Yes, Sean, We’re in Paris :)

 This is our annual family “Christmas trip,” this time in December (last year in Janurary).  We’re obviously not calendar-centric.

We are in Paris.  Sean missed today’s text saying so and was wishing me a “warm ale” in Europe…I’ll let you do the eyeroll. 

Originally we were going just to Nice (insert joke here), but when we found out we had to fly through Paris (or it was the best option, as opposed to flying through London or Lisbon), and our plans there were flexible, we decided to spend 2(?) days here. 

I wasn’t going to blog today, or our arrival day, but by midafternoon I said I had so much material today that I had enough for a week.  

I will start with the photo thumbnail: 

These are from the Christmas market in Tuilleries Garden (the royal garden from the Louvre to the next bridge across the Seine).  It was packed.  I got a lecture about both pickpockets and not checking the credit card machine. 🙄

But, to get it all in perspective we have to start in the living room at home with three personal bags and three carry-ons and too much weight.  One set of guidelines from the airline said 12 kilos including the personal bag; K googled it and google claimed it was 12 AND the personal bag.  There was an hour of handing things around and one pair of shoes (not mine) that didn’t make it (“they’re leather…”…therefore heavy?) It was 120 euros for a checked bag.  In the end, we went heavy and hoped.  But much stress.  Even went back and got another bag because EH worried her new “personal item” was too big for the airline’s specifications. 

The check-in person weighed the carry-ons, shrugged, tagged them, and never looked at the personal bags. 

From there things went well, except it was an overnight to Europe in small seats and the usual.  K said it was most sniffling and coughing she’d ever heard (EH and I are both sick, too 😃)

There was texting back and forth with KG, who flew into a different airport from Houston, 3 hours ahead of us.  I found a place AT the SAME address as our apartment that stored luggage. But he couldn’t find it (not surprisingly, it seemed).  

The taxi ride for us from the airport was 45 minutes (15 miles) and the driver kept trying to find a way around traffic.  Found none. :) At one point I wasn’t sure whether he as going to hit the car on the right he was swinging behind, or the car on the left he was swinging behind, the other way! The alert beeper went on both sides!!

But we made it.  KG was sitting on the sidewalk, sans luggage, waiting for us. 

But we had to kill 3 hours till check in.  we checked our bags.

As I pointed out the group (this always goes over well 😂) that the article I forwarded them two weeks ago from a writer for Business Insider on taking her 70-year-old parents to France concluded with 2 tips: don’t go too fast (amen, sister!) and don’t wing it on what you are going to do, especially eat.  You’ll spend a lot of time just not deciding.  That’s what we did, till we had gone downhill a mile, past 20 eateries (name the cuisine, we could have had it, including the most beautiful restaurant in the world — there was a line) before finally saying “no mas” and pretty much collapsing at this either blah French bistro (we ate at another much like it for dinner) or charming very French place. :)

We won’t be going back there.  I will be judicious and just say there were contretemps over “lunch.”  And then, on the way out, (charming means the tables are literally 4” apart) EH rolled several glass bottles off the table! I don’t think they broke but we high tailed it. 

We were let into the flat and then we had “how did you eff up the airbnb, dad?”  the listing said 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths.  We circled the place and could not find a third bedroom.  We tried a door that seemed locked and a closet, anyway, and I ended up calling the guy, with the floor plan up on the listing, asking if he put us in the wrong apartment.  As I asked, KG forced the closet door open and voila! (we are in France) another bedroom.  I still am certain they are a bathroom short (there’s one with no toilet but a shower…the half?, but there are really only two fulls)…and I haven’t found a locked door where it could be, yet.

If you think this has been good, well, then there was getting tickets for the metro.  KG had already gotten his and I went to kiosk and this guy jumped in to help me.  I didn’t know i needed all this help, but, in the end, he ended up with my cash and I ended up with 2 one-way passes, not 2 three-day passes.  😂😂😭😭

Thus, the talk at the market. (repeat eyeroll)

The only thing we bought there, in a crowd reminscent of huge days at the Bloomsburg Fair, were three tetes au chocolat — for dessert. 

They are sitting on the table at the restaurant we ate in at around 9.  

And then we went to get on the metro and I was the only one to get on the car — the door shut very quickly on a combination of my and K’s arm.  We are both all right and I got off at the nezt stop and joined them, but it was the capper to a grand, long day.  

But we are in Paris, Sean. 

