We in the United States do not have a great sense of long history; it has not sunk down and become part of who we are. We celebrate historic buildings built in 1901 and put up “History happened here!” signs celebrating the dedication of a “History happened here!” sign in 1965, and these are fine – I find them interesting.

Then you hit Europe. Where the oldest operating synagogue in all of Europe, built around 1290, is known as (really), “the Old New Synagogue.” Since there was an even older synagogue around when the newer one was built, it became the New Synagogue. Then, after a few hundred years, it became the Old New Synagogue. When your “new” synagogue is over seven hundred years old, you have some history behind you.

After a too-early wake-up alarm around 7:15 am, on day two of jet lag, we had breakfast and then went to the old city, to the old Jewish quarter, where we met up with a Jewish tour guide and three other Americans for a three-plus-hour walk through the remains of the Jewish neighborhood of Prague.

I say “what remains” because in the 1860s, Jews were granted full citizenship rights by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a larger part of concessions to minority groups to help quell rebellions. Since Jews were no longer required to live in a segregated neighborhood, the wealthy families moved out into the larger city, leaving the area to the Jewish poor, and later the poor in general. By 1900, the area was a slum, and the city razed most of it to make way for new buildings. They did leave a few synagogues and the old Jewish cemetery behind, as well as a few other important buildings.

We started at the Old New Synagogue, which is an Orthodox congregation. That means, in part, that women are segregated from the men who sit in a rectangle around the cantor who chants the service. The women watch and listen through small windows in the interior walls. I was surprised at how small the main room is – about the size of a large school classroom. It is also a reminder of how much time has passed that to get into the synagogue, you need to go down four or five steps; the synagogue was build at street level, meaning that the surrounding area has been built up that much over seven hundred years. And yet as recently as 2002, the building and environs were flooded by the Vltava River up to three or four feet deep.

We next visited Maisel Synagogue, which is no longer an active place of worship, but instead is a museum that tells the story of Jews in the Czech region. Many of the objects were given to the Prague Jewish community for safekeeping ahead of serious persecution during World War II. There was an excellent computer-animated movie of how the old Jewish quarter looked in the 1880s; a librarian made an accurate 3-D paper model of the city of Prague at the time, and remarkably, the model still survives, and became the basis for this short film.

We went on to Pinkas Synagogue, which is also no longer active. Instead, it has been turned into a very moving memorial to the almost eighty thousand Czech Jews who were murdered in camps by the Nazis. The name of every known victim is neatly handwritten on the walls of the building, while recorded voices quietly read the names of the dead over speakers. In addition, there was a small room filled with artwork drawn by children at a holding camp called Terezin. The children were allowed to have an art class, and some of the teachers hid the work safely away. It is hard to imagine the life the children led that brought them to draw things like being thrown out of school, or drawing a hanging of a Jewish man, or drawing pictures of the trains that took people away. It was at this synagogue that we learned that the Nazis required local Jewish leaders to pick which Jews would be rounded up; the Nazis asked for a certain number, and then the local council had to provide that many Jews. It was chillingly cruel.

Pinkas exits though the old Jewish cemetery from around 1400 to1700. There are something like twelve thousand headstones, but an estimated forty thousand people are buried there, as people were buried on top of older graves because of space constraints. Somehow, this cemetery was left alone by both the Nazis and the Communists.

The last synagogue we visited was Klausen Synagogue, which now houses a museum explaining Jewish holidays and traditions. I know a fair amount about Jewish holidays and customs from the Bible, but there are a lot of extra-Biblical traditions that exist. For instance, I had no idea there was a “Days of Sorrow” centered on remembering the destroyed temple from 70 AD and the one before that in 570 BC. It would be an interesting place to visit when we have more time someday.

We finished the now-almost-four-hour tour by walking to a statue commemorating Franz Kafka, and then on to seeing the outside of the Spanish Synagogue, which is under renovation for almost two years. Our guide showed us pictures from inside, and it is beautiful – heavily decorated in the Moorish style of geometrical shapes with bright colors.

The tour was very good, and our guide was very patient with all of our questions. It was a morning well spent, even on only a few hours’ sleep.

Since it was almost 2:00, we walked over to near the Charles Bridge, where we had lunch in a small coffee shop. Refreshed by food and rest, we walked back to the bridge, where we climbed the tower on the Old Town side of the bridge. It is a solid climb up about 150 stairs, but the views of the old town, the bridge, and Prague Castle were all worth it. In addition, I’m usually terrified of heights, but the windows that looked out from the ramparts were high enough that I felt safe.

The forecast had called for rain all day today, but we had only been rained on for short periods during our walking tour. It began to rain as we crossed the bridge to the castle-side tower, where we climbed up that one as well. That tower was much less crowded than the twin across the bridge; I’m not sure if it was because of the rain or because the crowds seem to hang out on the Old Town side of the bridge. Either way, it made for a pleasant viewing platform, even in the light rain. We retreated inside the tower for a few minutes when I saw some nearby lightning, but that passed, so we went back outside.

We walked back across the bridge and headed back into the Old Town. It rained hard for a few minutes along the way, but then stopped for the rest of the evening. Having a total of about twenty minutes of rain in a whole day of touring was a real blessing when we thought it was going to rain all day.

We jumped on the number 22 tram to take a scenic ride up to the castle area. Sitting while touring was a welcome change. We got off near the top of the hill to wander in a quiet neighborhood area, where we only saw four or five people, none of whom seemed to be tourists.

We took the same tram back to the center, where we ate a quick meal at a sandwich shop on the main shopping drag. It was not quaint, but it was getting late, and it seemed like a good idea to get back to our hostel to try to get a full night’s sleep – I’m in charge tomorrow, and of course I only have vague ideas of what we might do. I’ll need to sleep on it.

