Are
we spoiled, or what?
(January
9 - January 27, 2000)
Unfortunately, I can't seem to find photos from
this trip,
so I'll put them up at a future date if we come across them.
The year 2000 did not start out on a very auspicious note which, I
guess, means things can only get better. I once wrote a
travelogue that was
titled 'Flexibility' in which a planned trip to work in Paris didn't
work out
and I ended up back in the states. Well, flexibility is still the
key
word in this job because things have a way of changing, sometimes
daily. ;-)
At first, it looked like I was really going to get lucky with the last
assignment I would work. I would be out in California for the
month of
January. That would have been great because I would escape having
to spend a brutal winter month in some other US city like, say,
Boston.
Being in California would also let me hook up with two folks. One
was a
classmate that I haven't seen since high school. The other person
I have never
met, Mark Nemeth, but he travels around America full-time and has one
of my two favorite RV
lifestyle web sites, Mark's Full-time Adventures. I'm sure you
have figured
out that I did not end up in California.
That trip got moved to, Yup, BOSTON, and now it meant winter. I
HATE WINTER! With every bone in my body. Why do you think I
moved from NY to
South Florida back in 1977? ;-) Brrrrrr. And
UGH.
BUT..... It meant that I would be able to hook up with my boyhood
friend Frank (from the Tokyo
travelogues) and have dinner a couple of times over the three weeks I
would travel
to
Boston. So it wouldn't have been all that bad. HOWEVER.....
here's where the flexibility comes in.
So where am I? I find myself starting out the year 2000 working
in ENGLAND again. At first, this trip was going to be without
Diane.
She had indicated that she really had no big desire to go back to
England again since we
were there twice in 1999, and she wanted to work to replenish her
spending
money. But that lure of travel just got in her blood and it
became impossible
to resist it. On Saturday night she started to indicate that she
sort of wished she had decided to go. So I made some calls to
Delta to see what
I could do. There were some limited non-refundable seats
available for $496, which
is a good price. But she wasn't positive about going. Then
on
Sunday, as I was getting ready to go to the airport, she says she
really wished she had
decided to go. Sigh. So now it was time to do some quick
moves to
try to get a cheap seat. When I got to the airport to check in, I
asked the Delta
person to check on the flights we wanted to see if there was
room. There was, so
I booked it, and Diane arrived in England on Saturday, January
15. ARE WE
SPOILED, OR WHAT? :-) Although Diane started off slowly
with her
travels back in 1993, and more in 1994, it wasn't until 1995 and 1996
that she did a lot of
travel. When I returned to the Audit function in 1998, she
started traveling
100% with me out of the country. We have traveled together for
the past 26
weeks, dating all the way back to summer of 1998 and the Caracas trip
that she didn't
go on. That made it very hard to not make this trip
together. We are a
traveling TEAM. :-)
However, neither of us had any burning desire to go to Europe in
winter. We had made plans to go to Florida in January for a long
weekend.
The trip to England meant canceling a planned trip to Ocala, which was
to include a
day trip to Tampa to attend an RV rally and meet Ron and Barb
Hofmeister,
who have our other favorite RV lifestyle web site, Movinon.net.
These
folks have been full-time RVers for almost 11 years. We've read
both of their
books and monitor their site. RV buddies John and Libby from
north Georgia,
but now recently full-timers, were also going to be there.
Unfortunately,
the other half of my department is also out of the country, so there
was no way
to switch teams to stay in the states. As they say, c'est la vie.
The team this time is made up of Steve Needham (Tampa), who is leading
his first engagement; Tuan (Endicott); Steve McGinnis (Atlanta), who is
thinking about joining the IT Audit Group; and Merle (Dallas).
The other
half of our department is down in Portsmouth on a different
engagement.
I'm real glad that Merle is on the same team as I am this time. I
met Merle in
September 1996 when he first joined our audit team. Actually, I
think Diane
and I were the first folks he met upon arrival in Tokyo. I will
always
remember that
first day when we met him and we showed him around Tokyo and walked his
butt off. That was one of the 'memory' days that stuck.
