Time
Time is a funny concept-totally manmade yet still it passes and is unescapeable in its impact on all things. Time moves at the same speed yet it somehow feels as thought it simultaneously moves very quickly and as though it stands still on occasion. You know it's happening and can't feel it until one day you find yourself older- when you distinctly remember being younger what feels like mere moments ago. I mention this because somehow 20 years have passed in our marriage and while I'm very aware of it I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that 1. I got married in the first place (18 year old me was convinced I'd be an incel for life) 2. that I was married at an early age (23 for me) 3. that my life is immeasureably better as a result. We've had so many good memories, fun times, and our fair share of hard times too. In that vein Tracy and I had so many reasons to celebrate.
Our good friend COVID-19 screwed up our travel plans (and millions of others like us worldwide) beginning in 2020 so we started thinking about what we wanted to do on this monumental occasion. After thinking about it for a while we settled on Europe as Tracy had very much enjoyed her time there in 2019 and I'd never been. We thought about doing Germany, Swizerland, and France...I wanted to save Germany for another time due to my love of WWII history I'd love to see all that (including VERY sad/tragic) places which is decidedly NOT the vibe for a 20th anniversary. Upon researching flights and talking about our interests we decided that a three-legged trip was in order. Those three legs were, in order, London, England, Paris, France, and Bordeaux, France. I'd like to take this opportunity to mention that we had a wonderful time.
I've never traveled across the Atlantic before and as someone who Six Flags described as a "person of exceptional size" I had concerns about the comfort of doing so. Tracy got us an exit row (which is always appreciated) for our entire trip. The voyage from PDX to Dallas was comfortable...the flight from DFW to Heathrow not so much. The Boeing 777 we were in has this weird "hump" that protruded from the door limiting the space available and the seat cushions were practically non existent. We made it, albeit feeling very tired and a bit banged up. A spendy cab ride to the Pimlico neighborhood showed us a bit of London. We had decided going in to this trip (learning from our 2018 adventure in Hawaii) that utilizing a good, better, best, or small, medium, large approach to travel made the most sense so to call our London hotel "cozy" is a bit of a nice way to put it. The hotel was clean, relatively quiet, and very convenient in terms of its access to memorable destinations.
The (native) food in England is what I can best describe as "meh" and perhaps why they practiced centuries of imperialism? We definitely had good food in England...Thai and Indian come to mind. London is a BIG city and that was evidenced when on day 2 or 3 we made the misguided judgement call of riding the Underground in the financial district around 5 PM. We'd had a few issues with our tickets not working properly and with that many bodies coming and going all at once it got to be overwhelming and we punted on that strategy for a bit. It's an old city and it took us a while to get used to looking the opposite direction for traffic-the instructions on the road as to which direction to look were much appreciated.
We visited a lot of the notable landmarks like Westminster Abbey (we both got yelled at by priests), Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, St. Mary's Axe (Gherkin Building), and London Bridge. I would say of the three places we visited London was my number 3-which is not to say I didn't like it...just dug France more and I suspect some of that was weather related (and the fact that most of France didn't smell like a sewer). More to come in the next installement.
