Friday, July 21, 2006

Vacation Stories, Part I.

I’m home. I don’t completely want to be home. My two brothers and sister and their families also went on this trip so it was pretty amazing. My sister told me that when she got home she had an email from another Paris family that wants to do an apartment exchange in October. My sister had been thinking, “well of course I can’t go” but when I told her I had been checking air fares she started having second thoughts. Girls’ week in Paris! She and I went to Vienna together for a week – golly, it was close to 15 years ago, back when we were both still single and childless. It was very cool. No commitments here, but we’re thinking about it. In the meantime I need a crash course in French. I had a year and a half of it in middle school and then dropped out because French was just too trendy at my school and it got on my nerves. The middle school mind is difficult to comprehend. I started taking German instead, which I happily did for many many years, with some intensive Spanish during a summer spent chasing bats in Costa Rica followed by more Spanish conversation and writing classes in graduate school. Now I’m ready for more French. More of all three of those languages actually. My new goal is to be able to do voiceover in four languages.

I will resist the temptation to write a travelogue and just give you the highlights. We spent a couple of days in London before joining the rest of the family on the coast of Brittany. That was a whirlwind with the agenda set by the kids.






The Changing of the Guard was a big wish but that occurs at 11:30 a.m. and we just didn’t make it. After seeing other sights we finally got over to Hyde Park and hung out in front of the palace for a while.






Shortly after 7 pm the security guards in front of one of the gates started clearing the area, even telling cyclists to stay back, and then two posh-looking cars wheeled out of the gates.



I didn’t pay too much attention, but son Edward told me he saw a grey-haired lady in one of the cars and insisted it was the Queen. Later he claimed with a twinkle in his eye that she had looked directly at him, held up her hand like a telephone and mouthed, “call me!”.

The oldest pub in London (I think)


We stayed in a dive – the Regent Palace in Piccadilly Circus, a smoke-drenched columbarium for sleeping only – economical and depressing. On our way out of town to the airport for our flight to France I was able to point out to the kids the hotel where I had stayed on my last trip to London: The Grosvenor House in Hyde Park. I had taken a trip to Egypt during the year I worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, paid for by Discovery Tours (now AMNH Expeditions). My job was to “interpret Egyptian ornithology” on a Nile cruise. We stopped in London on the way to Egypt to see the Egyptian collections at the British Museum. I have come down in the world since then….

To be continued...

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