Merle's
an 'old' codger like me and will also be retiring soon, at the end of
March. So
having Merle along will make the time go by faster as we always have
great discussions
over dinner and we work very well together.
The other thing good about this trip is that my Swiss friend, Peter,
asked us to come visit them one more time in Wollerau before the
international
travel ends. By the way, unless you are fluent in German, you
wouldn't
know that the name of the village is pronounced Vollerau. So we
have made plans
to go to Switzerland on the second of the two weekends here.
Our work location is in Staines, which is about 30 minutes drive from
the hotel in Kensington. Early morning traffic added 15 minutes
to the
drive. We started out with one rental car and one 'hire car' who
would pick us up
in the morning and again in the evening. Each driver took a
different
way to/from the location and never made it in under an hour. None
of the ways
they went would have been the way I would have gone, but they weren't
up to having a
foreigner tell them the route. It turned out to be more expensive
to do the
hire car than another rental car, so mid-week we got another rental
car.
Funny thing, other than one day where the traffic was unexplainably
heavy going into
London after work, which resulted in it taking a little over an hour to
get to
the hotel, we have had nothing over 45 minutes drive, and some at 40
minutes. So much for foreigners not knowing their way
around. Little did
these drivers know that we become almost like natives in the places
where we work.
;-)
Not wanting to go very far in the evenings for dinner due to the
lateness of returning to the hotel (usually around 7 PM), we opted to
eat locally
the first week. So I took the folks who wanted to eat together to
some
places we frequented in August. There were the Indian and Greek
restaurants
across the street from the hotel, IT'S (Italian), Ask (also Italian),
and a place
called the Pharmacy. This restaurant served continental food
(meat/fish)
and was decorated like an old pharmacy, right down to the scrub sink in
the
rest rooms.
Diane arrived on Saturday, January 15 about an hour late as the plane
was late taking off and was held over London for a while before
landing. I
took one of the team cars and drove out to Gatwick to pick her
up. After
fighting the traffic each morning to get through London to go to our
work location,
it was real nice to have no traffic to contend with, but I didn't
expect much
traffic at 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning. It has been cold and
sometimes
wet since we arrived the week before, and the Saturday ride to the
airport was
damp. This was the first time since summer of 1998 that we
haven't traveled
together and it was like we'd been apart for months. I was
anxious to see her
and it was great to see her come through customs. We headed back
to the
hotel so Diane could nap for a while. Then we
decided to head out to get some lunch and find an ATM. We spent
three weeks in
the hotel (Kensington Hilton) in August when we were here, so we knew
our way
around.
On Saturday evening, we had a team dinner to celebrate my upcoming
retirement on February 1. The other half of our department was
working in the
south at Portsmouth and they came up for the weekend to attend the
dinner.
I was given the choice of restaurant and chose Offshore, which is a
French
restaurant specializing in seafood. Diane and I had been there
three times
in August with the team I was leading at the time, and none of the
current folks had
been there. We always had a great meal during the August visits
and it
got good reviews from everyone on that team. It was a bit
different this
time. They were out of some entrees and then out of some
desserts. Diane
asked for vanilla ice cream. Not available. Then she asked
for mango
(because the waiter offered mango). He came back and said it was
not
available. I ordered one of the four creme brulees and then found
out they only had
three. So I yielded mine and Diane and I decided to skip
dessert. I mentioned
it to the manager when he came over to our table of 12 folks. I
even
'hinted' that he should think about offering something complementary,
you know, like a
glass of Grand Marnier. ;-) He didn't bite. So on the
way out
I asked him who would receive the email that I planned to send to the
address on the business
card. He then came up with all the reasons why they were out of
food (none of
which held any water). I did mention to him that if he had
offered me a
glass of Grand Marnier, I may not have been as disappointed with the
dining
experience. Some people really don't have the people or business
skills to be managing a business. With 12 people eating dinner in
his restaurant, he should have offered something to make up for their
lack of food.
