REFLECTIONS

I feel an urge, an obligation really, to finish up the posts about our Great Britain trip before the end of December.  I turn these blog posts into  physical book form, a sort of memoir, of each year.  I don't know who will ever read them; for now they line my bookshelf. I fantasize my grandchildren might one day find them after I am gone and will learn something about Grandma and her life.  Or they may get tossed away in the grand 'cleaning out' that inevitably happens at the old family home at some point.  At any rate, I forge ahead and  I want to get the trip documentation in under the 2018 deadline.  

The problem is I'm still having a hard time processing the whole thing.  I have snippets of memories and tons of digital photos I've skimmed through, but find the task of studying them and organizing them rather daunting.  I want to create a slide show as well as a hardbound photo book.  I wonder when that will happen?  Procrastination has been my go-to decision lately.  So until then I find the details of the trip hard to tease out of the impressions of the whole.

Still, as Christmas approaches I find myself conjuring images of Britain as the quintessential Christmas scene -- the winding narrow cobblestone streets of Scotland's Edinburgh and Oban, Wales' Conwy, and England's Bath and York, lined with shops, restaurants, pubs, and inns.  (Every one of which had advertisements about booking holiday meals and  get-aways even when we were there in September.)  I can imagine the sparkling lights, Christmas trees, and festive decor.  I see the soaring cathedrals, robed priests, angelic choirs -- all of which I am sure are now adorned for and anticipating Christmas worship.  I see the hustle and bustle international hub of London brightly lit and busy as ever as a meeting place of cultures and languages and religions gathered in one place, creating a holiday season of rich diversity.  I imagine all those places colder, wetter, and less crowded when we were there; more true to themselves.

I wrote about the trip immediately upon returning home with less than stellar reviews of my experience.  With time I have mellowed and have started to find more and more access to what I loved about it.  I recall the experience now with fondness and with rich, happy memories.  I never negate the challenges life throws at me, but I almost always (eventually) find a way to embrace those aspects of any situation that help me to grow, learn, and find joy in the experience too.

Hub and I were watching a Rick Steves "Christmas in Europe" special the other night and I even allowed as to how I might actually entertain another Rick Steves tour.   Hub was shocked.  I told him this time I would know exactly what to expect, how to navigate the rough spots, and to focus more on the positives than the negatives, knowing the negatives will pass and the positives will prevail in memory.

For now, we are content with planning some in-country travel in 2019, but flirting with the idea of doing one of those Viking River cruises, that I see on PBS, in 2020.   To even find myself at the point of not only considering this, but feeling not even a hint of anxiety about actually doing it, demonstrates my Britain trip this year was a huge success.  I've turned a corner.  I still may not be a world adventurer, but at least I'm willing to leave the confines of the county -- and country -- with my travel anxiety mostly in the rearview mirror.  Bon Voyage!

At least, that's the view from here...©
(I think you can click on the photos to get a larger image.
TOP to BOTTOM: 1. Edinburgh, 2. The Sheep's Heid Inn (Duddingston,Scotland),  3.Bath, 4. York, 5. Wells Cathedral, 6. Conwy (Wales), 7. Trifalger Square, London

CASTLES, CATHEDRALS, AND MARTIN LUTHER

I was watching a Rick Steves visit to Germany show last night on TV -- back to armchair traveling -- and now I've checked that country off my must see list.  Thanks, Rick.

Anyway, he focused a bit on Martin Luther and his famous Reformation.  Hub grew up in a family of Germany-descendents who were conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran teachers and preachers, so he's well-versed in all things Lutheran and, by marriage, so am I.   Instead of dressing up for Halloween every year, Hub and his classmates at his Lutheran elementary school had to watch a grainy old film about Martin Luther and the Reformation, since Reformation Day is also on October 31.  (Hub still harbors resentment about this and suffers from a bit of PTSD.  His school was a stern place, apparently.  And to think at that very same moment I was dressed as a witch gobbling down orange-frosted cupcakes! Heathen public school Methodist!)

Luther was a young monk who was troubled by the Catholic church's selling of indulgences (buying your way out of Purgatory) and other shady religion-focused business practices, so on October 31, 1517 he jotted down his thoughts on the matter and tacked them to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany hoping to stimulate discussion amongst his monk colleagues.  Today he would have posted his thoughts online and been hailed a hero and/or inundated with trolls freaking out.  Well, actually that's sort of what happened anyway.   Luther got some good comments and felt emboldened.  He decided that he'd write the Bible in German so everyone could read it, not just Latin-scholar priests.  He teamed up with a new operating system, called the Gutenberg printing press, and got his German bibles widely distributed.  The people read them and came to realize a bunch of stuff the Church had been telling them wasn't even in the Bible at all!  No mention of the Pope or indulgences or any of that stuff.  His 95 Theses went viral and pretty soon a whole new thing called "Protestantism" was born. The Catholics were not happy.