In the past, I have left as early as twelve hours before a flight was scheduled to take off – five hours to get to Toronto, three hours before an international flight, and then I left four hours of “squishy” time for traffic, food stops, border crossing, etc. After getting to the airport ridiculously early several times, I tried to aim for eleven hours, but we left late, so we actually left ten hours before takeoff. We skipped food (because of the early evening flight, we were just going to have lunch in the airport), breezed through the border, and hit no real traffic. As such, we were sitting at the gate three full hours before the flight took off. Which was then delayed twenty minutes. Meredith is pushing for nine hours for the next Toronto-based trip. She likes to live wildly.

The flight was uneventful, but the trip from the airport to our hostel was not so easy. Mer waited until we were waiting for the bus to tell me we needed to take the bus to a certain stop to transfer to the Metro. Fair enough. That we would take to a stop to transfer to another line. Okay. Which would take us to a stop where we would go up to street level, to catch a tram. In a city in which we had not traveled before, with signs in Czech, while jet-lagged. What could go wrong?

It actually was not too bad – we did struggle a bit with trying to figure out which direction of tram we should take, but Mer saw a famous church spire that got us fixed on the map, and we headed away from it toward our hostel. Never mind that it turned out to be the wrong church – it still worked. We also wandered a bit on the far end trying to find the right street, but it all worked out so that we were checking in around 9:30 am. Sadly, our room would not be ready until 3:00ish, so we stored our bags and headed out to explore the city – the jet-lag-breaking nap would have to wait.

We were smart enough to buy three-day passes for all public transportation in Prague, so the tram-to-metro and metro-to-tram riding we did all day was easy to do. We went down to the Old Town, where Mer took me on the start of a Rick Steves walk, starting in Wenceslas Square, which has a museum on one end, and the other end leads further into the Old Town. We ambled though the square in a little bit of a fuzzy-brained fog, but it was exciting to be in a new city (for me – Mer, of course, had been here for a couple days in the 1990s).

We went down a narrow and cool (if commercial) street that ended in a huge square where the Old Town Hall sits on one side and Tyn Church on the other. It is a really beautiful space, with pretty buildings, open space, and a huge monument to a priest who tried to reform the church in the 1400s – Jan Hus. He was excommunicated and then burned at the stake for trying to do so, but he has been a symbol of Czech independence ever since (even as they were dominated by the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

The Old Town Hall has a complex and cool clock from the 1400s that tells the time, the zodiac, the amount of daylight, the time of sunrise, and so on. Of course, it is so complicated, I could not figure out how even to read it as a clock. But, on the hour, it gives a small automated performance before sounding the hour, to hundreds of camera-toting tourists. First, Death turns over his hourglass and starts ringing a small bell. Then, two windows open up, and the Twelve Apostles appear at each window. Finally, a rooster crows, and the windows close, and then the hour chimes. It is a remarkable clock, despite seemingly not impressing the teen boy behind us who was being ribbed by his family for having a “we waited ten minutes for THAT?” attitude. He was smiling as they gave him grief. I liked the clock.

It was about noon, so we took the Metro to a quiet neighborhood for lunch. It was a little out of the way, but Mer wanted a quiet lunch away from tourist hordes, and it was lovely. We ate outside next to a small round “square” bordered by five-story apartments.

Back to the main square, we did more of the Rick Steves walk, passing through Ungelt Sqaure (where merchants once stored wares, since there were only two entrances), then peeked into a highly decorated Baroque church which was sadly closed, but had provided windows to look though. We wandered down to the Fruit Market Square, which was fairly small and cozy, and past the Estates Theater that now seems to focus on Mozart operas, and finally ended up at the Powder Tower, which used to be the main gate in the city walls. It is beautiful and imposing.

Next to the Powder Tower is one of the most magnificent buildings I have ever seen – the Municipal House. It is a fabulously decorated homage to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was a celebration of new techniques of construction that allowed the architects to incorporate elaborate curved designs into iron decorations and stained glass and tile work and mosaics. The Municipal House is pleasingly decorated inside and out with art everywhere. It is a grand building, and I loved it.

We had managed to get to the early afternoon, so we headed back to the hostel, getting there about 2:30. After an initial protestation from the new desk clerk that we were too early, the original clerk explained things to him and he let us have our keys so we could finally go get a three-hour nap, followed by a shower. We both felt much better after that.

We had supper in the same neighborhood as where we had lunch, in a small beer garden. There may have been a German tourist or two, but we did not hear anyone speaking in English. So, another quiet meal.

We finished the evening off by strolling though the now-lit city to the Charles Bridge, build by Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1300s. The bridge is beautiful itself, and the Vltava River is pretty to look at, but on top of all of that, it overlooks the Prague Castle, started by Charles, and it’s one of the largest castles in the world. At the center of the complex is the striking St. Vitus Cathedral. It is a remarkable spot, even if we had to share with hundreds of other tourists.

As an aside, this bridge is shown in Spiderman – Far from Home, and I was able to identify where that scene was shot, which was very cool. But the movie shows the bridge empty of people. I’m here to tell you that is never the case on a good-weather evening; even a quick shower of rain did not dampen the spirits of the crowds on the bridge and in the small square.

We walked the full length of the bridge and back, and then headed home. Mer had figured out which stop to use on the tram to get us really close to the hostel. The only issue is that the tram going TO the city stops there, but the tram coming FROM the city does not. We discovered this the hard way, overshooting our stop by about a mile or so. We decided to wait for the return tram, but it was a little creepy on a deserted bridge in the dark.

And so, having clearly become masters of Prague’s transit system, we wrapped up day one.

The last full fay of our London adventure this time around resulted in the five of us breaking into three parties. Shelby went to Greenwich to see the Fan Museum and explore Greenwich itself, while Neuf and Brianna went to Buckingham Palace to (somewhat) see the changing of the guard – it was crowded, so they did not see very well. They visited some stores as well. All three of them met up early in the afternoon at St. Paul’s, where we were all to rendezvous at 3:15.

Meanwhile, to help make up for the lack of supper last night, I took Meredith to a breakfast buffet. With a view. Darwin’s is a restaurant that is part of the Sky Garden, which is a real garden at the top of the 20 Fenchurch Street building (nicknamed “The Walkie Talkie). The garden is on the thirty-seventhish floor (depending on if you are using the American or British floor numbering system), and the restaurant looks right down on the Thames, with great views of Tower Bridge.

