Europe - August & September, 1997

8/17 - Over England

Well, I'm nearly back in Europe again, about an hour out from Amsterdam. I've been looking forward to this trip for a while now. Got 4 hours of sleep overnight so I think maybe I will be OK for getting thru the rest of the day without napping. That's always the key for me on coping with jet lag... get my biorythm on the local clock as soon as possible. I also took "No Jet Lag" pills every couple of hours. I'm not sure if they are placebos or what since the package does lists no ingredients, just marketing claims. But, what the hell, maybe it helps.

So anyway, it's Sunday morning in Holland & I will be here thru Friday night, then I meet Martha in England on Saturday AM. The weather is supposed to be pretty nice now. Not sure how I will spend the afternoon today, probably get freshened up & then get out & explore Holland a bit.

It is starting to look like my world traveling will be winding down going into next year. I will almost certainly be going to Asia in the next few weeks, possible twice before the end of the year. But 1998 is going to be the big push year for making sure that we are really ready for 2000. I had a project review with my boss this week & he made it clear that I will have to focus most of my efforts there. I had arranged for an outside consulting organization to review our program & while they validated what I've done so far, they were pretty clear in stating that this issue is too important to continue under part time leadership.

Well, we are about to land, so I will have to sign off & put this thing away. I'll write again later...

8/19 - Passage

I'm in a fine reverie. We just passed over the tip of Greenland & it brought to mind the note I wrote last year when I was returning from that 3 week marathon tour of Europe. I remember feeling blessed then & I feel even more so now. I was slightly sloshed then & I have had a couple beers plus wine with dinner so far this afternoon, so maybe it's only alcohol. But I don't think so.

Dad's parting was perfect. I feel like the last 2 or 3 years was just one long goodbye. I wasn't there at the end, but I was with him on his last vacation, his last Thanksgiving and his last birthday, all in the last 12 months. What more could you ask for? Not only that, but the way he left could hardly have been scripted better. No last agonizing illness, no pain, no long drawn out suffering. He even got to spend his last evening with his sister.

Which kind of brings me around to the real core thread of the reverie I have been immersed in for most of this flight: relationships. When you really examine what it is to be human, I think you have to conclude that it is relationships above all else that differentiates us from the rest of creation as we know it. We are all that we have. And life without the warmth of friends and family is nothing more than chopping wood and carrying water. We all have to do that in one way or another, but it is the relationships with our fellow travelers that makes it bearable at worst and sublime at best.

I've choked myself up numerous times today & writing about this has done it again. But I feel especially blessed in this aspect of my life. Both parents for more than 50 years. Close bonds with my sisters & daughters. A wife who is the embodiment of love. A best friend for nearly 40 years. We've never been especially open about sharing our feelings with each other, but I think we all know that there is a deep river of feeling uniting us under the surface. In a way, I almost feel that it trivializes it to talk about it too casually except at times like this.

Well, it's probably a good thing my battery is running low, or I might really get carried away. But I'm really glad I got this down because you guys are a big part of what makes my life special and I will have trouble expressing this to you when we are together.

8/26 - Wales

It's our second night in Wales & I decided I'd better catch up while things are still fresh. I enjoyed flying over Idaho on the first leg, good views of Sun Valley, the Sawtooths, the upper Snake area & the Tetons. Also passed right over Devil's Tower (the mountain in Close Encounters). We had a good flight over to London, except that I decided to ride in coach with Martha, so I got a refresher on why business class is so much better for these long flights. I can usually get half way comfortable & get at least a couple hours of sleep in business, but in those cramped coach seats I never did get settled enough for more than maybe 40 minutes of sleep total. But I took No Jet Lag again & it seemed like maybe it worked because I got through the whole day without getting too sleepy to function.

The weather so far has been pretty showery, both yesterday PM & this morning. Good old English rain. Keeps it so green, so we aren't complaining. We drove on up past Oxford & then cut over west through part of the Cotswolds so Martha could get an early dose of charm. Then down to South Wales, through Abergavenney & Pontypool. Called our hostess for directions to the first B&B: Up the hill through Trevethen, up Church Ave, then Lasgarn Lane for a mile & a half, most of which was single lane with high hedge rows on either side & occasional turnouts for passing cars coming head on. Through a farm gate, up over the top of the mountain for 3/4 mile on a "dirt track" which is near to requiring 4-wheel drive. Through a second gate & down the hill to a 16th century Welsh long house of stone on a spectacular hillside setting overlooking the Usk valley all the way to the Bristol Channel. Wow! Martha wanted charm & this place oozed charm. Later I asked our host about the massive beams in the house & he said that because oak was royal wood, the only way common folk could get beams like that was to scavenge them from ship wrecks, so that was probably where those came from. They did look "used" in that there were holes drilled in them here & there which had no apparent purpose.