Which brings me to my recent trip to Great Britain.  (The travelogue continues...)

Our Scottish tour guide joked that people often tire of the non-stop tours of cathedrals and castles.  At the beginning of the trip I couldn't imagine this.  That's what we came to see!!! By the end of the trip I totally got the point.

We saw some absolutely beautiful architecture and the artistic creativity was jaw-dropping.  The ruins of old cathedrals was moving and inspiring.  The art historian in me was in awe.

But the stories we heard over and over and over, were stories of Protestants and Catholics fighting over who was in charge.  Kings and Queens were on the throne or killed off or married off in fits of rage and/or alliances mostly having to do with which religion they practiced.  Places and artifacts of tremendous beauty were destroyed to wipe out any recollection of what had come before in waves of "my turn" changing of power between the religions.  It became grotesque to hear these stories of war, murder, and punishment all carried out in the name of "religion".  If I have to hear one more graphic description of what it means to be "drawn and quartered" I might scream.

So, it came to pass that as I entered a new cathedral or castle on the itinerary, I steeled myself for the stories of death and destruction and power-brokering that went along with the view.  Both of us began to notice that all the lead roles were played by men, or by women who were used in the service of men to get the power they craved.  The patriarchy upon which our historical and religious culture is based was on full display as tourists oohed and ahhed at each stop.  I started to feel depressed that this is our heritage.  I started to long for a different history.

Where were the peacemakers?  The women?  The artisans who saw their masterpieces turned to rubble?   I have always known that history is written by the victor, but I felt that fact viscerally on our trip.    We both sort of rolled our eyes eventually and tuned out the litany of war upon war and the ridiculous religious one-upmanship on display.  We appreciated instead the amazing human ingenuity and creativity of these beautiful places and honored those who toiled to design, build, and decorate something they thought would last.

There has to be another story under the one that we have been taught, because humans seeking power through death and destruction don't really seem to win the day.  We are still here.  There must be a current of a life-affirming energy running through humanity too.   Let's tap in to that.  Let's learn from that.  Let's honor that.

Oh wait....now we're getting to the heart of my religion, the one that celebrates compassion, inclusion, diversity, open-mindedness, hope, humility, laughter, generosity.  I read somewhere that Jesus talked about that stuff but, not being a practicing Christian, I might have that wrong.

At least, that's the view from here...©

Photos:
Top -- Ruins of St. Andrews Cathedral, St. Andrews Scotland
Bottom -- York Minster Cathedral, York England

HAGGIS & SWEETS

Before our trip I had lost about 12 pounds following the Weight Watchers points system. It's easy!  It works!  I also took some dance classes at the Y, a strength training class, and my usual yoga practice.  I was in a groove of healthfulness and felt great.

Then we left town, and our routines, behind.  The only thing that saved me from gaining more than the three pounds I gained on the 5-week trip was the amount of daily walking we did -- over 200 miles in total; about 6 miles/day.

Breakfast was provided every morning on the tours.   I didn't want to fill up on pancakes, and the eggs, I'm sorry Britain, were always too runny for my taste.  "Traditional" Scottish and English breakfasts include lots of meat, which I don't eat except for the occasional chicken dish and Thanksgiving turkey, so that was out.

But let me say a word here about haggis.  In Scotland, haggis is always on the menu, and it is part of the traditional breakfast.  I swore I would not go anywhere near it; would NOT put even the smallest taste into my mouth.  But....I did.   Our first night in Edinburgh we found a local pub and Hub dove right in and ordered the Haggis, Neeps and Tatties (mashed turnips and mashed potatoes).  I ordered the lentil cottage pie -- a lentil mixture with mashed sweet potato topping. So good!

Here is the Wikipedia definition of haggis, if you are unfamiliar:  Haggis is a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver, and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and cooked while traditionally encased in the animal's stomach though now often in an artificial casing instead.

On the plate it didn't look too gross, so I took a small forkful and found it savory and flavorful and not at all disgusting.  Still, being full of organ meat was a bit of a turn off for this 95% non-meat eater, so that was my one and only foray into the Scottish delicacy.  Hub enjoyed it with most of his breakfasts.

I hit up the Continental breakfast buffets instead and found so many favorites!  Danish!  Croissants!  Pain au chocolat!  Toasts and jams!  Bran flakes (which for some reason are a binge food for me, and binge I did!)  I also ate oatmeal, yogurt, fruit, and nuts, which sounds healthy in normal qualities.  We won't talk about my quantities.

