Life Since London

Of course coming back to your life after vacation is always cumbersome.  There is so much to do that has been put to the back burner while you've been gone.  I often want to move to wherever it is that I am when I'm on a vacation, but that's because I want to move there ON vacation.  No work schedule to adhere to, no house to tidy, no garden to tend, no bills to pay...but I digress.

We have been very busy since we've been back.  I just went through my email a few days ago and the messages from a month ago.  Oops.  Sorry people I've been ignoring, it wasn't intentional!  The garden kept growing while we were gone (of course, there's no stopping it until the frost comes) and we had tomatoes coming out of our ears.  We flew back on Thursday, slept and caught up life on Friday and went back to work Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  On Tuesday we went out and picked all of the ripe, red tomatoes we had on our plants, which amounted to SIX bags of tomatoes.  The pepper plants had been prosperous as well, so we had a whole bag of jalapeños and about a dozen sweet peppers.  There were maybe a half dozen cucumbers we picked (I see cucumber sandwiches!) and found the largest caterpillar I have ever seen!

It was eating some of the tomatoes...but with as many as we had, it can have some.  A friend at work asked for some club-sized zucchini and we could definitely provide!  Mom even harvested the only Hubbard squash we got to grow this year (the vines kept trying to die...) and we rescued a couple of cantaloupes that weren't too far gone.  The pumpkins did amazing this year so get ready for a pumpkin themed post later in October.

We took a couple of bags of the rounder tomatoes into work to share and half a bag of jalapeños, because there was no way we'd eat that many.  The rest of the tomatoes (mostly romas) ended up sitting in the bags for three more days as we went back to work, which ended up being the end of some of them.  But the first day off we had we canned as many as we could.  There were still quite a few jars of sauce in the pantry from last year, so all of these tomatoes were stewed.  Stewing tomatoes is an easier process than saucing which was good because there was still a lot.  Mom started them off by scalding them and then her and I both sat and peeled and diced them up.  We each filled a dutch oven full to the brim, then I took them over and added some oregano and basil and cooked them on medium heat until they juiced up a bit and boiled a short while.  From there it was into the jars and then the canner.  Phew!  By the end of the weekend we got them all canned (though it was rough) and are 31 pints richer!

We've also been missing our afternoon teas, so we've been doing that more since we've been home.  It's nice on our days off because we only usually eat two meals a day and this is a good snack sized bite to eat in the middle of the day.  The cats are also glad we are back and eating at the table again (for their benefit, obviously).

The fair also started that weekend we were canning tomatoes, so we figured on Sunday we'd rest and go visit it because if we didn't, we wouldn't.  I told everyone that we were going on an eating tour of the fair and they asked how you do that.  Well we walked in and we ate, and walked through the house demo, then we went to the petting zoo, and then got something to eat, then looked at the quilts and watch a lady spinning wool (and got her number because she does a weekly spin and knit night at her house), and then went to the Ag building and got something to eat, then walked around the food booths and got something more, then picked up kettle korn and went home!  We figured that would be our only day to go so we wanted to get all our favorite foods in.  Later this last week, however, Mom found out she won two free fair tickets and free parking, so we ended up going back on Friday for dinner (a little less eating this time) and got to walk through the barns.  There was also this AWESOME robot advertising some business, but it was so real you had to stand there a long time to tell if it was a guy in a suit or if it really was a robot.  There was mechanical sounds every time it'd move and the voice was altered, of course, but we ended up deciding there really was someone in there.  So cool!

With October coming up quickly there are more things showing up on the to-do list.  I want to get the house decorated for fall, which involves cleaning and I'd like to do a deep clean and get the house in ship-shape for the inevitable lock down that is winter.  We need to get a couple of truckloads of wood and eventually clean out the garden.  We washed the windows outside today (a shock, I know....I don't think we've ever washed the windows on the house...) and thanks to a lovely Pinterest pin, they look amazing.  And we also we got all the spider webs off the outside of the house (it's like they were slowly trying to cocoon us in here).  I have high hopes for getting back on my elliptical and shedding a few more pounds before trying another embryo transfer.  And walking!  The weather is perfect right now for evening walks, I just have to get myself out there!