Normally, I can’t stand heights. But I thought I would try it this time, since I knew Mer would love it. It turned out to be great – we were in a restaurant, sitting at a window, which overlooked a larger lounge space about two stories below.  Though the glassed-in lounge space had an outdoor terrace, the terrace wasn’t directly below us.  So I was quite removed from the edge and could not see straight down. The food was expensive – about thirty to thirty-five dollars each for the buffet – but the service was top-notch, the food was excellent, and it was serving as two meals for us. Since it costs even more than that to go up to the observation deck of London’s highest building (the Shard), getting to sit for an hour while eating excellent food was a solid deal.

After brunch, we wandered around the garden, which is free to the public with reservations made online. Since the reservations limit the number of people allowed up at one time, the garden did not feel overcrowded, and the layout allowed us to look out in all directions. Mer wanted to try the terrace, and I tried it, but had to beat a hasty retreat from the height. It was a slow-paced and pleasant morning.

We regrouped at the apartment and then headed out to the St. Paul’s area. We wanted to explore St. Bartholomew the Great, a church of which we had seen the exterior during the walk the other night. It is London’s oldest church, from about 1145. We had a little trouble finding it since I was relying on memory of the walk and on maps in my head, but we did get there eventually. The church was almost empty, and we got to walk around it at our own pace. There were several modern religious artworks installed next to inscriptions from 1600, and they were moving – there was a modern statue of St. Bart holding his own skin (he was flayed alive), an abstract but identifiable crucifixion, a modern painting take on Mary and Jesus, an excellent terra cotta statue of Jesus coming out of an old stone coffin for his resurrection, and some glass work. The church has been the site of several movies, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Richard II, and even, so we were told, a scene from one of the Transformer movies.

We left St. Bart’s to get back to St. Paul’s, stopping briefly at a park that had been planted where a Wren-designed church used to be. It had been bombed out during World War II, and the altar wall still survives, along with some window casings down the sides. The interior of the church has been planted with plants in a way to show where the pews used to be. It is a lovely use of the space.

We had lunch just outside of St. Paul’s, and then we met the others there at 3:15, so we could start our trek out to the Warner Brothers Studio just outside of London, to go see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. It took a good two hours to get there from St. Paul’s, party because we happened to take a train that stopped frequently. But get there we did, and it was pretty amazing.

Warner Brothers has dedicated two former studio buildings to provide  permanent housing for props and costumes and sets from all eight of the Harry Potter movies. They have exhibits on how things were designed, and full sets of rooms, such as Dumbledore’s office and Harry’s bedroom at Hogwarts. These are the actual sets that were used in the films. We got to hear, from the people who actually made things, about how sets were constructed, or how special effects were done. To my great surprise, the effects people preferred to use real props as much as possible, resorting to computer-generated effects only as cost or safety demanded. Even then, they usually tried to have some real props as a base from which to start, so, for example, Harry might be fighting a snake with a real prop head and a computer body. It was great fun to get to see how they did it.

By sheer luck, we were there on the first day of the preview opening of the Gringott’s Bank set – the staff themselves only saw it for the first time last night. It was the entire Gringott’s lobby, in full scale – huge. It was pretty jaw-dropping. They also had behind-the-scenes looks at how the vaults were made for the films – again, a mixture of real props and computer animation.

The exhibit had a full-sized section of Diagon Alley, and a near-full-sized Platform 9 3/4, with the Hogwart’s Express sitting in it. The winner of the tour was saved for last, with an incredibly detailed scale model of Hogwarts itself – it must have been fifty feet across, and had several levels and included lots of landscaping. It is hard to do it justice from description, but it was a real “Whoa!” moment.

We took the faster train back to the city, and so our touring for this trip ends. Tomorrow we get launched at 7:00 am (3:00 am EST), and should get home sometime around 9:00 pm if all goes well. We have had a wonderful time with great weather and good success at seeing lots of things.

Shelby decided to do her own thing today, but the rest of us got a leisurely start to the day, eating breakfast at Covent Garden before heading to Paddington Station, from which we took the one-hour train ride to Oxford, home to the oldest university in England. Meredith had lived a summer there with her parents when she was seven (almost forty years ago), and had not been back since a brief visit when she was fourteen and on a tour that stopped in Oxford for a couple hours. The other three of us had never been, so it seemed like a great getaway from the bustle of London. And so it was.

We got there about noon and walked about a mile from the train station to the university area. The university is broken up into thirty-eight separate colleges, and we were hoping to see the ones with which the authors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll were associated. Since that represents three different colleges, that was an ambitious plan. We got to Carroll’s college, Christchurch, which is tourable by the public, but for some reason, the main hall was closed until 2:30, so we kept walking along a small river (the Cherwell) to the local botanic gardens.

I like botanic gardens, and it was a beautiful day, so we paid the reasonable six pounds and spent a happy hour there, wandering around and looking at flowers and trees. We were probably about two or three weeks early for maximum early blooms, but it was a soothing place, even with many small school children running around near the entrance. We found that Carroll used to walk with the young Alice in the gardens, so we even had our Carroll tie-in.

We then decided we should get lunch, and the plan for that was another mile walk across town to the pub favored by Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings – The Eagle and Child. Once we were most of the way there, I discovered I had left my glasses back in the gardens (I was wearing my sunglasses), so I walked back by myself to get them. I met the others near the pub; they had been window shopping, so had not yet reached it.

The front section of The Eagle and Child is crammed with nooks and is interesting and inviting. As such, there were no tables there. The back half is more modern – not bad, but not so interesting. We sat there and had an unhurried lunch. Meredith had been denied admission to the pub thirty-nine years ago, for being too young, so the lunch date had been postponed for some time.