We were grungy from the night on the plane & all day in the car plus suffering from serious jet lag by then, so we took a nap & then cleaned up for dinner at the B&B. Sue served us local salmon which was very tasty & while we were eating, Harold sat with us & started talking. I think he gets lonesome up there or maybe he just likes to talk. It was an interesting conversation. They are from Yorkshire, not Welsh at all, & Harold is both opinionated and cynical. He looked like an oversize leprechaun. He was going on about how it was useless to bother with Welsh & a waste of tax money to make all the signs in Wales bilingual. He didn't seem interested in other opinions on the subject, so I didn't get a chance to point out that a lot of what feeds the tourist industry in Wales (including him) is the cultural diversity that you still find there. Had breakfast with a nice older couple also staying there who were from Zimbabwe.

We slept really well. You can imagine how peaceful it was up on that hillside. This morning we stopped by Caerphilly, one of the most spectacular of the great Welsh castles. Didn't take the tour because we had a fair number of miles to cover, but I walked around it & took some pics. Then we spent the rest of the day getting up to the north coast. The roads are very much like Ireland, although in general in better repair & wider. But they wind through the hills a lot & along the coast, so you can't make very good time, but there is a lot of wonderful scenery. Once you get out of the industrial south, most of Wales is pretty unspoiled with much natural beauty. Most of the towns are small & picturesque. We enjoyed trying to make out the Welsh place names & noticed that the further north we got, the fewer English place names there seemed to be. We found a Welsh language radio station so Martha could hear what the language sounds like, sounded just like Irish to me.

We got to Conwy about 6 only to find out that the booking service I used had somehow dropped the ball & we had no place to stay in Conwy or as it turned out anywhere very close to Conwy. This weekend happens to be the last bank holiday (ie, national holiday) of the summer & I think Conwy is kind of the Brighton of the north for all the people of Manchester, Liverpool & Birmingham. So all the B&Bs were full. We got a tip to go to LLandudno & did manage to find a room here, possibly the last room in North Wales. Kind of a third grade hotel among a whole row of similar places along the promenade. Charming it ain't, but at least it's close to the sea.

We are both fighting colds that we picked up on the flight over. Kind of a drag, but so far it hasn't cramped our style too much. Tomorrow we will take the scenic route out of North Wales, jam past Manchester & Liverpool as fast as we can & make our way into the Lake Country in the north of England. It should be a relatively easy leg. Not sure when I will be able to send this to you because the Brits wire their phones backward from the rest of the world & I don't have an adapter. Oh well...

8/28 - Lakes

Well, we came through our colds OK & are still on our planned itinerary. Second night in the Lake district, actually Southlakes, since we are down in the very southwest corner of Cumbria. Kind of out of the way for touring the lakes, but it is nice being on the coast & the B&B is qiite nice. A 19th century manor with a lot of nice architectural detail, especially on the inside, with elaborate ceiling mouldings, nice treatments, etc. Nice couple from Surrey run this one. We thought it was kind of interesting that our host in South Wales is from northern England & our host here in the north is from the south. We are in the cute little stone village of Silecroft about 1/4 mile from the beach. Tonight it clouded up & now there is a wind howling around the windows, like something is blowing in off the Irish Sea. Yesterday & today were mostly sunny with mild breezes & lots of billowy clouds, so we have had some good weather. Hope it's not too crummy tomorrow.

After we left Wales, we jammed by the industrial belt of Manchester & Liverpool as fast as we could. Didn't see much of it from the M6, but that's just as well. Although I kind of wanted to soak up a bit of Beatle history while we were in the neighborhood. Didn't even see a sign indicating that we were crossing the Mersey but the signs to Blackburn, Lancashire, brought to mind all those holes...

We really love the Lakes. Yesterday we drove into the middle of the district to get a first taste. Had a "memorable meal" at a country hotel we found near here on the way back. Then today we drove around the whole area, passing several of the prettiest lakes and stopping at some of the interesting towns. This area really has a storybook quality to it. There is a lot of variation: soft wooded hills, stark rocky peaks, shimmering lakes, quaint villages & windy roads. Frequently the highway will narrow to a single lane while it winds between a house & barn, or though a village. Stone is by far the most common building material & most of it is slate, either charcoal or olive green in color. There are whole mountains of slate both here & in north Wales. It is used for fencing too, with drystone slate walls snaking across hill & dale everywhere. Both of us like the rustic stone construction techniques used here.

