it’s a single building.  Rather, it’s a complex — a fortress including a central tower, rings of buildings and towers, gates and battlements, a (disused) moat, two chapels, a garrison — the whole bit.

The Tower really got started in 1066, when William the Conqueror, having recently wrested power from the locals, needed a seat for government and, not incidentally, a stronghold from which to dominate the populace.  So he commanded the construction of the White Tower (the central building in the modern Tower complex), starting from foundations and wall fragments that date back to the Romans.  From there, the Tower complex was extended for about four centuries, continuing to serve as fortress and picking up duties as royal prison, execution grounds, and armory along the way.

The White Tower

It’s a bit hard to see, but in the lower left, you can just make out some of the old Roman foundations.

Today, the entire Tower complex is essentially a museum, though it is still inhabited by the Tower Guard (the famous “Beefeaters”).  It also still functions as a real Royal military garrison, at least in limited ways — the Crown Jewels of Great Britain are housed in one of the buildings there and very serious guards with very big guns keep a close eye on them.  However, if you’re clever enough to go in early January, you can get in to see the jewels without a 2 hour wait.  ;-)  (Still not allowed to photograph them, however.)

Our guide, one of the famous "Beefeaters" -- the Tower Guard -- harranguing the tourists

One of the most notorious uses of the Tower has been to hold royal prisoners (or anybody else who was important enough to merit real imprisonment, rather than just summary execution).  Many of same prisoners never left the tower, or left it only as far as the headsman’s block on the nearby hill.  Even Elizabeth I was prisoner there briefly.

The axe used to behead Lady Jane Grey (in common legend, anyway, though apparently not in fact)

(Incidentally, they have reproductions of the famous painting of Jane Grey up all over the place there.  I can’t tell if it’s a kind of self-flagellating penance or if the romance of the tragedy appeals.)

But the widely known executions, like Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn, were really the smallest part.  Many, many people met essentially anonymous ends there.  When they excavated the floor of the “modern” chapel of the Tower complex (not to be confused with the medieval chapel, shown below), they found about 1500 unaccounted-for skeletons.  No record of who they were.  All clearly beheaded and buried anonymously and, presumably, ignominiously.  We don’t even know what era they died there.

When we were there in May, they had an exhibit of Henry’s armor.   (That’s Henry VIII, of course).

Henry VIII's tournament armor when he was c. 20 yo

Check out that joint articulation! Amazing craftsmanship.

In Jan, before the Henry exhibit was on, we met a chap who had a bunch of armor gear available to play with.

Susan stylin', Seventeenth century cavalier-style

Susan with more armor -- this time, Thirteenth century foot-soldier's helmet

Some miscellaneous inside architecture shots.  (Yes, it’s dark inside.  And hard to photograph.  At least we didn’t have to photograph by candle light…)

The medieval chapel, where centuries of English monarchs sat vigil before coronation

Vaulted ceiling. Did I mention that it was dark in there?

A medieval bedroom layout. (If you're royalty, that is.)

View along one of the Inner Ward's curtain wall battlements, now a springtime promenade for tourists

We arrived on a day when they were demoing their siege equipment in the greensward-formerly-known-as-a-moat.  Terran got to play with the toys.  (Tee hee.)  This one is called a “perrier”, pronounced “pear-ee-ur”.   (No shit — the etymology goes back to Latin for “stone”, via French, pierre.)  For scale, it’s probably about 20 feet tall at the top.  It’s a counterweight-based stone-caster, similar in principle to a trebuchet.  Unlike the latter, however, this one depends on human-power.  The thing that looks like a weight, on the left, is actually just a fixture for the ropes (that you can just see dangling beneath it).  You hang a bunch of big, burly guys (like, say, me) off the ropes and have them drop their body weight on them when the artillery commander gives the signal.  We were only tossing water balloons and we managed to fling them all of about 50m.  Woo — hardly a terror to the besieging hoards, I’m afraid.  But we only had 4 guys — the historians/artillery commander claimed that there are medieval woodcuts depicting giant versions of this sucker with about 100 people acting as weights.  Yike…

Medieval siege engine, or modern play toy?