What to do after lunch? When you don’t know what to do, punt. We walked a mile back across town, to the River Cherwell, where we rented a punt – a shallow boat that is propelled by a pole by someone (me) standing in the back of the boat. I had seen it on TV, and was reassured by the man collecting the money that it was very easy. It was not, at least not for the first fifteen minutes, during which time I ran into a bridge support and the shore, had to have a boat coming at me go around me because I could not get on the correct side, and got so close to a footbridge I had to stop the punt by reaching up with my hand and grabbing the bridge. I also almost fell in four times. Happily, I more or less got the hang of it for the final forty-five minutes, which was good, since that was a much busier section of river, which included three not-well-controlled punters and a very erratic rowboat using the novel method of rowing with the prow facing the wrong direction. Overall, the punting was a good experience, and the others said they liked it, but I was tired and my feet were sore, so I was happy to be back on land, dry.

As we walked back along the street, we saw that Magdalen College was open, so we paid for admission there. It was quite lovely. It was very quiet and had a wonderful path along some wooded areas near the river. The flowers were out back there too, and it was peaceful. We had to be back through the main gate to the college by 6:00 or risk getting locked out in the paths, so we made sure not to be out too long, but we got to walk around the quads of the college, and spent some time watching the deer in the deer paddock, because what is a college without its own deer population?

We stopped at a coffee and pastry shop after I was seduced by the display in the window. That worked out okay since we then walked back to the train, took the train back to Paddington, and took the Tube home. We got back to the apartment around 9:00, so the pastries inadvertently turned out to be supper.

As for Shelby, she made the most of the day, going to Westminster Abbey (and stumbling into an anti-Brexit rally), the Foundling Museum, the Sir John Soanes Museum (it was open this time), and riding the London Eye. And she still beat us home.

Today was the first day I planned; years ago Meredith decided I needed to plan half the vacation days rather than letting her plan them all and then making tons of suggestions when we got to the country. That is fair, but it is more pressure when others are involved. I played it really safe today – we just went to the Tower of London.

In my mind, the Tower is the one must-see sight in London. You have a cool castle, a thousand years of history, and the super-cool Tower Bridge in the background of many pictures. There are the crown jewels, and Beefeater guides in costumes, and semi-tame ravens wandering around. There is prisoner graffiti that is four hundred years old and escape stories and Isaac Newton as the head of the English Mint at the Tower. It is an amazing place.

We showed up when it opened at 9:00, having purchased tickets the night before. We stayed until almost 3:00, so it seems as if the others enjoyed it. We started with seeing the crown jewels, since that can get long lines. We waltzed right in to them and got to pass them (on moving walkways) three times. I had forgotten how impressive they are – covered in diamonds and other valuable stones, they do convey a certain awe, even to this skeptical American.

From there, we took a forty-five-minute tour from a Beefeater (warder) – one of the people who served in the military for twenty-five years or more and then applied for the position. Our guide was a funny man who managed to be cranky-seeming while still being polite. My favorite line was when he told Americans “to go study your history. That won’t take long.” He was great. He filled us in on the development of the Tower, from the original White Tower from around 1100 to its use as a royal residence and a prison and a barracks (not all at the same time).

We then saw the rest of the Tower (more or less) over the next several hours. There are exhibits on animals kept at the Tower (they rarely fared well), the armor and weapons of the keep, the Royal Mint (which was at the Tower until 1811), retired crowns and jewels, and more. We finished our visit to the Tower by crossing over the famous Tower Bridge, going out along it and coming back over.

At that point, Shelby headed off on her own to explore the St. Paul’s Cathedral area, to see the Museum of London (mixed reviews), and to see the British Library (positive reviews). The other four of us returned to the apartment. I took a nap, and Brianna rested in her bedroom, and Meredith and Neuf went up to Covent Garden for awhile before we all headed out to St. Paul’s at 5:30.

We grabbed a quick supper across from the cathedral, and then we met up with a local guide, Andrew, who was to take us on a two-hour walk of the original City of London (about one square mile), with a focus on Shakespeare and Dickens. The City itself is mostly banks, and so while 350,000 people work there, only about 7,000 live in the district, which makes it very quiet at night. Andrew walked us around, showing us places that Dickens describes in his stories, and pointing out where Shakespeare lived when he came to London, as well as a few memorials to Shakespeare. It was a relaxing way to see the city, and along the way, we saw a few houses and churches that date from Shakespeare’s time or earlier, along with some memorials to the religious upheaval of the time in which Shakespeare lived. Andrew even suggested that Macbeth might be inspired by the Catholic/Protestant issues of the day, with a Scottish king (James) on the throne and with other hints (like the castle porter’s speech about a farmer and equivocator being found in hell – both could be a reference to a well-known Jesuit priest executed around 1606). I loved the tour, and the others were still speaking to me at the end, so that seemed positive.

We walked down the hill from St. Paul’s to get the magnificent view of the church lit up at night, and then grabbed the Tube back to the apartment from near the river. After a day spent in the 1100s, the 1600s, and the 1800s, it was nice to ride back home.

Sometimes on these city trips, we stretch the city out. In this case, we stretched it by a ninety-plus-minute bus ride to go see some rocks. It’s amazing what people will pay to see.

All of us got up early and were on a bus, heading west at 8:30 am, going to see Stonehenge. A not-insignificant part of the trip was in just getting out of London to the highway. London is huge. The countryside out to the stones is very pretty in a non-dramatic way, with lots of fields and pastures. The bus drove right by the monument, so my first sight of the place was through a bus window. I had not realized how big the stones were. We zoomed on by, to the visitor center, getting off the bus about 10:30 with strict orders to be back by 12:30. The stone circle is a little over a mile from the parking lot, and there is a shuttlebus, but Mer and Brianna and I decided to walk on such a beautiful morning. In the interest of time, we did take the bus back, but the walk out was soothing. Shelby and Neuf took the bus out, so they were there for some time before we showed up.