London - Day 10

Well as I'm writing this, I am at 30000 feet going 552 mph a little south of Iceland.  We are flying home!  Hooray!  As a coworker said, there's nothing like going to Europe to make you glad you live in America.  I am very ready to go home.  We got up at 3:30 to try and catch just a little more sleep (because 3 to 4 hours of sleep sounds better when you add that extra half hour).  Mom and I had decided not to shower, just freshen up and go.  I got on my iPhone after I got up and checked us in to our Alaska Air flight to Yakima and screen shot the tickets.  We also paid for all the luggage since every checked bag is $25 on that flight.  It took three trips up and down the stairs to get all our luggage down those 4 flights.  We needed to be outside waiting at 5 AM for the shuttle to pick us up.  There was supposed to be an invoice available for us in the morning so I went over to the desk to see if I could also print the tickets.  The young man behind the desk was a little hesitant, but went ahead and let me.  I tried to use the link to the tickets I had emailed to myself but it wasn't working, something about not being compatible with the Adobe they had on there.  I told him I couldn't but that I'd screen shot them and that I was sure there would be kiosks in the airport to print them.  He said no, they had no place to print them at the airport and that a screen shot wouldn't be good enough for the check-in.  He had me go back to the check-in page and go through it again to get to the tickets and print them from there.  When he saw that it said Alaska Airlines, he said excitedly, "Are you from Alaska?"  I said no, that we were from Washington State in the US on the west coast and that Alaska Air flies all over the Pacific Northwest.  We talked a bit about it and he said he really wanted to leave Britain and that he was hoping to move to Vancouver B.C.  But he needed to save up some more money.  I told him it was nice where I was from,  we really did have to save a whole bunch of money to travel to Britain.  He said he knew I was American from my accent and I said yeah I knew that really gave me away.  He was sad that he only spoke 4 languages and I said that it was better than me, I only spoke 1 and a half.  He asked how you speak only half a language and I said that I had taken high school French and was only good enough at it to read some of it, but not speak it too well.  Tickets in hand I went back and Mom and helped her get the luggage out to the curb and we sat on the steps in the dark early morning cold until the shuttle came.  It was a good thing we picked the earlier time because he picked up quite a few more people and we didn't get to the airport until after 6:30.  They had said to be there 3 hours before our flight and we were, but just barely.  It was a pretty easy check-in process and it was all self-serve.  We printed our baggage tickets and a lady helped us put them on.  When we went to the counter to hand over our baggage, the tickets were not on the right luggage and so "my" luggage was the small carry-on and "moms" were the two large ones.  We both held our breath as my large suitcase was weighed, but it must have come in under.  The agent asked to see a receipt for our payment on the extra bag and we were both a bit dumbfounded.  Shouldn't that all show up when you scan in my ticket?  I had to get on the free wifi (which required my name and email and something else that just seemed absurd for access to 45 minutes of free wifi) and go to mom's email and show her the emailed receipt.  And as I'm frantically trying to get online and find it, she just kept repeating that she needed a receipt.  I understand your request, can you understand I can't produce it immediately?  She was okay with the emailed receipt thank goodness.  However she only wanted to see our ticket from London to Vancouver.  I tried to hand her all of them so that she would check us all the way through, but she very brusquely gave them back to me.  Mom asked her before we left if the bags were checked all the way to Yakima and she said yes.  I was dubious since she hadn't looked at any ticket other than the one that got me out of her country.  Next up was security and that went pretty smoothly too.  Until Mom set off the metal detector because she was still wearing her Fitbit and had to be patted down.  We found out our gate wouldn't be announced until 9:05 and we had about an hour to wait, so we went looking for the VAT place.  It turns out you do need a form from EVERY store you buy from that you are going to declare, so we were only able to do two VAT refunds.  Your welcome Britain we helped boost your economy.  We sat and waited for our gate to show up on the monitors and I did a little last minute shopping.  The gate number showed up a little bit earlier than 9:05 and we took the long trek out to it.  (Down a hallway, down an escalator, around the corner, down a very long hallway with three people movers, up an escalator and one more long hallway...)  The plane was late getting to our gate because not all of the crew had shown up on time so we waited a little longer than we were supposed to.  And now it's on to Vancouver!  See you in North America!