Another of the myriad of legends associated with the Tower concerns the Ravens of the Tower.  Apparently the story goes that the Tower will fall if the Ravens ever leave.  This was a bit of a problem in the sixteenth century when the Royal Observatory was established there.  Apparently, the Tower featured about 2000 of the birds at the time, which was enough to…  Well, “obscure” the optics of the instruments, if you will.  But they clearly couldn’t kill all the ebon intruders.  So since then, they’ve maintained a small flock of tame ravens on the grounds.  To cover all the bases, though, they clip their wings, so the birds are stuck there…

One of the Tower Ravens, on whom so much depends.

(You may ask: Why were there so many ravens there?  Well, aside from the bloodthirstyness alluded to above, there’s the small fact that the moat was misdesigned, so it didn’t drain properly into the Thames.  As a result, everything that went into the moat, stayed in the moat.  And, of course, in that era, it was most common to dump all of the…  detritus of the fortress straight into the moat.  Mmmm….)

My grandmother on my father’s side was born a Boyer.  She once pointed out to me that there’s a Bowyer tower in the Tower of London.  I’m not entirely clear on whether our family is connected to this bit of architecture in any way, but I couldn’t resist going to find the tower.  (It turns out that its major claim to fame now is that some poor bastard got hisself murdered by being drowned in a barrel of sack [white wine] there.)

Bowyer tower -- my Grandmother's heritage?

We were particularly struck by the juxtaposition of this ancient fortress, nestled into the midst of a bustling modern mega-metropolis.

Two millenia of architecture: Roman wall (far foreground), medieval battlements (middle distance), and Victorian Tower Bridge (background).

Shadows of past and present

As archaeology and ancient culture junkies, Susan and I have really been wanting to see Stonehenge and other of the great standing stone monuments of the British Isles.  (Yes, I know that other countries have them too, but we’re here now, so…)  Unfortunately, they’re a bit challenging to get to for the car-free.  Fortunately, our local friends Gwen, Joe, and Gavin have a car and volunteered to take us on the sightseeing tour.

One of the secrets that we learned from the locals is that, while the English Heritage group keeps most tourists at a distance from the stones themselves (for the stones’ preservation), it is actually possible to get to go inside the circle and to touch the stones.  You have to make a reservation well in advance, because only a limited number of people are allowed in each day, in fixed, early morning time slots.  So, entirely too early on Saturday morning late in April, we hit the road, headed for the Salisbury plain.  This is a couple hours away from our end of London, so it was a bit of a trek to get there early enough.  But it was a glorious morning and an incredible experience.

The circle of Stonehenge, seen from the approach across the Salisbury Plain.

For those who aren’t familiar, Stonehenge is one of the great mysteries of Brittanic culture.  It’s a neolithic monument, dating from roughly the period of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and far before the written word had entered the isles.  It was constructed in phases, over as much as 3,000 years (depending on which parts of it you’re talking about and whom you ask).  And, unlike the Pyramids, we really have no idea what it’s about.

It’s clear that the circle has astronomical functions — the alignment captures midsummer and midwinter sunrise and sunset (respectively) precisely.  But beyond that, we know little about why or even who built it.  Given that it was built in phases over a span of time greater than that from Christ’s birth to today, it seems virtually certain that it was used by different cultural groups for different things over different eras.  What is amazing is the amount of effort that went into its construction and the fact that it remained of importance for so many millennia.  And that all of that importance is now lost in time, like tears in the rain.

It is difficult to describe the sensation of standing among the stones on a quiet, bright, sunny morning.  The sense of age and mystery is amazing and humbling.  The stones are immense — the small bluestones in the inner circle are nearly my height and weigh something like 4 tons apiece, while the great sarsens in the outer ring stand over twice my height and weigh as much as 25 tons each.  Their weight and silent mystery resonate in all the places of my soul that long to touch other times and places.  I can’t really put words to it properly, so I’ll let the stones speak for themselves.

Sun flares at Stonehenge.

A different view of the circle, showing how they've fallen over the ages.

The stones are home now to lichen and a variety of other life: birds, spiders, mice.  The lichens are fascinating — it turns out that they can do genetic studies on the lichens to determine their age and origin.  There are some lichen colonies that are, apparently, thousands of years old and live only here, on these stones.