I had not realized that the area around Stonehenge is full of burial mounds – hundreds of them within just a few miles of the stones. The stones were added roughly five thousand years ago to an area that seems to have been important from before that time (there are some mile-long dug trenches still visible that predate the stones being erected). Stonehenge is also the only existing stone circle that has stones on top, called lintels. Many of the stones are over ten tons, and they were all hauled from at least several miles away, with some seeming to have come all the way from Wales. A lot of people put a lot of effort into the construction, and no one really knows why. The stones do line up with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, but we do not know if that was the main function, as a sort of calendar.

Anyway, it is very impressive and worth seeing, even with a nearly four-hour drive round trip. You can’t get into the stone circle, but you do get to walk all the way around it, and you can get quite close on one side. There were a ton of people around, but the site is so large that you can get alone pretty easily. In fact, if we had been there with a car, I could have easily spent another three hours wandering around the burial mounds and checking out all of the visitor center. As it was, two hours pretty much covered the walk out to the monument, the actual visit, and the shuttle back to the tour bus. We got there with about five minutes to spare.

When we got back to London, Mer wanted to get a quick bite to eat an an Italian restaurant and then head over to the Docklands area of London to do a walking tour out of her guide book. Brianna, Neuf, and Shelby decided to go see a small museum and poke around some shops in that area instead. That worked for us – the Docklands is not high on the list of what to see in London for most people, but we stayed out there back in 2009 when we first visited London as a couple, and we wanted to go check it out again, and more thoroughly.

The Docklands used to be the world’s busiest port, but it got bombed out in World War Two, and then never recovered as the shipping industry went to container ships which could not come this far up the Thames. The area became one of the poorest in all of London, and was largely abandoned until the 1980s, when developers figured out it was cheap land. Now it is all gleaming glass and steel and parks and fountains, and is home to most of the high-tech office workers and banks in London. It has a very “city of the future” feel to it, which we had remembered from our 2009 stay.

What was new to us on this trip was getting into the small but well-planned parks. The designers put the shopping areas underground, and then put parks on top of them with fountains, flowers, and green spaces. They are great parks – small, but inviting. It must be working – we saw real estate advertised, and a 517-square-foot one-bedroom apartment was listed for the equivalent of about $600,000. I have no idea who lives in these places. Not teachers.

We enjoyed our walk around, and then took a fast boat back up the Thames to the Embankment dock. As such, we got to sail past all of the Docklands and see the new apartments on the river, and then go under Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London. We zipped past St. Paul’s, and all the way back to near our home for the week, where we stopped in and got reorganized before heading to Chinatown for supper and then ice cream for dessert.

I don’t usually try to eavesdrop, but the Chinese place had communal tables, and the man and woman next to me were talking though the whole meal. The man got to telling the woman many of the major stories of the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament), and he did an excellent job. I have no idea why he was so familiar with them, and I did not know how to ask, since we had not spoken to each other during supper. Then, in the ice cream store, two men came in, and one was talking in a British accent about the New England Patriots and one of their players. It was a little surreal.

It was a fine evening, so Mer and I walked back home, getting slightly lost several times, which resulted in wandering into different parts of Chinatown three different times. All part of the fun. We made it back home eventually. The others are not home yet, so I do not know how their afternoon and evening went. More eventfully than ours, it seems. I’ll update when I know more.

….

The others rolled in about 10:00 pm last night, and had a great time exploring most of London, it seems, although they had a few slight frustrations. They started their time together by visiting the Sir John Soane Museum, which is the home and collection of a major architect from the late 1700’s and and early 1800’s.  It turns out it is closed on Tuesdays. They visited a Victorian custom umbrella shop nearby, and they rode London’s double-decker buses several times.They got in a visit to Herod’s, which they said was high-end and a really quirky building. They went to Hyde Park to see the Peter Pan statue (under restoration and fenced off) and the Princess Di memorial fountain (empty of water).  After the sunset, somehow they got on the back side of Kensington Palace and had great views through the lit windows into the rooms and ended up in an area where people were swiping cards to get out of the grounds; they were allowed out. They finally looked for two different London restaurants, which were closed (one was new and not open at all yet), and so finally out of fatigue and hunger ate at the nearby Pizza Hut and then came home. They had a busy afternoon – we left each other only at 2:30. We clearly need another week here so they can see all of London, because I think they would.

It is mostly a great thing to be in a country where you speak the local language. It makes touring much easier. Since it makes touring much easier, it means people can strike off on their own, which Mer and I encourage. But it does mean that people have different experiences. Such it was today. Neuf and Shelby were already gone by the time Mer and I went upstairs to go around 9:00. Brianna decided to hang with us today.

Not only did Neuf and Shelby head off on their own, but they also did not stick together for long, each going to see different things. They started together at Buckingham Palace, but then Neuf had a ticket to tour Westminster Abbey. So their days looked like:

Neuf: Neuf went from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, then back to the palace. She caught Platform 9 3/4 (of Harry Potter fame) at King’s Cross Station before heading over to the British Library. She then texted and joined Shelby at the British Museum.

Shelby: Shelby started at the palace with Neuf, then toured the Queen’s Collection – an art exhibit focusing on royal portraits of Russian and British families. She then spent the rest of the day in the British Museum, where she managed to get to every single room in the entire museum, which is really impressive. Neuf joined her toward the end of the day.

That left me and Meredith and Brianna. We headed back to Covent Garden to get breakfast. We took a detour into St. Paul’s church (not cathedral). We had intended to walk through it to get to the market area, but the gates to the main square were closed. So we were stuck in the church and churchyard, which was not a bad thing at all. The churchyard had a striking statue of the conversion of St. Paul done around 2010, with Paul looking very young and very Roman. It worked, with the sculptor catching the instant by having the horse rear and Paul fling his arm up over his eyes – it was all quite dynamic. On the far side of the church was a small brick maze that led to a portrait of the queen, so I did the maze path for fun.

St. Paul’s is known as “the actor’s church,” and the inside is filled with dedications and memorials to actors. To drive home the point, the first sign we saw inside the lobby of the church was a directional sign to Hamlet auditions. We had not prepared a monologue, so we just went into the church, which is simple and elegant inside.