KG finished the day by saying we could have fun, but another kind of fun, tomorrow. 😂

Smoking, butterflies and Chubby’s

Dear Readers,

It’s been only a fairly busy couple of days.  We are not doing much today (or last in Texas), but we are having dinner tonight at another Michelin recommended place, so there may be blog worthy food porn from that yet.

Over the last couple days, the highlight was probably yesterday’s lunch.  We picked up bbq from a place in downtown Spring (the place with the shotgun houses).  But Corkscrew is in a trailer.  You have to set up your pickup time because they sell out so quickly.  

It is the rare barbeque place in the world with a Michelin rating of distinction.   I checked. :)  If you can imagine, there was a line around the trailer to get in — at 1130!!! Michelin says to get there at 11 when they open or go eat elsewhere (it’s not quite that bad, but you get the idea).  We ordered ahead, so we had our pounds of meat. :). Here’s my plate:

Supposedly, the claim to fame is it is cooked over red oak, and it does have some color to it and a strong smokey taste.  as Michelin said, you can taste the smoke long after you eat it.  So, it was a big hit. 

To go back to Wednesday, we spent the day at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (HMNS), which was pretty amazing. 

The highlight was their butterfly area; it had its own waterfall and was 3 stories high.  At the beginning they gave you a laminated legal-size sheet with pictures to identify the butterflies — on both sides!!!  I insert just a couple pictures here. 

I talked to the staff person working the area and she told me about the bird over my head, which was a native of Angola, has a terrible sounding call — between a crow and a dog, she said — and it (or they, there’s a pair) like to poop on the staff.  She was keeping an eye on it — “I see where you are” — because she had yet to be pooped on.  Butterfly room working hazard, I guess. 

The other exhibit we paid to see in the building was of King Tut.  He wasn’t there (they put him back in his tomb in Egypt) and we thought the exhibit was both fakey and hokey.   

OTOH, they had their own huge Egyptian room with lots of good real artifacts from there. 

Dinner was at a place near KG’s called Chubby’s.  It had a good rating on Google; it was supposedly a “seafood place with a Latin flair.”  Right.

Don’t get me wrong, the food was good.  But the experience! :).  So, KG orders a margarita.  Their specialty one.  The waiter immediately says “we don’t have that tequila.”  So, he moves on to the second, their “golden.”  Away goes the waiter.  

K’s drink comes.  But no margarita.  After about ten minutes, the waiter comes back and says “turns out we don’t have that tequila, either.”  You know, a Mexican place without tequila…like a desert without sand.  KG orders the classic margarita with mango juice.  

A bunch more minutes.  A guy (not our original waiter) brings our appetizers and asks how things are going and if KG needed a drink and he says “I ordered a margarita.”  The guy (he might have been the chef) makes him repeat his precise order and says “Okay,” and bounces away. 

Nothing.  

Another ten minutes and finally the first guy comes back with his mango margarita, which he says is good. 

He has only taken like one drink and here comes the waiter to say “we have our alcohol order here and we can make whatever one you want.  If you want it, we’ll give you the specialty one (with the most expensive tequila) on the house.”  KG says “sure…”. 

At one point I said “they really don’t want you to have a margarita, do they?” and he agreed they didn’t seem to want him to. 

But here’s their shrimp tacos, which K had. 

Like I said, food was very good. 

Around the bbq delivery, we ate on KG’s golf club’s veranda, we looked around the golf course.  It’s called Gleannloch (someone named the whole place with that irrational misspelling! 😡) and is in the north and slightly west part of Houston.  There are 27 holes and they own A LOT of property.  

Probably the outstanding characteristic having driven around the course is that it has at least one tunnel on each 9.  Never seen a course with some many tunnels.  We were told that in a hard rain they flooded up to the road above.  :) 

The course looked good, very green for Texas at the end of summer, and there was a fair amount of  play for a Thursday afternoon on an 88 degree day (they think that’s nothing here). [K took all the pictures while I drove]

And that’s about it.  We leave tomorrow as early as we can to head east; we stop tomorrow night in a place I didn’t know existed till we drove by it last week — Evergreen, Alabama.  I suspect it’s a misnomer. :)

Till later…

Stu & Johnson and lots of Food Porn

  Hi readers.

Thank you for reading; I see from the stats that a bunch of you have jumped on and read.  Ironically, one is NOT K; she claimed she fell asleep during composition the other night and forgot the next day!!! Likely story.  OC, since she’s lived them all, it’s hard to get fired up for the dad jokes again. 😂

In order:

I guess this episode will start with food porn, as we began yesterday morning with another French place for breakfast (okay, by the time we got there “brunch” 😁. We begin with my ham and cheese crepe, which was really, really good.  Though the service was slow. 