Of course everywhere in these parts you find Wordsworth & Beatrix Potter, the two most famous people from this area. Wordsworth seems to have lived in half of the towns in the district & now each has a museum or monument & they all sell Wordsworth memorabilia. Likewise with Potter... Every town has a Peter Rabbit store.

Another interesting thing is the obvious Viiking influence in this area. A lot of the place names are based on Scandinavian words. One of the most common is places that end in thwaite. We looked it up. It means meadow or paddock, basically a place to graze sheep. So it also speaks to the importance of shepherding during the formative years of the district.

We're going to spend part of tomorrow going back thru the center of the district again, then on down to the Peaks, just south of Manchester...

9/4 - Catching Up

Wow, I think it has been more than a week since I last wrote. I left us in the Lakes... It seemed like there was just something almost every day that kept us out late or made me too tired to sit down & write. The last night in the Lakes as we were going to dinner the muffler fell off our Alfa coup! So the next day we had to stop at the nearest decent sized town & get that taken care of after stopping at one last Wordsworth site. That ended up taking 3 hours, so it was late when we got to the Peak district. After that we seemed to be running into lots of traffic things like an hour crawl on the London Orbital (beltway) on the way to Winchester & more in Holland I'll cover later. Plus my cold came back & by last Saturday I had a raging sinus infection that nearly knocked me out for the weekend (the flight to Amsterdam was hell). I got some antibiotics Monday & am pretty well by now. Anyway, that's why you haven't had a follow up...

So anyway, we really like the Lakes & will be certain to include it on any future trip that gets us to the north of England. We also liked Derbyshire (the Peak district), but a shade less maybe. We stayed at a nice B&B run by an older couple in a really typical village in the heart of the area. The hills in that area are not quite as dramatic as those in the Lakes & overall the area is more settled. One thing it has going for it is a lot of the great "country houses" , ie, manors & estates like Chatsworth. Huge homes of the old nobility on great park-like grounds. We stopped by one, but didn't take the tour; $15 seemed like too much. While in the Peaks we got a pretty good dose of Pride & Prejudice in terms of identifying some of the filming areas for the BBC series & seeing a couple of the carriages used in the production. We also met the horses that drew Darcy & Elizabeth's coach (Rudi & Robert). Seems like this was an "authors" trip, since besides Potter & Wordsworth we had a heavy dose of Austen. In addition to the Derbyshire stuff, we also went to her home near Winchester, saw the house where she spent her final days & stopped at her grave marker in the floor of Winchester Cathedral.

After finally getting to Winchester the next nigt, we couldn't find any B&Bs. Drove around the outlying area for nearly an hour & never saw a single sign. It must be only place in England with so few. It was getting late & we saw a sign to a country hotel so we went in. Turned out to be a 5 star hotel in a converted "country house". It was really elegant; they had a room that was probably going to go unrented so I got them to give us a single rate, but it was still something like $150. We decided we couldn't afford to eat there, so we went out & then got lost getting back. Took us about 2 hours & we finally had to get directions. So it was after 1 AM when we got in. Next day we did the cathedral (imagine a church that has been in daily use for 900 years!) & walked around the old part of Winchester, then did our laundry before moving on to a smaller town where we had reserved a hotel for the night on the way to Salisbury, our next stop.

That was Romsey & we stayed at a hotel right in the middle of town. It was like an inn, with a pub downstairs, built in half-timbered style. It was kind of neat to experience that side of England too. We toured their abbey in the morning (quite large & old for such a small town). Then we went on to Salisbury & toured the cathedral there. It is very impressive in a number of ways: it has the tallest tower & spire in England (I think over 400 feet) & it was built in under 50 years in a single continuous effort, so it has a unity of style that no other major cathedral in Europe has. Most were built over a couple of centuries & the changing of styles is often reflected in various wings, etc. Then we went to Stonehenge. I had seen it before, but only from outside the fence. This time I took the tour & listened to the audio guide. I learned a few things I didn't know before. We ended the day's touring at Jane Austen's house which we had to find by going to a town we found mentioned in a reference somewhere & looking for signs. Getting to the town was neat because there was no major route from Stonehenge, so we took a series of very scenic secondary roads (some not well signed at all) & by kind of dead reckoning finally got there. Martha toured the house while I had tea. I got in the habit of afternoon tea pretty much everyday in England. I like it.

Then we went on to our B&B not far from the Gatwick airport & settled in for our last night. I was feeling pretty poorly by then. When we got up Sunday morning it was to the news that Princess Di had just been pronounced dead a few hours before. It was a shock to everyone that heard about it. The morning papers only had the news that she had been injured, then the extra editions came out & they were a hot item at the airport. It was big on TV all week.