After a picture stop outside the church and one of Meredith posing with a flower cart (since she is teaching Pygmalion right now at school, which takes place here), we made it to the market. Our first-choice place was closed, but we had a good breakfast in a cute restaurant across the way.

After breakfast, we jumped on the Tube, the London subway, and took it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. I knew nothing about the museum, other than that Mer had said it was eclectic. I thought it would be a small museum filled with some decorative art. Um. No. It was a ginormous huge big museum, filled with pretty much anything that had any tie-in to a decoration. They have sculptures and silver and gold and paintings and fabrics and glass and architectural models and costumes and tapestries. They have Roman things, and early Christian objects, and Islamic and Buddhist art. They have some Donatello works, and Turner and Michelangelo and Rodin. It is an incredible museum. We ended up being there until 5:00 pm.

We walked in from the Tube – the museum has its own Tube tunnel access, and we walked into one of the sculpture galleries, where I was greeted by over a dozen Rodin statues. Welcome to the Victoria and Albert Museum! We caught a free guided tour that walked us through several of the most important Medieval and Renaissance works, which mostly focused on religious objects. We got to see a sculpture of Samson killing a Philistine; it was special for only having a few contact points on the ground. We saw a few works of Mary and Jesus and saw how the style changed over the years. The tour included a couple of ornate saint bone boxes (reliquaries), including one that had been associated with St. Thomas Becket (an English bishop murdered by four knights who thought they were doing the king a favor).

After the tour, we ran into a docent who recommended a half dozen rooms to go see, including architecture, glass, sacred silver and stained glass, household and decorative silver, and the theater and performance rooms. We also saw some other rooms, like paintings, along the way.

Of what we saw, I liked the sculpture, of course, but I also loved the theater rooms. They had costumes from The Lion King musical, and a First Folio of Shakespeare. They had the original horse puppet from The War Horse, which is a show I love. There was a Fred Astaire tux and stage designs for some famous productions and more. I don’t think I had ever seen anything like it before.

Even where we had lunch was spectacular – the cafe is decorated by heavy floral wallpaper designed by a famous designer, William Morris. We had dessert sitting in a sunny enclosed square, looking at a shallow splashing pool (although no one was in it today, since it was only about fifty-five degrees out).

One of the reasons we do this colleagues-included trips is so we can get to know our fellow teachers better. Mer and I both knew that Brianna was a fun person to be around, but we had not gotten to spend a ton of time with her. Today at the museum, the tour guide was introducing a glass cup and asked if anyone in the group of about twenty people believed in fairies. Brianna’s hand shot up as she said, “I do!” That was delightful. We knew she was a cool chick. Oh – the cup was supposed to have been left behind by a king of the fairies and had been passed along in one family for hundreds of years until the museum bought it.

We left the museum about 5:00 and went back to near Covent Gardens, to do a Rick Steves guidebook walk of the Gardens area that led over to Soho and Piccadilly Circus. When we got near the market area, I saw a souvenir shop and asked if I could go in it. Shelby had been looking for a specific souvenir, so I thought I would scout it out for her. Great minds think alike, because she and Neuf were already in the shop. And so we were reunited. They and we had also noted the same pub – The White Lion – earlier in the day and considered it a potential candidate for our dinner location, so we decided to eat there. After dinner, Shelby and Neuf went home, and the three of us finished up the walk. Soho does feel very bohemian, with lots of music shops and small streets, and Piccadilly Circus feels like Times Square had a love child with a quiet Paris neighborhood – garish lit-up signs reflected in the glass and stone fronts of elegant buildings. It is the heart of the theater district, so we saw lots of shows advertised.

Tomorrow is an early day, as we’re all heading out together to go tour Stonehenge. After that, who knows where our London fancies will take all of us?

We met a British man on the street tonight who is retired and walks around downtown with the purpose of being useful. He freely helped us find a gelato place, including walking with us and chatting the whole way. He really did just want to be friendly and welcome us to his city. When he found out we were American, he said he hoped we realized how lucky we are. True words.

I am lucky. Meredith and I have the means and the freedom to travel, and we both enjoy it. Most relevantly, we both have the health to travel. One of our good friends who was supposed to join us on this trip could not make it because of health reasons, and I almost was in the same metaphorical sickbed.

On Thursday, I started having an occasional dry cough and my eyes were stinging, which I wrote off to being tired. That continued on Friday, and I did not think about it much. I began to get worried on the walk home – I got so cold my teeth started chattering; it was cold, but not teeth-chattering cold (it was about thirty degrees). I could not get warm at home unless I was in bed under a ton of blankets. That kept getting worse, and I went to bed around 8:00 in hopes of getting well overnight. We were supposed to leave for the airport and then to London at 10:00 am, so I was not optimistic. Everything pointed to the flu, and that usually lasts at least a full day. By the time I got into bed, even the act of rolling over caused pain in my sore muscles, and I was cold if anything other than my head stuck out of the blankets. I warned Meredith that I would have to play London by ear, and maybe I could pay the change-ticket fee and join her later in the week.

My hopes were not raised when I woke up at 1:00 am and struggled to get out of bed and got to the refrigerator to get a Gatorade in an attempt to stay hydrated. By 3:00, I got up and took an Advil, hoping it would lower the fever I now had and the sore back that was keeping me from sleeping. London was dimming in a haze of flu symptoms.

When the alarm went off at 7:30 am, I was surprised at how much better I felt. I was clearly not one hundred percent, but I could move without pain and did not feel feverish. I proceeded to get ready for our trip, and I kept feeling better a little at a time. So, in the end, I made it to Toronto and on to London with Meredith and three other friends – Meredith N., Shelby, and Brianna. I do not know if I was healed by God having mercy on me or not – I know several people were praying for me, but many of us have been praying for other people who are seriously sick at school, and it is hard to see why a flu would be healed when other illnesses linger for people. I do know one thing, reinforced by our new British friend – I am lucky, and I need to be thankful. I am thankful to be with Meredith and we are both healthy enough to rack up eleven miles of walking on our first (partial) day of touring in London. Thank you, Lord.