Given that it was cold, it was a good time to do some indoor
stuff. So Diane and I went to the British Museum on Sunday.
I had been there once
before when I was working in Portsmouth and took a day trip to London
with Lacey Bostick, who was working in Hursley at the time, and then
subsequently
joined the audit team for a couple of years. The museum had a
'knock your
socks off' Egyptian display, including Cleopatra's mummy. I like
Egyptian
stories and long to see the pyramids, which we may yet do some
day.
One display that was closing the day we were there was Cracking
Codes-The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment. We decided to view the
display
and spent about an hour going through it. It was very
interesting. The
stone was discovered in 1799 during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt it a
town named
Rosetta. It was the key to discovering how to read
hieroglyphics. By the 4th
century AD, all knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs had
disappeared. The stone
contains an inscription which was a decree by King Ptolemy V Epiphanes
in March 196
BC. It was intended to be understood by several peoples and was
written in
three languages: hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek. By using
the
Greek section as a key, scholars realized that hieroglyphs were not
symbols, but represented a language. The discovery of the Rosetta
Stone was a
monumental find to help the world understand how early Egyptians lived.
Another display that we decided to view was Gilded Dragons, which
showed
a Golden Age in Chinese history, the Tang dynasty. It was the
time
when gold and silver achieved high status as precious metals for the
first
time. Many of the exhibits were excavated in recent years from
tombs and Buddhist crypts
in Shaanxi province.
For more information on the museum you can check
out the following web site.
http://www.british-museum.ac.uk/index.html
We both enjoyed the museum very much and spent about four hours
there. I could have spent more time there, but the slow moving
and the standing causes
my back to start aching and I didn't want a repeat of the problems I
had with
my back in August. So we headed out and back toward the tube
station. On the way, we came across an open store front with a
bunch of people in front of a
stage. On the stage was a guy who was conducting a sort of
auction.
Actually, he was selling packages of stuff, some up to ten items, and
asking people who
had the cash to pay. He did it to entertain. It seemed like
a good
deal to buy some of these packages for $50-100, but I am such a skeptic
that I can't get
past the adage "if it seems too good to be true, then it probably
is".
So we just watched and tried to figure out what the deal (scam?)
was. How
can someone buy a Nintendo 64, a VCR, a video camera, calculator, other
small items,
all for
$50-100? There had to be a gimmick somewhere. Refurbished
goods? Repossessed goods? Certainly it couldn't be brand
new, top of the line,
stuff. Could it?
After a while, it was getting colder and darker and we decided to head
back. By the way, it gets dark about 4 PM and by 4:30 PM it is
pretty
dark. Dreary. Depressing. As in....UGH. We took
the tube to Oxford Circus
to pick up bus 94 back to the hotel. If we had turned left when
we came out of the
tube, the bus stop was about 100 yards away. Nope. We went
right and
spent about half hour
looking for the bus stop. We eventually decided that going
forward along the route wasn't working since we didn't know if/where
the bus
turned. So decided to go back to the tube station and backtrack
along the route where we
saw the bus 94s coming. Bingo. There it was, about 100
yards from
the station.
So we waited for a bus to arrive, and waited and waited and
waited. Finally, bus 94 arrived and off we went back towards the
hotel. We decided
we'd eat by ourselves that evening and got off at Notting Hill Gate to
eat at
Ask. On the way, we wanted to find the Italian restaurant we ate
at in August and
we found it, along with a Thai restaurant since Tuan liked Thai
food. We
had a nice Italian meal at Ask and then went back to the hotel.
All in all,
a long and enjoyable day that started with 10 AM mass and ended up back
at the
hotel about 7:30 PM. to end the first week in England for me and first
weekend for
Diane.
Until next time.
NOTE: This turned out to be the last
travelog I wrote before I retired on February 1.
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