Crepes multiple days on the menu, in Houston! who knew?

After discussion, K bought one of those multisite passes for seniors (or families with small children) which included the zoo.  So, on a day that was a MERE 92 with a real feel of 97, we went outside to the zoo. 

I kept saying “Stu the cockatoo went to the zoo,” a misrembrance of the Big Bang episode where the bookstore staffer gives Sheldon the similarly named book to help him make friends (Sheldon doubts the author has expertise in the area, and also doubts her owning a cockatoo).  Unfortunately, Stu was gone at the Houston Zoo Monday — the cockatoo area was empty. 😢

They did have a neat penguin area, and both sea lions and river otters who were diving and swimming and having a great time.  

OC, the favorite was probably the red panda.   He was very energetic.  We’ll see if I can load the video. 

There could be a lot more pictures, OC.  It was a good zoo, but we both almost melted. 

FYI we found a “good” place for ice cream thereafter (“lunch”) — the local variation on Coldstone.  I had a mix and K had an ice cream sandwich with coffee ice cream in the middle. 🤷

K found dinner “near him” in downtown Spring, which is old-looking, with what looks like the original shotgun-style houses.  The place was a “saloon” (not a term you see often in Pennsylvania) and was supposedly haunted. 

I failed to feed my phone before we ate, so the only picture is of my dessert — that’s their variation on pecan (you can pronounce it either way) pie. 

Yes, it has a funky color: it’s made with buttermilk, NOT Karo syrup!!! That’s what intrigued me.  But it wasn’t a good substitute. 😟

The highlight of the meal was the wait person, Olivia.  At one point K said she was “cute.”  KG and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.  

But she was chatty.  She said she was studying at mortician school and I said that must be deadly.  She laughed.  🙄 I had a couple more.  She knew quite a bit about the business and the building — built in 1900, for a long time it was a brothel (her word), too.  There was a joke about how it was only a brothel on Thursdays now. (Not mine :))

Today we started with a donuts and kalatsches breakfast.  Then we went way to the southside of town to the Space Center Houston.  It was on the multi ticket, too. 

It’s a sprawling place.  But I kept noticing the “Space Center Houston” signs and realized that they’ve “background” the Johnson Space Center name.  I had not heard this, but specualtion on the ride home was rampant.  :)

We got on the tram to the astronaut training facilty and they old guy (and I say this with care :)) next to K starts chatting.  He’s from Mexico City and he’s a ball of fire.  He embarassed her with the fact she spoke no language other than English — he spoke four, he claimed.  It is maybe the first time ever that some stranger talked more than she did. :)

Here’s on pic:

That’s one of the American sections (the living quarters) from the space station. 

As we were getting ready to leave the astronaut training facilty, weather hit the area and we were to take cover in place.  We were standing in the hallway, overlooking the huge “toybox” as it is called.  A lot of staff must have been on lunch.  So, we were bored and not comfortable.  It wasn’t long before we were allowed to get back on the tram — which was open — in the rain and it was leaking, so we were all pretty wet by the time we got back to home base.  Wet in a different way than the zoo. :)

We stopped at an international grocery store on the way back and I repeated multiple times “we are retired on a fixed income…” and was ignored, mainly.  To her credit, she didn’t buy more than we can carry home in the car, just more than we could afford. 😥

Dinner tonight was Italian.  I will share only the picture of KG’s osso bucco because it’s unusual (I had chicken parm; K had carbonara). 

As we finished dessert, I said “we have a funny story to tell you.”  The punch line was that his sister told us to bring something fun from the international grocer.  His response: “I’m still waiting for the knee ( “-ny”) part.”  😂 The kid made a dad joke.  We laughed and laughed. 

And, on that note, I go.

PS. I feel we have gotten to know Houston, staying beyond the north side and today going beyond the south side, with stops between.  The one thing I’ve learned is that congestion is a given.  As is indigestion…as the two go hand-in-hand.  

Night. 

We’re retired, so we drove (there’s food porn)

 Hi, dear readers.

Yes, we’re back travelling and, having heard from some of you we can’t travel without a blog (forgive us, for we have sinned!), here it is.

We are in Texas to see KG’s new environment.  He move to Spring, Texas, a northern suburb of Houston, in mid-July.  K hadn’t seen him since January, so we decided to take the time to drive down, dividing it into three days.  It was 25 hours of driving.  At least. 