The trip here was uneventful, and I was actually tired enough to get about three hours of fitful on-and-off sleep on the plane. Meredith, of course, just graded the whole flight. We got to our Air BnB in the middle-of-everything London (just a few blocks from Parliament and Trafalgar Square) around noon, but we could not check in before 3:00. We were able to drop our bags, and we headed back out, walking up to Covent Garden to the enclosed market there. While we were scoping out eating options, we were offered a free tasting of hot chocolate (which made my day) and got to listen to a lively string sextet (including a cellist who held her cello neck between her shoulder and neck). That was delightful. We then split up, as Meredith and I wanted to go get a picture of Meredith in front of St. Paul’s church (not cathedral), where My Fair Lady/Pygmalion is set, and then we planned on going on to Chinatown for lunch. The others wanted to stay in the area and do some shopping and sightseeing.

When we got to the church (a walk of about three hundred feet), there was a street entertainer there balancing on a round can and leading up to juggling knives. We stayed to watch, especially since he was right in front of the church. He was fun to watch and had good crowd engagement. We then got the picture of Meredith and walked up to Chinatown, which brought us through really lively and busy streets. It was a nice day, and Londoners seemed to be enjoying it. Unfortunately, the restaurant for which we were aiming was small, with only about a dozen tables, and all of them were full. We ended up going to the French bakery chain Paul, which was fine for our jet-lagged bodies.

Mer then walked us over to the bridge in front of Parliament, and we walked the area following a recommended walk from Mer’s Rick Steves guide book. We only got about halfway through it before seeing it was time to check in at the apartment, so we headed back. We bumped into the other three coming from the apartment, and they said the cleaners needed thirty more minutes. That was unfortunate, but we went to a park and ate some cookies that Meredith N. (“Neuf”) offered us. The others walked to the Thames while we ate, and then I wanted to see the pedestrian bridge across the river that followed the train line into Charing Cross train station. We ran into the others there. By then, we were able to head back and get into the apartment for a nap.

Or so I thought. Neuf and Shelby went back out for an English tea back at Covent Garden. They said it was wonderful. Meredith and I and Brianna all enjoyed a two-hour nap, and then I felt better after a shower.

The evening was mellow – we finished the Parliament-area walk and had supper in a pub along the way. The walk ended in Trafalgar Square, and while we were looking in our guidebook, our very nice British man introduced himself, ending our evening with kindness and gelato.

I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep to see if I can continue to feel better, but even if I feel a little worse, I would be sick in London, and that would still be something for which to be grateful.

Meredith relies heavily on the Rick Steves brand of travel books to plan these vacations. I like using the internet, which allows me to occasionally go “OR,” or Off-Rick. One of the places I found in my searches that looked lovely was Giethoorn, a small village carved out of a peat swamp where the traditional center of the town remains largely unchanged – no motor traffic (other than five-mph boats on the many canals), and the center is now a protected World Heritage site. I really wanted to see it.

This created a problem; to get there by public transportation takes at least two hours each way, which is a long time for a day trip. It is around ninety minutes by car, which is about as far as I am willing to go for a single site in a day. So the obvious thing to do was to hire a local guide. I could have rented a car more cheaply, or even gotten an Uber for less money, but Mer and I have always enjoyed the guides we have hired on past trips. They are guides for a reason – they know things about the sites that are otherwise hard to pick up, or they know places not on the beaten paths, and they take care of the driving.

Enter Cherry, of Cherry’s Travel. Cherry is originally from Hong Kong, but has lived in the Netherlands for twelve years. She has lived all over the world, and loves travel. She put together a private tour for us, with her and a driver, on only about sixteen hours’ notice. I did not book things until Thursday, as I was keeping an eye on the weather, which was cool but sunny today. Cherry agreed to take us to Giethoorn, then to the all-in-one-all-things-Dutch village/site of Zaanse Schans, and finish off at the sort-of seaside town of Volendam. She said it would be a long day, but it would get us a Dutch highlights tour all in one day.

We got to Giethoorn around 10:30, and booked a canal boat tour for 11:30. We used the time in between to wander the village. The town has a public walking path because most of the houses are on small islands, and the paths and bridges to them are private. The path takes you past boat companies and restaurants, and to the church, where you can walk north or south. We went south, admiring the thatched-roof houses and the many many many bridges across the many many many canals – the town has over 150 bridges for just 2,600 residents. The canals, and the large lake next to the town, were all created by farming peat for fuel. As the peat was shallow, all the waterways (including the lake) are only about three feet deep.

Traveling off-season has challenges – not everything is open, and it can be cold (it was a high of forty-four today), but it has advantages too. We had the town largely to ourselves. While we saw five or six tourists on small boats in the canals, I do not remember seeing any obvious tourists on our walk, which was very peaceful and beautiful. When we got back for our boat tour, it ended up being a private tour – four of us and the pilot in a boat that can hold fifty people. It probably was not good for the boat company, but it was good for us. Other boats we saw while we were there had more people in them, but we had our own.

After the boat tour, which also went out on the lake, we grabbed a quick lunch, and then walked the northern part of the town. Again, we had it largely to ourselves, although we did run into a group of eight or so twenty-ish-year-old guys going into a restaurant, but I could not tell if they were tourists or locals. Giethoorn was a hit with us, and I would happily go back when it was warmer so I could spend more time wandering the town or renting an electric boat to take out on the lake.

Going to and coming from Giethoorn took us through a huge area of reclaimed land – the Dutch are really good at building dikes, and turned their Zuiderzee (South Sea) into a large freshwater lake by building a twenty-two-mile dike across the mouth to the Atlantic. Then they built more dikes to reclaim dry land from some of the lake. The land now sits below the lake level, as does much of the country – two thirds of the Netherlands is below sea level. Driving along and seeing the water within just a couple of feet of the top of the dike with towns below that level on the other side is eye-opening. Mer put it well when she said that the Netherlands looked to be one good rain away from flooding.

