Friends are great!

Here's a picture of me and Mary with our friend Barb from Victoria. We went to see Mama Mia in Bristol--it is a totally fun musical! It was so great to have Barb visiting and we were kind of sad when she left last Thursday.

But then a friend and interpreter from Vancouver was here visiting her daughter, who is living in the Bath area, so I got to spend the day with Leslie. It was raining, so our day consisted of lunch in a pub...then off to a tea house to eat scones with clotted cream (I hate to think what is happening to my cholesterol level!), then on to another pub and finally dinner at a Turkish restaurant. It was great!

The next day Mary and I headed off to a different women's walking group. There were 11 women on this walk, two that we met the week before. It was a confusing route to get there but we made it. We saw the oldest tree in England! It is a huge chestnut tree, and they think it was planted in 800 or 900 A.D. The walk and company was just great..but the drive home was so confusing. Maybe you have to be born in an area to be able to figure out the confusing roads, with no signage or else useless signs. There we are, zooming around a roundabout at 60 MPH and get close enough to the tiny sign to see that we should be three lanes over for our road. So then we go on this completely confusing quest to get back going the right direction. It was night, and raining, and it took us 1 1/2 hours rather than the 45 minutes it should have taken. Well, I must admit when we got home I opened the pepper vodka I was given in Ukraine, and it was quite good. :-)

Mary is really into her school work and is reading lots, and feeling good about her learning. I am going to be doing a bit of contract work for an American group so I guess I will start getting out of bed before 9:30!

We are heading up to London in February...an interpreter I met in Spain this summer is going away and needs cat-sitting, so it is ideal for all.

Anyways, no visitors scheduled now til March but at least we have found the walking groups, and time just keeps marching along. We saw some snowdrops already in bloom on the walk, and quite a few daffodils were up, though not blooming yet. It really gives me hope that spring is around the corner..and while it has been rainy, it's also been mild, so we are not having a bad January at all.

More thoughts on England in the days to come...

Karen