Lunches were on-the-go affairs, rushed in restaurants, so we took to stealing breads and cheeses (and another croissant and a few mini-pastries) from the breakfast buffet to build our own take-along sandwiches and treats, along with an apple (healthy!), and copious numbers of Shortbread cookies -- which became a bit of an obsession.  Also, our nicer hotels provided "snacks" mainly consisting of chocolates that we hoarded in our "treat bag" in my daypack.

Dinners were plentiful, delicious, and unconcerned with caloric intake, but with rarely a salad in sight!  Our English tour guide said salads were traditionally considered "poor man's food" and if you were rich and/or wanted to impress guests, you served meat! Greens were an insult. I'm not sure why this tradition continues in most restaurants.  Salad is healthy!  Still, I was grateful for the variety of vegetarian main dish options, even if no salads.

Most deadly for me, however, was that every single dinner came with a delectable dessert.  Two local favorites became my faves too:  Eton Mess and Sticky Toffee Pudding.  OMG!

Eton mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, broken meringue, and whipped double cream.

Sticky toffee pudding is a British dessert consisting of a very moist sponge cake, made with finely chopped dates, covered in a toffee sauce and often served with a vanilla custard or vanilla ice-cream.

But even if those weren't on the menu, there were brownies, ice cream, cakes, pies....let me just say I fell off the low-sugar wagon big time.  BIG TIME!

So I swore to get back on Weight Watchers when I returned and get back on my yoga and YMCA schedule.  Good intentions have been thwarted by jet-lag, illness, conflicting commitments, sloth, and sort of an "I don't want to" near-depression blues that has been winning the battle between good and evil.

Now I tell myself that November 7 is my start-over date.  I will have been home for a month, plenty of time to recover, and the mid-term election will be over.  Win or lose I will have to be in good shape for what comes next.  2020 is just around the corner -- the year my younger son will be married and the presidential election is held.  Let the goal-setting commence; a year should be long enough.

At least, that's the view from here...©

Photo Credit: Alamay and  BBC.com

BROKEN

That trip might have broken me.  Going into it I knew I'd face two big challenges:  too long away from home and too many people/socializing.  My introvert NEEDS quiet, alone, downtime between socializing and "going and doing".  And I'm really a homebody with no enormous desire to see the world, although there are some things I'd like to see and do if I could see and do them in an afternoon.  So I entered into the plan for 5 weeks in Great Britain with this trepidation: I might get homesick and suffer a bit from "too many people" burn out.  Well, that was an underestimation.

We started with 4 days in Illinois to attend a 3-day extravaganza of activities to celebration Hub's Class of '68 50th high school reunion.  I was only one year behind Hub so I know all those people too.  It was interesting/fun/tedious.  And frankly it was shocking to see how all those people had aged so much more than Hub and me.  Sad.  😉

Then we hopped a red-eye 747 from Chicago to Edinburgh for the first of our two scheduled tours.  Met the tour director who was a hoot; a woman about our age, native Scot, and full of fun and vitality and interesting stories to tell to enhance our trip.  The other 24 tour-mates were also very nice people; a few quiet ones, a few partiers.   But we didn't go to make lifelong friends, and since we like each other's company a lot, we didn't go out of our way to socialize at every opportunity.  Still....we basically all lived and ate and traveled together for the 10 day tour of Scotland.  Saw some cool things.  (Later blog post.)

When that tour was over, we had exactly 2 days to regroup before meeting our next tour director and tour group in Bath, England for our Best of England and North Wales tour.  One of those in between days was spent with a dear friends who live near Edinburgh who took us to cool, non-touristy places and cooked us a home-cooked meal in their lovely country cottage.  Highlight.  The other day was a flight and bumpy bus ride to Bath.

The new tour group was, shall we say, less vivacious.  And the tour guide rather dour.   We were already tired, wishing we'd only scheduled one tour, and sort of counting the days until it was all over.  We steeled ourselves for what we now knew was ahead -- a nonstop itinerary and living with a new group of people.  We were at this point embarking on a 14 day tour, with 5 days alone in London tacked on to the end.  We had barely begun.

We ended up learning that our tour mates were pleasant enough folks, but the tour guide never did win us over and in fact began to grate on us to the point we mostly tried to ignore him.  He added very little to the information we could read in a guide book.  He had a lot of rules.  We felt reprimanded at times which started us to giggling.  We ended up sitting in the back of the bus binging on shortbread cookies and making fun of him.  Small rebellions.  Saw some cool things.  (Later blog post.)