We drove back around Amsterdam and went north of the city, to the tourist-focused site/town of Zaanse Schans. It is a tourist trap, with five relocated and working windmills, a clog-making shop, a cheese-making shop, and a cute village where no one lives (they are shops), but the tourist area is surrounded by cute homes where people really do live, so the whole area is open to people to wander around in, and most stores give demonstrations for free so that they get potential customers into the store.

We got to see the five windmills, although not so closely as I would normally like, as we were a little pressed for time. We got to see an excellent clog-making demonstration by a man with flawless English, who then did the entire demonstration in Chinese for the group after us. It used to take two or three hours to carve a wooden shoe, whereas the “new” (eighty-year-old) machines he demonstrated could make a shoe in five minutes. Why wooden shoes? They last a long time and are waterproof, which is important in a country where water is everywhere.

We went on to a just-us cheese-making demonstration given by a cheerful young woman. She explained that their young cheese was about a month old, and old cheese was aged one or even two years. We wandered the shop and then out into the old village area, before getting in the car to go to Volendam.

I keep wanting to call Volendam a seaside town, but it technically is not one anymore. It was on the sea until the early twentieth century, when the sea dike was built. Now, Volendam is on a huge lake, but still looks like a seaside town. In fact, it reminded both Mer and me of Rockland, Maine, where Mer’s grandfather lived. In Voldendam, we walked along the cute street facing the lake and got a private demonstration of how to make stroopwafels, with Meredith assisting in the process. Stroopwafels are a Dutch dessert for which very thin waffles are cut in half and filled with caramel, and then put back together. They are delicious. It turns out the fresh, warm versions are drool-worthy. Mer and I picked up chocolate-covered stroopwafels and ate them looking out at the lake.

We finished walking the main street and then hustled back to the car to get out of the gusting wind, which was now very cold with the sun’s going down. We rode back into town, getting home about 5:30.

I thought that was to be the end of the touring day. Since we had eaten late, we headed out around 7:00 to get light fare from a local supermarket. However, when we were halfway to the market, my eye was caught by a woman playing a piano in a restaurant, so we crossed the street to look at the menu. It turned out to be an Argentinian eatery, so it was mostly grilled meats. We decided were were all okay with that, and we went in for what turned out to be our favorite meal of the week. If you are ever in Amsterdam, check out La Casona near the Prinsengracht canal. Our meal was a fitting celebratory end to an excellent week in Amsterdam and environs.

I loved this trip. The city is beautiful, with the old buildings and all the canals. The museums are top-notch. Getting lost is easy, but you don’t really mind in a city like this. The people with whom we interacted were all friendly, and many were outright charming. We squeezed in a visit to a castle and a canal-rich village. We saw heroic World War II sites and got to The Hague, remarkable for at least having an article in its name.

Lord willing, we’ll be back. When it is warmer. These Thanksgiving trips, if they continue, need to look south.

Dubbs was in charge today, and decided to let all of us sleep in, even if she woke up at her usual 3:00 am. Mer and I were allowed to lounge in until 9:00. Dubbs had one touring goal – to get to the Christmas fair being held at the De Haar Castle in Vleuten, near Utrecht.

That sounds like a modest goal, but it involved some planning. We walked to a nearby Metro stop, took it to the Amstel station (our third major Amsterdam train station this trip!), took a train to the Utrecht station, took a train to the Vleuten train station, and then finally got on a shuttle bus to take us to the castle. What could go wrong? Well, you could get on an express from Utrecht to Gouda, zipping right by Vleuten, which would probably require a return trip back to Utrecht before catching the right train. And you probably could get stuck on the station side of a Metro exit barrier because your card time had expired, with no way to buy another ticket, which might make you dash through the gates after someone else had gone through. That possibly could go wrong.

But we did make it to the De Haar Castle around 1:00 in the afternoon, where we bought our admission into the two-hundred-plus-booth Christmas fair on the grounds of the beautiful castle that the De Haar family refurbished in the late 1800s as a summer home and entertaining center. They rubbed elbows with the rich and famous of the twentieth century, including Gregory Peck and Brigitte Bardot. The castle is beautiful, surrounded by moats and canals and gardens and walls. The structure is made of red brick, and was designed by the same architect who did the Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam’s central train station. The woodwork of the main hall ceiling is stunning, and the walls are filled with stained glass. It is an elegant home, even if it was only used for about a month per year.

We paid to tour the castle, and paid the slight extra to tour the servants’ hallways and quarters, so we have now done the “nooks and crannies” tour of the De Haar Castle, but still have not managed it at Stan Hywet in Akron. It was interesting to see how there were hidden corridors for the staff to use so as to stay out of sight of the guests. We also read that it was not unusual for staff to work seventeen-hour days, but that the De Haar family treated their help well, providing clean and modern rooms for them to live in, and the information we read said the staff often remained loyal to the family their whole lives.

The tour was fun, with the only downside being that it was given in Dutch. We had English cards telling us what we were seeing, but it sounded as if our guide, an older man, was quite funny. It was the first time this whole week that we were surrounded by Dutch who spoke little or no English.

The fair itself was good – the number of booths was dizzying. I’m not sure we actually saw them all. We stopped in at the “Moulin Rouge” tent to hear some live music (two Dutch women singing Carpenters songs in English), before finding a good food tent. Dubbs shopped for a few gifts, including a new scarf for herself, and that was the afternoon. We left the fair around 5:30, when it was mostly dark, so we got to see all the Christmas lights come on around the tents of the fair.

We got back home around 6:15 and headed out to supper a little after 7:00. It was in a very cute pedestrian-(and bike, of course)-only area. After having Italian food in Lisbon last Thanksgiving, we decided on Mexican in Amsterdam this year. After supper and dessert, we walked a mile or so back home, admiring the canals and looking into the upper windows of lovely Amsterdam homes. So starts our Christmas season. Here is hoping Santa brings us some unexpired Metro cards.