Lichens growing on a trilithon.

New life nestles among the ancient stones.

A view of the outer ring of sarsen stones, showing the longest remaining segment of capstones.

The lintel stones in the outer ring of sarsen stones are works of high stone-shaping skill.  They’re actually assembled with tongue-and-groove construction aligning the lintels and mortise-and-tenon joints holding the lintels in place.  You can still see the tenons at the top of some of the uprights that have lost their horizontal stones:

Stone tenon, once used to align and support a lintel capstone.

Beneath the lintel stone.

Shadows of present and past: Susan framed by a trilithon.

After Stonehenge, we headed for Avebury.  The awe of the stones hung with us as we drove.

Before arriving at Avebury, we stopped briefly at Silbury mound:

Silbury mound.

Just as mysterious, and at least as ancient as Stonehenge, Silbury mound is an artificial hill, constructed by an astounding mounding clay and chalk.  While you could build it with only “modest” effort using modern earth-moving equipment, in its day, archaeologists estimate that it required 18 million man hours to move the nearly quarter-million cubic meters of earth.  And we have no idea why.  It doesn’t seem to be a barrow or burial mound, and no significant implements or artifacts have been found in the excavations of the site.

Today, it stands starkly out of the plain.  The photo doesn’t really capture just how obviously man-made it is.  It is dramatically different than all of the land features around it, and you have no doubt in your mind, as you face it, that it was built by human hands.  It’s quite a bit larger than the photo makes it look as well — it really does tower over you as you stand there.  Unfortunately, it is currently closed because some of the old excavations have collapsed, so we couldn’t get any closer than this.

Then it was on to Avebury.

Avebury is a small village in Wiltshire, not too far from Stonehenge.  It is notable now because it sits in the midst of an enormous neolithic structure — immense earthwork ditches and banks, a huge stone circle (much wider than Stonehenge’s), and a prehistoric roadway or avenue lined with standing stones.  Many of the stones were partially or entirely buried until unearthed in the Nineteenth Century, which preserved them against the depradations of those seeking building materials or fearing what they represented.  Today, they have been mostly unearthed and concrete pylons laid in to mark the positions of some of the missing stones.  The remaining stones stand an imposing sentinel around the village.

Part of the great Avebury Stone Ring. The village of Avebury can just be seen in the background.

These stones are older than Stonehenge by a good five centuries, at least, and they are just as mysterious.  They are in a very different style, being undressed stone, but they represent at least as much effort.  Some of the large stones clock in at 40 tons.

Susan and Gwen hold up one of the Avebury Stones.

Gavin, Gwen, and Joe (Joe's back, anyway) at Avebury. Yes, the grass really is that vividly green.

One theory (or at least story) told about the stones is that they are gendered — the tall, narrow stones being male, and the shorter, broader stones being female.  I don’t know that there’s any evidence supporting this, aside from the raw fact of the dimensions of the stones.  But it’s a nice story.

A "male" stone.

Part of the avenue leading into (or away from?) Avebury.

The earthworks surrounding Avebury are also monumental, even if they’re a bit less striking than the stones themselves.  I can’t find figures, offhand, about how much effort it took to construct them, but my guess is that it was well more than Silbury Mound, when you consider that they ring the entire village.  And when you consider that all that digging was done by neolithic humans, with no domesticated animals, using deer antlers for digging tools, it becomes awesome and terrifying.  What inspired them to so much effort?

After the stone tour, it was lunch at a local pub in Avebury, then back to London, tired but filled with wonder and fascination.

So, clearly there are whole books on a country’s cuisine, but here are some things that British food has been to us:

British food, sort of like American food, seems to be basically family restaurant or pub fare.  The signature dishes are fish’n'chips and bangers’n'mash.  Everyone’s heard of the former.  The latter is sausages and mashed potatoes.

And oh the sausages!  One of the first things we discovered in the grocery store was Cumberland sausages.  They’re pork sausages with a pleasant mild flavoring, but there is something in the filling that makes them the lightest, fluffiest sausages I’ve ever tasted.  Every sausage with this name we’ve tried, in restaurants or cooked up from our own groceries, has been very good.  There are plenty of other kinds of sausages floating around here, but these are the ones we like best.  And it’s a good thing, since we have found nothing that tastes remotely like an American breakfast sausage here.