First stop was Statesville, NC, where the in-laws moved last October.  They just bought a house there.  It’s nice.  It was “flipped,” so the inside is clean and new with refinished bathrooms and kitchen. 

We hung out on Thursday, with J and I playing golf with one of my college roommates at CC of Salisbury, which was very nice. 

We got to “Houston” early enough yesterday to get to the baseball game.  We bought the tickets weeks ago, before we could know the series with the Mariners would be for first place.  We had great seats (requisite photo) and saw what turned out to be a pretty good game, after the Mariners got off to a 6-0 start. 

The personal highlight was the guy behind me screwing around and spilling his beer all over KG and under my seat, leaving me to spend the night in a nice pond of Bud Light. ):  

But we enjoyed the game. :)

Today was chill and eat today (no one said it officially, but it’s what we did), so there is food porn. The brunch place was Paulette’s in Conroe (halfway btw the kids’ and our lakeside condo) — it claimed to be French.

The stafff were all wearing black and white horizontal stripes — it was clearly a theme — and I said they had all recently gotten out of prison (I was asked, not for the last time, if I had been working on that one :))…

In the end, the food was great.  We all ordered the same thing, though I had different egg preparation — here’s is their “country farm breakfast”

The kid said he could’ve had “regular food,” and he was told we were prepping him for the December trip 😁. I told him he could get an American flag in his dinner.  Again, “have you been thinking of that since we sat down?”  

FYI the small bowl in the center was parmesan mousse (insert large antlered animal joke here), which none of us could identify without asking.  That’s a small pancake with creme brulee on top.  It was delicious.  Hard to top the rest of the week.  

After a long day of watching football, it was decided we needed a steak place for dinner (as the antithesis of the French, I think).  We found one in the Woodlands, the Capitol Grille, which seemed to be straight out of central casting for steak places — dark, woody, with some reds thrown in.  

The waiter, Mel, was quite amusing. 

We ordered two filets and a strip with gorgonzola.  I give you two pics.  No dessert (creme brulee cheesecake from the French place sits in the fridge):

And that, as they say, was that.  

I’m going to keep these short (this took me almost half an hour) and not necessarily daily.  So, eyes open for the link. 

Welcome back!

The one(s) that got away (and other fish tales)

 So, today we did something completely different from ever before.  We went fishing. 

The resort offered it as an activity and we signed up; they hooked us up with a guide, named Evan, and we met him.  We had purchased our one-day salmon licenses ahead of time.  (No one ever came around and checked)

This was a focal activity from the opening planning stages as KG and his best buddy are into fly fishing.  But it ended up being just the two of us, thus providing comic relief. :)

I’d never been fly fishing before.  If you don’t know it or understand the distinction, with fly fishing you are always active — there’s no sitting in the boat and drinking a beer.  According to Evan, you want to recast every 20 seconds or so. And there’s, of course, a skill to learn as to how to flick the fly out there.  

KG had done this a few times before and was quite proficient.  He needed no real instruction from Evan. 

I did. 😂

It turns out it really isn’t a good time for salmon here.  In the ins and outs to sea of their lives, we were kind of in between.  And then Evan said they are “the fish of a thousand casts.”   They don’t bite easily. KG caught one baby, which Evan says isn’t technically a salmon (don’t ask, I can’t claim to have grasped the details), but that was as close to one as we got.

KG ended up catching five fish.  I only have this picture — KG never got out his phone and Evan did but he hasn’t shared his pictures.  So, here it is:

I caught one. 

It slipped out of my hand before Evan got the camera out. 😢

We actually started the day at a different spot — here’s the best shot of it:

You can see the hill, the nearness of the trees, and the current.  Compare to this:

There was a brook coming into the river, the Margaree, behind me, so we were at the junction.  We got nothing at the first place and Evan moved us after about an hour. 

We were working left to right, me following towards KG there, at about 1130 Maritime Time, and…

KG says he’ll remember this and tell this the rest of his life. 

There was a branch under the water in front of me, KG said he stumbled there earlier, and I cast and lost my balance a little forward.  And there was nothing forward.  My first step was forward to catch myself.  And stepped on the branch.

I went into the river face-first.  KG has told the fam I “was swimming.”  Funny.  Ha ha.  

My first thought was “my god that’s cold.” (I may have said “shit” as I tripped :))

I realized I wasn’t getting my feet under me and rolled over on my back and came up for air.  Evan was part of the way from KG to me.  KG has used the word “flailing” multiple times. Ha ha.  Ha. 

