Skip to main content

The great project: getting to Windsor on a grey and rainy day

 As a friend of mine remarked after reading my blog and remembering her own experiences sleeping at an airport one long ago Christmas: “Just keep thinking of it as an adventure.” An adventure testing what stamina we have left in our elder years for sure. At least we haven’t slept at an airport (so far, we still have tomorrow to get through.) 

I didn’t see Elizabeth at King’s Cross yesterday. After writing my blog and taking a shower, I realized I was not feeling up to socializing. For Elizabeth’s sake as much as mine. I think Elizabeth might have been secretly relieved, she replied that we had looked a bit like the Marley brothers’ ghosts when she saw us on Wednesday—sans clanking chains but I certainly felt like I was dragging as did Richard. I was all for hanging out at the hotel all day but after eating what the hotel had to offer in the way of breakfast, Richard said he was up for going back to Piccadilly and revisiting Hatchard’s for reading material. So we traveled back into London, the weather thankfully sunny, and revisited first our favorite cafe at the Royal Academy and then Hatchards and Waterstone’s. And then we went to the M & S Food Express at Terminal 2, loaded up with sandwiches and trifle cups, fruit cups, and went back to the hotel. As I said, at least the weather was sunny and I took some final photos of the area around Piccadilly.







. 

 











I decided to bring out the lovely tea tray that Elizabeth had given me for Christmas to make my M & S feast a bit more elegant. I didn’t use the William Morris fabric napkins though.


There was an NCIS marathon on telly—come to London and watch NCIS, such is modern travel. I wondered if this hotel had been one of the so-called “COVID hotels” where folks had had to quarantine a couple of years ago. The upside would have been clean and comfortable (once you figure out how the heating works); the downside would have been the in-house restaurant food.

It’s really nasty looking outside this morning but we have non-refundable tickets to Windsor Castle this afternoon so we are preparing to bundle up and find our way out there. Certainly not the holiday we had planned but at least it’s provided grist for the writing mill and, so far at least, we’ve been able to regard it from a kind of wry “we are still very lucky” point of view.

And now to Windsor

Comments

  1. OneKidsMomDecember 30, 2022 at 5:23 AM

    On to Windsor! So glad both you and Elizabeth were flexible and paying attention to your health needs! Sometimes a thing that would be so small becomes HUGE when not feeling 100%. Learning to pace ourselves is a senior skill!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 2024 and blogging

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most ...
12 comments
Read more

It’s just another day

  Yesterday was the final day of my 8-day assignment in a 4th grade class; I’ve written something about that assignment in a previous post, “Revolt of the Guinea Pig,” It’s been a challenging 8 days which, as Dickens might have said, brought out the best in me and probably the worst in me as well. But yesterday morning I had that experience that every teacher dreads—shelter in place, also known as possible shooter situation. I had arrived at the school at 7:20 thinking how wonderful it was that our heat had broken a bit. The skies were overcast, we’d had rain the day before, there was a cool breeze. As I walked to my classroom (photos below of what the buildings look like), I waved to the students already gathered on the other side of the gate, who were waiting to rush in, some to the cafeteria for their breakfast, some to the playground to run and hopefully get some of that energy out before the bell rang at 7:55. I unlocked the outside door to our building, walked down the corrid...
2 comments
Read more

Journeying to Helsinki

Sheila and I got up quite early in our hotel room, were packed and ready to go by 7:30. Had some buffet breakfast (a couple of mini croissants, double Gloucester cheese, fruit and a latte), brushed teeth, out of room by 8:30 am. At train station before 9, picked up my tickets and realized I wasn’t going directly to Heathrow on the train but was going to King’s Cross first and then would have to transfer to the Tube. Ugh. Still the first class carriage York to King’s Cross was very nice. I was served a ham sandwich and a brownie. (If I had realized that would be the last food I’d get until 3:00 pm, I would have eaten the whole sandwich. This is becoming a theme with me, long waits between meals.) As first class also means free WiFi, I began to dismantle my arrangements for Edinburgh although I couldn’t fix the Ryanair part of it yet—what a surprise. I have over a week to do that, if I’m not too tired when I get to the hotel in Helsinki tonight, I will get that done. It was difficult to ...
2 comments
Read more