When we arrived in Vancouver we were about 20 minutes behind our scheduled arrival time.  I wasn't sure where we would pass through customs, whether it was here or in Seattle, but I was kind of panicked at the time we had to make it to our connection.  We had to turn in our Entry cards that were given out on the plane, but when we got to the check point the man said we needed to fill out a different card.  But he was SO nice about it!  "Oh, well it looks like you need to fill out this card instead of the one you got, but just go right over there and then come right back to me, don't worry about getting back in the line."  I had forgotten how NICE people are here in North America!  So we did and made it down to the U.S. Security check.  And here we really started to panic.  There was quite a line and we hoped it would move quickly, but...It...Didn't...Move.  You could see people putting their stuff on the conveyor and moving through, but the line didn't seem to move up in accordance with the number of people going through.  Finally we made it through the door way and BOOM!  Merging lines people...merging lines.  Apparently they had two planes disembark in the International terminal.  So did they open one of the other TWO lines to get us through quicker?  No.  Mom pulled out her watch and we spent our time in line coming up with contingency plans.  We could probably get stand-by on the 11:00 plane to Yakima, it's never full.  We could rent a car and drive home from Seattle.  We could try to get a ride on the Airporter Shuttle.  Then finally we were at the front of the line.  The people right ahead of us used like 5 bins to put their stuff in.  A pair of shoes here, a purse there.  By this point I had become old hat at the security line.  Shoes off and in the bottom of the bin, iPad on top of that, tickets and passport, jacket, bag on the other side laying down flat.  We got through and put ourselves back together and went out the door to someone who had us identify our bags from pictures taken as they were checked in London.  Then around the corner was customs.  They helped us with the answers we had messed up (Are you bringing back any commercial items?  Well, yea, we have souvenirs.  Anything to sell?  No.  Then mark that as no.  Oohhh.)  When we made it into the terminal to catch our flight we had 10 minutes.  So we ran.  And made it just as they started general boarding.  Thank heavens!  We took that puddle jumper back to Seattle and then went to the baggage carousel to see if our luggage was there.  It was.  I knew no one in London would be like, "Oh sure we definitely checked that all the way to Yakima," like they knew where that even was.  So we collected our bags, got some trolleys and went up to check them in at the Alaska Air desk.  More self-service kiosks, where we printed our luggage tickets and our boarding passes (see Europe...they print the passes at the airport...revolutionary, I know).  We then had to go back through security (our 3rd time that day) and it all went really smoothly, so that we had about an hour and a half to get something to eat.  They'd fed us very well on the Air Canada flight (a lunchish meal, drinks, a hot-pocket type snack, drinks, ice cream and pretzels, more water...), but it was time for some dinner.  We ate and then got some real fresh brewed coffee.  Aaahhh real coffee.  Then it was just one more puddle jumper (which we both slept the whole way on) and we were home!  Mom ran and got the car and went off to get the dogs from the kennels because they closed at 6 and it was 5:45.  I got all the luggage from the garage door slide and sat and waited in the terminal for her to come back.  While I was waiting there was an airport employee that asked if I needed a ride or to call someone.  ()See!  So nice!  I said that my ride was coming and she did, with two dogs that gave us both stern barkings and clingy love all the way home.  We got our luggage in, loved the cats, and sat around in a bit of shock.  When I turned on my iPad it hadn't quite changed back from London time and it said it was 3:30 again.  We'd been up for 24 hours, but we'd made it home.