When that tour was finally, thankfully over, we still had our 5 days in London.  We moved to the luxe hotel we'd scheduled to pamper ourselves and sprung for an even better room -- a suite.  We were so relieved to be finally, blissfully alone.  But I was still homesick, having missed my granddaughters' first day of school, her birthday, her father's (our son's)birthday, and her parent's (our son and daughter in law's) wedding anniversary and likely a million things our other son and his girlfriend were up to.  We kept up with headlines, but gratefully missed the minutiae of the Kavanaugh debacle.  I worried about my garden and whether my friends would remember or recognize me.  I posted daily photos and trip updates to FB (when I had WiFi) to help me remember what we were seeing and doing because it all became a blur.

It really was a whirlwind.  Never enough time to truly ground in any one experience before we were on to the next.  The pace was not our pace.  Active extroverts had a blast.  Introspective introverts got tired.

I was so happy to arrive home!  But it was also disorienting to realize we'd left the end of August when it was still summer and returned in early October in autumn with darkness descending by 6:30 p.m.  I was jet lagged, fighting a head cold, enduring a cluster of every few days migraines, totally exhausted and feeling like I'd never find my equilibrium again.

I am improving but, after two weeks home, still not back 100%.  A friend who traveled to Poland this past summer for an extended stay told me it took him and his wife a month to recover.  I'm half way there.

It feels so incredibly disingenuous to complain when we know we are blessed by the opportunity to have taken this trip.  We saw and did and experienced; learned and grew.  We are truly grateful and with time will be more appreciative and joyful about the experience.  We have about 2000 photos to remind us of all we've forgotten in the blur.  Still, the fact remains:  I'm a homebody and an introvert and next time (there's a hopeful note!) I'll do it differently.

At least, that's the view from here....©

SKIP TO THE LOO

I just got back from five weeks of travel in England, Scotland, and Wales.  I'll have plenty to write about for awhile, but let's start with the restrooms.

Between the tours we took, and the time on our own in London, I believe I visited most of the public restrooms in Great Britain.

First, never call them "restrooms".  If you do, people may do their best to accommodate you by referring you to a place that lets rooms with a bed -- to rest upon.  What we euphemistically call "restrooms", the Brits call out in plain language, "toilets".   It is perfectly polite to inquire, "Where's the toilet?"  Signs everywhere show the way to the Gents and Ladies TOILET.  If you want to be fancy, you can say lavatory, which has been charmingly shortened to "loo".  Our Scotland tour guide would assure us that at several points throughout any given day we'd have ample opportunity on our stops to "Skip to the Loo".

In the US it is sort of a crap shoot (hahahahaha) as to the cleanliness of any given facility.  Not so in Britain, at least in the places I visited which were mostly touristy spots, but still.  They could easily have become degenerate given the high volume traffic they accommodate, but almost without exception they were sparkling clean and fresh-smelling.  The glaring exceptions were one Starbucks and one McDonald's where Hub and I used the facilities in a pinch.  I don't know what that says, or maybe I do.  These are American establishments.  We need to clean up our act!

The British loos were well-maintained, well lit, clean, and sanitary.  There were none of those fastidious paper toilet seat covers, but I never felt I shouldn't put bum skin to seat anyway.  And if I did (hello Starbucks) I merely did the squat and hover thing women have learned to do, and was grateful for my exercise routine that keeps my thighs muscular and my balance steady.

What I loved most about the stalls was how private they were.  None of those open at the top and bottom doors that barely offer a private moment; these were like little rooms!  Full doors that when closed provided a cozy toilet room with no one peaking under or potentially over.  How did you know if they were occupied?  When you closed the always working, never broken latch, the outside showed a red indicator; available showed green.  (Like we see on those gross port-a-potties here.)

Hand washing was a bit of risk, however.  I never learned why but the hot water tap is turned up to boil all over Britain.  Signs warning of VERY HOT WATER were to be taken seriously.  So if you go, be sure to be cautious and get some cold water mixed in, which can be a bit of a chore given that there is often a two faucet set up -- one for scalding hot and one for icy cold.  Many, thankfully, were a one faucet (automatic sensor) set up that provided water that didn't take your skin off.  Another thing that keeps the loos cleaner is that I almost never saw a paper towel dispenser anywhere.  All hand drying is done with those blow drier things on the walls.  I generally get impatient with those and end up wiping my wet hands on my pants, but they did cut down on waste and clutter.

The photo I'm including is from probably the best public toilet, but not by much.  Most were great.  This one is from the Tower of London just outside the Royal Crown Jewels exhibit, so they have a high standard to meet.  You will note that this one has a bit less than the fully enclosed toilet room I described above, but still pretty private and very stylish.

I had hoped to get shots of more loos, but most of the time they were jammed with other tourists, and whipping out a camera would have just seemed creepy.

At least, that's the view from here....©