I went to shore and got out of my wet top — fortunately, I had taken a layer off when we got there.  It was a nice day (as pictures show), so I was fine, except for being wet from waist to toes.  As Evan pointed out, the feature of waders that doesn’t let water in, also doesn’t let water out.  It eventually warmed up, but it wasn’t comfortable. 

Evan said he’d had lots of people get wet, but it was his full go under.  Ha ha. 

If you are reveling in my pain (#$%^&*), there’s more.  Later, I’m casting (I had good moments and bad with this) and I flipped it back and hooked myself!  Yeah, through the waders and top so that there’s small “abrasion.”  A bit of an ouch.

Yeah, I had all kinds of #$%^&* fun.  :)

It actually was.  And we caught enough fish to not be satisfied, but to feel like it wasn’t fruitless.  (And everything in Nova Scotia is catch and release, so there was no literal fruit to be had).  

And that was Saturday, day.

Friday night, for food porn lovers, we went to the Panorama, which is the high end restaurant at the resort. [side story: it’s right above (on the second floor) the 18th green and if someone does something interesting, diners pound on the window, either cheering or mocking. : ) last night, a guy made like a 60 foot putt from the front of the green and there was a lot of pounding on the glass for him :). One of those distinctive features of the resort and the restaurant.] 

I thought KG would get lobster (which he loves — if you don’t know, lobster is ubiquitous on the coast in Nova Scotia) , but he got lamb chops instead. 

I had the beef tenderloin, which was to very good.  Melted in your mouth. 

And KG started with oysters from nearby.  

Tonight we are going to the lobster shack on “campus” here at the resort — they do a “boil”, if you know the concept.  I don’t know how boiling brisket comes out, but that’s what I might have (you know I don’t eat lobster 🤮) 

And up early tomorrow for golf right here in front of our room. 

WTF Canada (& Boston)

 So, I am on the road again, this time with KG to Nova Scotia (how’s your Canadian geography?) for golf and fishing…but started with a baseball game in Boston. 

I’m going to open with this picture from today’s golf course, Cabot Cliffs, which was amazing.  This is the shot from the high spot of the course, the 17th tee. 

Not to overdo golf, but it was the most visually spectacular course I think I’ve ever played.  Lots of vistas, lots of water views, lots of elevation changes.  and lots of big ass bunkers.  

I will tell one story the caddy told.  The second par 3 on the back you play over this big bunker with a rock sticking up in it (we neither one got a picture) — boulder! The architects argued over whether or not to leave it.  They got someone in who was mediator who didn’t play golf but watched on TV and he said instantly “oh, you gotta leave the rock, it makes the hole.”  And, see, yes, it makes it memorable. 

But (for blog purposes) today’s storry isn’t about golf or the course, but about our playing partners. :) Like last year’s trip to England with J, we came as a twosome.  You never know what that will mean; last year we played 4 days without getting paired up.  Not this year!

Standing on the practice putting green, waiting, I talked to this older caddy, Ted, who ended up double-bagging for the other two.  But I had no idea that the couple wondering around was who we were playing with — they were dressed like hikers, not golfers.  He was wearing a puffy vest (their was a discussion about their both wearing all black later) and black sock cap with a bill.  He wore sunglasses all day, although the sun never shone (I understand there can be reasons, but still…)  She wore joggers and a similar top.  

But nevermind what they were wearing.  He was a pretty good golfer (but wait for it) but she had only been playing a year.  And it looked at least like that.  She played all day with 2 clubs, a 7 iron and a putter.  And she dribbled the ball off the tee A LOT!!! 

We got talked to about keeping up with the group in front of us at least 3 times. 

Which brings to part two: putting.  They made each other putt EVERYTHING out! I mean, one footers, they putted out.  And she missed some.  A lot, really.  

And he…oh, my god, he did the newfangled alignment method on putts.  And paced them off.  Carefully (she did it foot-over-foot).  I will go back to — they HaD A CADDy!!! Who is paid to tell you what putts do…but, no, they slowly, methodically, did  their own thing.  And he did it even on those 2 foot putts. 

They were from Brooklyn.  The place could get a rep if people acted like this from there a lot. :)

They did not make small talk.  Every attempt ended in an awkward silence.  “You got nothing…” we both wanted to say to him.

It was so bad that KG refused to even consider having a post-round drink. :)

Stories to tell forever.  Oh, yeah, they both played dayglo colored golf balls; I told KG I would see her neon pink one rolling in my dreams tonight. 

The golf course was awesome, though. 