People have asked since we've been back if we'd go again and the answer is most definitely yes!  We've even already talked about what we'd want to see when we go back.  But it won't be right away, maybe in a year or two.  I've mentioned in this post how nice everyone is here and "nice" is not as descriptive a word as I would like.  People in America (and Canada), random strangers on the street, are interested in your welfare.  If you look lost and ask for help to get somewhere, they will point you in the right direction and may even go out of their way to walk you there if you're unsure.  In Europe they were ready to get rid of me the moment I opened my mouth.  They did not want to be bothered with my incompetence.  Overall they were not unfriendly, they just weren't willing to help.  I think that further we were out of London this was different, people were more willing to help you, but we weren't out there alone much on this trip.  Maybe it's just the number of people in London that makes them that way.  But we are much more versed in travel over there and the options for food and I think we would feel much more comfortable traveling by ourselves when we go back.  I've heard from lots of you that I've seen in person or on Facebook how much you've enjoyed taking this trip with Mom and I, and I love to hear that you do!  I worry that my long posts are just a bore, something to scroll quickly past on your newsfeed.  So thank you for all the encouragement.  And I'm so glad I did write down everything at the end of every day.  It was a wonderful trip that I got to live over again.  See you all in the more mundane posts of life...

London - Day 9

We had saved the last day of our trip to do any of the things that we had missed.  It was a good thing to do and we ended up filling it from beginning to end.  I had wanted to visit a shop that said it was in London, but ended up being a 30 minute ride on the Overground line from where we were.  It's called The Who Shop and is a store that sells only Dr. Who stuff and I had read that it had a museum as well.  

Not my picture...didn't remember to take one when we got there...

It was bit...underwhelming.  We found fun stuff and we dropped a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but it was a lot of stuff that you could have found online.  I tried to get stuff I hadn't seen in the U.S., but it was also really overpriced.  Kind of a let down after the awesomeness of Harry Potter.  I never saw any indication of a museum, though on the flyer they slipped in our bags it said there was one, and you couldn't take any pictures in the store.  They did have two full size TARDISes (TARDi?) and they were quite a bit bigger than I had imagined they would be (on the outside as well as inside).  On our way back to the tube station we passed the West Ham football stadium (can you name the Harry Potter reference?  Anyone?).  

We tubed it back to Kings Cross and went to the bookstore that was next to the Platform 9 3/4 store from yesterday.  Since we thought that it was going to be too heavy to bring back all of the Harry Potter books (along with all the other's I'd already bought) we had only picked up our favorites at the WB Studio.  I had seen that there was an Internet address on the back and figured we could buy the other books that way and send them home.  When I'd tried that last night we found out they wouldn't ship them to the U.S.  Boo!  :(  But I had seen that that bookstore was selling the books with the new covers on them.  

We also each picked up one of the cutest bags I had seen yet on our trip.  Mom figured at this point we needed to get another suitcase to get everything home.  We once again had bought souvenirs and things that we had wanted like we were driving home not flying.  It's our usual problem.  So we walked over to St.Pancras station and got another carry-on size suitcase.  They were of course really expensive because they were there at the station, but we didn't want to go hunting for cheaper ones.  Taking our loot back to the room we then headed off for the next Dr. Who related thing I wanted to see before we left which was the last blue police box in London.  It's at the entrance to the Earl's Court Underground station.  When we got off the tube and out on the street there wasn't anything there.  I had noticed by now that there are multiple entries into the tube at any one station so we walked around the block to the opposite entrance.  There it was!  Tucked in beside a magazine stand with everyone walking around oblivious to it's presence.  

What's that next to the stand?

Right there...