Like I said, the Amsterdam flight was miserable because of the intense sinus pressures from the altitude. We had planned to tour Holland for at least a couple hours in the afternoon, but I was so rocky we just headed for our hotel. I had arranged one in the heart of the old city so it would be convenient for showing Martha around, but it turned out that Sunday was the day of an annual festival and we literally could not get to the hotel because of the throngs of pedestrians & bicyclists that got more an more dense as we got closer to the center. After 3 attempts to find a way in I gave up & we checked in to a hotel back out near the airport. It is also close to the office here, so that was another reason for coming here. We went out for dinner & to avoid traffic went to Haarlem, a nearby small city that is really kind of a mimi-Amsterdam. We had a nice dinner at an outdoor sidewalk cafe & then wouldn't you know it got stuck in a 40 minute jam coming back to the hotel caused by repaving of the motorway.

Second night we headed the other way, east, into a fairly rural area. Stopped & dhedked out a windmill, went out about 20 miles or so then came back & found a nice place for din still about 15 miles out. Coming back after a very good meal, about 10 miles away, you guessed it... jammed again. Traffic on the highway (equivalent to a US highway, not an interstate) came to a dead halt. After 20 minites of going nowhere we decided going anywhere was preferable, so we turned off on a country lane & headed into the dark & rain with hope & a full tank of gas. We zigged & zagged, tried a few dead ends, saw the road narrow to one lane & continue out on a dike so we had water on both sides with no shoulders (lucky we never met anyone coming the other way). We just kept going, turning where it seemed to feel right as long as it was generally west or north. Finally we found a sign which pointed to a village I recognized from having seen it on the highway. We were somewhere! Then we found a sign pointing to Amsterdam. Hurrah! We finally made it to one of the motorways & although it wasn't direct to the airport area, I knew how to get there. I made a joke: "They called him Pathfinder; Jerry the Navigator." But of course there had to be one more obstacle. Our exit was closed due to the afore-mentioned paving project, so we had to go another 10 miles to the next exit & come back. Our time to cover the 15 miles from the restaurant to the hotel approached 2 hours! Next night we ate at the hotel. No more adventures. And the following morning I saw Martha off on her homeward journey.

We had a lot of fun despite the obstacles along the way. We saw pretty much everything we had planned, enjoyed quite a variety of people & places for so short a trip & spent probably half again what I had planned. But it was great. Work this week went well... All major objectives accomplished. This is a good group over here & I have always enjoyed working with them.

I'm disappointed in Tim though. I left him in charge of the 49ers & Giants while I was gone & he has shirked his duty! There is no joy in SF just now. I checked CNN sports on the web today (my first look since I left Boise) & found that not only have the Giants surrendered first, The '9ers lost (to the Buccaneers! for the first time in almost 20 years!), Steve Young has another concussion & Jerry Rice is out with a bad knee injury. Woe!

9/5 - Baffin Bay

It's time for my Arctic Circle coming home note again. For some reason our great circle route today is farther north than I ever remember before. We went across the heart of Greenland, but is was under cloud cover except the west coast. Now we are over Baffin Island & it is really lovely, clear as far as I can see, which in some places is clear to the Arctic Ocean. Lots of snow clad peaks and icy blue fjords with red-brown shores, big ice flows out on the larger bodies of water.

I haven't had as much to drink this time, since I had a lot of email to work on. There is no end of work I could be doing but a guy has to get a break some time. So anyway, I may not get quite so carried away with personal emotions as I did the last couple of times I wrote from this vantage point.

In reflecting on this trip, more than anything it just seems a lot longer than 3 weeks since I left home. Of course the Boise leg added to that both in terms of emotional energy & in the 2 transatlantic flights in so few days and the subsequent jet lag which it seems like I just finally got over. Of course now I have to get unlagged yet again. Those long touring days in England seemed like more than 8 days too. We covered 1600 miles. I don't even want to think about how much time we spent sitting in traffic. The trip could have been even longer since I was requested to go to Ireland for a day. But it would have been a hell of a day, fly after work in Holland to Dublin, drive to Conmel (2 or 3 hrs) & spend the night, probably arriving after 10. Then driving back to Dublin after work the next day & spending the night, again getting in late. Then catching a 7 AM leg back to Amsterdam to hook up with my return to SFO which I would have delayed a day. Given my fragile health right now, I just bagged it. I spent some time on the phone with Murphy in Clonmel yesterday PM; best I could do. I am really glad to be heading home.

The next several weeks are going to be very busy at home with getting the house project wrapped up. Also at work with more travel in the offing & 2 major corporate projects entering critical phases.