Fish and chips really do fill the slot for burgers and fries here.  There are chip shops everywhere.  Batter-dipped fried whitefish is incredibly good, especially if you eat it as fast as you can once you buy it.  It definitely loses something if you let it cool.

But here’s something that really flies in the face of the American stereotype: the Brits are not shy with their spices.  Terran learned from some of his Victorian era research that Britain began a love affair with Indian curry when India became part of the empire.  That has not gone away.  Indian dishes are often listed next to the fish’n'chips in pubs.  And if you see any food here, even packaged potato crisps (called “crisps” here because “chips” was taken) marked as “hot and spicy,” be ready for some real burn.  Even if you order your Chinese food in the US at the top of the heat scale, keep in mind that you’re only qualified for medium in the UK.  Brits like their hot food hot.

Another famous type of British food is the hot savory pie.  We learned at a historic food demonstration at Hampton Court Palace that this type of cooking dates from the Tudor era, where flour/water crusts were often used in place of baking dishes for stews.  Back then, the crust was just a wrapper to be thrown away.  Since then, it’s become an integral part of the dish.  Sometimes a pie has an entire crust, but often the stew is made in a baking crock with just rolled pastry over the top.

Steak and ale pie is everywhere.  However, Terran had a hankerin’ for steak and kidney pie.  This has turned out to be very, very hard to find.  We’ve checked dozens of pubs, and only one of them even advertised such a pie for sale.  When we asked, they were out.  Sigh.  So, a couple of weeks ago, Terran undertook a quest to bake is own.  He used lamb kidneys and did his research.  They turn out to be unintuitive and kind of difficult to prepare.  But the result was very good, and we’re going to make it again.

I, on the other hand, experimented with some Welsh cooking, inspired by our hike in Pembrokeshire.  Welsh cooking seems to be known for leeks, dairy, and bacon.  I tried a more modern recipe for a turkey and leek pie with a milk and whipped egg filling.  That was a lot of fun. It was a nice lighter contrast to the steak and kidney pie, which is nothing if not hearty.  I’ve also tried my hand at cream of leek and potato soup (with bacon).  This came out shockingly yummy.

I haven’t even touched on tea.

Tea the meal, which seems to fit in around 4pm between lunch and dinner, is something I can’t really figure out.  I’m simply not hungry for a pile of mostly carbohydrates at that time of the day, and if I skip lunch and try to go until 3pm, I’m likely to make myself sick.  And to be fair, we’ve read that formal tea is dying off in the UK anyway. That said, we’ve managed to make high tea work a few times, and it is so much fun that I’m sad that I can’t come up with any nutritional purpose for it.

I really like black tea with a bit of milk and sugar, and I liked it before I came here, so I fit right in.  Since coming here, I’ve sampled scones and clotted cream.  Clotted cream is a tasty and different pastry spread — basically cream cooked slowly until it congeals.  It has a flavor like light butter and a texture like cream cheese.  Scones are one of the few things I’ve eaten where I think you really need to go to a high-end pastry shop to get them.  The ones I’ve bought in the supermarket have, in my opinion, tasted awful, while the ones we’ve had at high tea have been wonderful.  I want to try cooking these myself.

Crumpets, on the other hand, seem to be great from the bargain counter in the grocery store. I picked a package up on a whim, and I really like them.  They’re like very holey English muffins, but much eggier.

If you’re hanging out at home, you are supposed to make your tea in an electric kettle.  We have one in the house, and it’s so convenient that I think I will look for one when we return.  We have a whistling kettle for the stove at home, but when you have company, it’s just so nice to bring the kettle into the room and plug it in so that people can serve themselves.

Oh, and off the tea theme, there’s cheese.  A lot of cheeses I think of as ordinary are hard to find here.  You can get emmentaler in the big grocery stores, but I haven’t seen any holey swiss.  On the other hand, cheddar expands from the orange block in the corner of the cheese counter to an entire way of life.  There are literally hundreds of different types of cheddar here, and most of them aren’t even orange.

In summary, this has been a great sabbatical for our food horizons.