We took pictures and some guy was going to come up and lean his bike against it, but then saw we were taking pictures.  Do you think that it was only visible to us and everyone else was wondering why we were taking pictures of something so normal?  The TARDIS does have a perception filter which makes it unnoticeable to people who aren't looking for it, but visible to those who are.  Hmmmm.  At that point we were famished again and I had really wanted to have one nice tea at a fancy place.  My choice was the Orangery at Kensington Palace.  It was a nice stroll through the parks around the palace on the way to the Orangery and it was amazing to notice as you got deeper into the park how you couldn't hear the loud busyness of the city.  I was also surprised at the fact that it had been so loud for so long and I hadn't noticed until it was quiet.  The Orangery was beautiful and the tea so elegant.  We used china patterned after the Queen's own china and just like the tea cups that we bought at the Tower.  It was so good that I forgot to take a picture of the three tier set of plates with goodies on them again!  Every time we have tea I forget to do it!!  I think it's probably because we are so hungry that we just dive in.  So you'll have to imagine while I describe it.  On the bottom were the sandwiches, four of them, cut into triangles and filled with egg salad and cress, cucumber and mint, smoked salmon and cream cheese, and a chicken salad called coronation chicken.  Mom knew by this point that she was "allergic" to smoked salmon and discretely asked when we ordered if she could have something other than salmon.  In reality she just despised it.  On the second tier were the scones, cut with a biscuit cutter so they were round and had sultanas in them.  They came with clotted cream (which was really tasty and has a texture somewhere between butter and cream cheese) and strawberry jam.  On the top tier were the sweets.  A tart filled with lemon curd, a small dark chocolate and raspberry cake, meringue topped with a strawberry, another tart with a more citrus-y filling and two pieces of Victoria sponge cake.  At the cake I remembered I hadn't taken any pictures, so that's what you get.  

It was delicious and so filling.  After tea we wandered through the park to Kensington Palace and took pictures, but from only the outside.  

I also had the thought that Kate was in there somewhere sick as a dog because she's pregnant for the second time.  News reports said she was being treated at Kensington Palace and hadn't been sent to the hospital yet.  If there is something that I regret it is not getting to go into any of the palaces or museums.  We just didn't have time.  Did we spend too much of it on the tube going places?  Or walking?  Could I have timed things better or should we have done fewer excursions?    Probably yes to all of it, but now there is a reason to go back.  Like I said earlier in these posts, you become numb to the beauty of it and maybe it just wouldn't have been appreciated this time around.  After walking through the park we went out to catch one of the Original Bus tours of London.  I had bought the tickets online before we left and thought that we would use them the day we got there.  We didn't want to waste the money so we went and found a bus and got on.  I was bemoaning the fact that we would spend our last hours doing that instead of something better, but it was a pretty awesome way to end the trip.  

Herrods

Apsley House, or Number One London

Piccadilly Circus

Parliament...

On those tours you sit on the top level in the open air and get to enjoy the beauty of the buildings and your surroundings.  Walking the street you never look up and marvel at the magnificence above you.  You are too busy trying to navigate the sea of people coming at you.  On those buses you do nothing but look up.  We passed by every place we had been to and got to drive over the Tower Bridge, instead of just look at it from afar.  

Dragons mark the boundary of the city of London (as opposed to the city of Westminster)

St. Paul's Cathedral...

Monument to the Great Fire of London
If it fell over it would land on the spot where the fire started

Is falling down, falling down...

Mom said it was like on Survivor when you get down to the final three and they make them do a hike where all the snuffed torches of the people that had been voted off are along the route and they are supposed to do this moving tribute to those that had gone before them.  That's what our bus tour was, the tribute to all the places we'd seen and those we wished we could have had time to see. 