I met KG in Boston on Wednesday; it could not have gone better — he didn’t wait 5 minutes on the sidewalk at airport for me to arrive straight from Bloomsburg.  Then we went to downtown Boston — KG had not been there that he remembers.  We did the main old buildings and then went to hotel, cleaned up, and Ubered to Fenway. (I was sick of lobster signs early on Wednesday; today’s course’s logo was a lobster 🙄) 

It was a great game.  KG got great tickets right behind home plate.  The Red Sox hit four solo home runs; the Rays hit one homer, too.  It ended up being 4-3.  

Thursday the drive from Boston to wherever we are (my Canada geography needs work) took 13 hours.  And we lost an hour — my first time ever in the whatever time zone.  Weird that tonight’s basketball game starts at 930 😥 

The best thing about the area is it’s Scottish roots — they revel in it here.  I mean, the town we’re in is Inverness.  We passed through New Glasgow.  Our caddy today was from Dundee.  We have been told more than once that two generations ago people still spoke Gaelic here — they came from the UK to learn it since it was all but dead in Scotland.  They are big here on sheep farming.  

It’s already been fun, despite AC and DC on the course today, and there’s tonight’s dinner and fishing tomorrow (the fish tales have already begun)…wish us well. 

Food porn and lost and not found

I was told there was stuff to tell, so I should blog. When  the crowd commands…

We started with a walk to Covent Garden for last minute souvies, then decided to have breakfast at a French place on the piazza there. Final food porn:

If you wonder what this is, this is their maple French toast, made of brioche, with a caramel macaron on top (K helped with that). 

 This is K’s Eggs Royale — she said the salmon was excellent. She didn’t get a macaron garnish 😂

Then to the airport. Our cab driver was the first person we met here who claimed to like DJT. “He’s a straight shooter”. When he was reminded he didn’t know what he was doing, our driver said “oh, of course not, he proved that first term” 🙄🤷🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

We arrived at the airport and immediately found the desk that was supposed to have my Jean jacket. I had the identifying number. The first clerk we went to, disconcertingly, had to ask her colleague two stations down what to do to find it. !!! 😡😡😡 it was a wonderful study in work dynamics, as the serving person kept rolling her eyes when asked another detail. At one point she nudged the colleague between them and made the universal “what the fuck “ sign. After fifteen minutes the second person, whose name might have been Liz, went off across the airport to another storage area. The first woman asked if we made an appointment; we said no, were we supposed to? No…

Liz came back without the jacket. 😡 she then told me she was texting the colleague who checked it in, Charley, what they did with it. Charley never answered. Twenty minutes in, Liz went back across the airport, saying she’d be back in 5. 

She was back in more like 10 — without the jacket!!! 😡😡😡

We were getting antsy abt getting to our gate.  She as much as gave up and said they’d email and pay to have it sent, since they seemed to have lost it again. 😭 the jacket seems to like London. 

I will end with some travel thoughts for those who might be making the journey soon (you know who you might be 😃)

• Cell service isn’t consistently better than it is in the States (even though you’d think in this small country, one tall tower would do 😃). This raises the issue of whether it is worth the $12/day Verizon charges for service. One act is to get a British SIM card. But almost every place has Wi-Fi (shitty or good) so you can survive without it. It’s a matter of your tolerance. 
• I’ve driven in Cornwall 3 times now. It’s rigged. There comes a point where the roads are tiny — essentially one lane. I working recommend it if you can avoid it. Sean is paying for us to have a driver next time. 
• The food here is unbelievable. OC we love in Bloomsburg where there is little choice. We had seafood, Indian, Thai, French, Italian, Scottish and probably others I’ve forgotten. It’s one of the joys of visiting, despite the centuries long complaint abt English food. 
• Be v, v careful abt hotel room size. 😂 we had a talk with another couple coming down in the elevator abt whether they knew — no!!! We discussed trying to coordinate movements, etc. 😂 our room was 97 sq ft. Their “family room” slept 4 at 110 sq ft with bunk beds 😂
• Taxi rides are expensive AF. The one to the station this morning was £25! And we went to play last night across the street from that station for £1.95. Sometimes you need the convenience, but you can rack up some charges quickly going across just central London. 
• The weather is a mystery. As the cab driver said this morning “you often get all 4 seasons in a day”. Yesterday it rained a bit, was sunny a bit, was windy a bit one day it predicted a high of 21 and we saw 16 with clouds and wind. One day went the other way. Layers is the cliched answer 😃

We are taxiing to takeoff, so this will be it. Hope you’ve enjoyed. Bye now.