Cleopatra's Needle

It was getting later and later in the evening and the sun was setting.  It was really beautiful and moving...and cold.  We were huddled together trying to stay warm and Mom was using the map as a blanket like a homeless person.  I'd stick my hand in my armpit every so often to warm it up.  We looked at the map and thought we'd get out at Tower Hill to catch a tube home, but we missed the stop because we thought there'd be another.  Finally we passed a tube stop and the bus stopped so we hoped off, right down at Westminster, the Parliament building and Big Ben and the light was so amazing.  Maybe that's why we ended up on there a longer time than we'd hoped to be, just to get some more awesome pictures.  

We took the tube from Westminster back to Kings Cross on the Circle line, which was a little longer than usual.  But happily someone had left behind a London Evening Standard and we read the paper and managed to still get off at the correct stop making us true Londoners indeed.  Dinner was one last stop at Pret a Manger for me.  I'm really going to miss those, they have excellent healthy take away.  We made it back to our place around 8 PM.  I'd been hoping to get home closer to 4 or 5 because we still needed to pack.  But first I ran up and grabbed the papers so that we could check in to our Air Canada flight and get the boarding passes.  The lady behind the desk said that they usually don't allow it until 9, but she'd make an exception.  Wow.  Thanks.  So I got our boarding passes for the first leg of our journey, but it wouldn't be "24 hours" before our flight from Seattle to Yakima until 2 am.  We had asked earlier whether we could print them in the morning but the lady behind the desk at that time said no.  I was going to check us in when I got up regardless, but it would be nice to have the printed tickets.  So we headed upstairs, ate our last meal in London, watched the Great British Bake-off (which is pretty addicting!) and packed.  What mayhem!  The problem was getting into our carry-ons what we needed to declare to have the VAT taken off.  VAT is a 20% tax on all items sold in Britain.  We had been told at one store that we didn't need to get forms at the stores to have the VAT taken off our purchases, but at another store they had the forms there so I got one.  Rick Steves said that your purchase needed to be above 30 pounds so we got together everything that was a large purchase and fit them into our carry-ons.  With that accomplished the next task was getting everything else into our suitcases.  I think one of the carry-on sized bags that we checked was filled with mostly books.  My suitcase was crazy.  I had brought some of those space bags and put all my clean clothes in one, but then didn't think another would be helpful with trying to pack the rest of my stuff and clothes.  I rolled the rest of the shirts and folded the pants and got everything in, but it looked like a mountain and there would be no way to close it.  And I still hadn't gotten my bathroom stuff in.  So things started getting cut at that point.  If I didn't really need it then it got left behind.  In the end I had to leave my travel hair dryer, though that wasn't such a hardship as it was really too hot when I would blow dry my hair.  It even set off the fire alarm one morning (after the toast incident) so I took to drying my hair next to an open window.  We did get the suitcase closed, after opening the extender, and prayed that it wasn't over weight.  By the time we were all packed up it was 11:00 PM.  We needed to be up at 3 AM.  Seriously.  So we threw ourselves into bed and tried and tried and tried to go to sleep.  I had checked my cellular roaming charges and saw that they were at 9.6 KB.  In my sleep deprived and slightly panicked state I thought that a KB was more than a MB and that my cell phone bill was going to be in the thousands of dollars from going over.  Not that it won't be huge, I'm sure, but just not that high.  After figuring out my mistake (thank you Google!) I fell to sleep.  But Mom said that she didn't get to sleep until after midnight because she heard the bells ring out.  Always try to end it with a bang!

Fun Observation of the Trip - People who live somewhere you travel to often want to travel to where you live.  You each think the other has it better, but really it's just a hand off of one set of problems for another.  Londoners like to conform.  Everyone dresses the same, the houses are all similar, no one stands out.  I'm not sure why that is but it seems a bit socialist.  We were also glad that we were leaving before the voting that is happening at the end of the week.  Scotland has decided they want independence and at the time we left it was a 50-50 split for yes versus no.  I'm pretty sure that there will be upset people no matter which was it goes, so I'm glad to be out of there.  (Hooray!  They voted to stay!)