Our European Trip, Part One

 We recently returned from our five-week trip to Europe. I wrote this to our family midway through our tour.

 My daughter arranged a house swap, so we're staying in a cute house about an hour outside of London while the owners are staying in her home. We spent the first week in Paris, Brugge (a small ancient town in Belgium that we loved) and Amsterdam. 

On Monday, our son-in-law joined us. We've seen the London sights, Matilda the musical--which was mind-blowing--Stonehenge and the Cotswolds. 

And we went blackberry picking to make a cobbler.

We're staying in a cute little village called Saffron Walden. Staying here and living like a local has been my favorite part of the trip. Today we went to mass at an Anglican church originally built in 1130 (but has been renovated a few times over the centuries.) We had just two of our grandchildren with us because my daughter had taken her oldest son (who has water polo starting tomorrow) and her husband (who has work) to the airport. It was a typical mass, but a man who has been involved in translating the Bible into Roma for the past 20 years shared his experiences of living in Romania. 

Tomorrow, we're going to a Downton Abbey sort of manor house. We'll spin off from Bethany and the kids on Tuesday and begin the second leg of our journey. Coming up, we have an 11-day Scandinavian cruise starting in Copenhagen and visiting Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Latvia, Estonia, and Poland. Things will get really wild and crazy after the cruise because we have five days with very loose-goosy plans until we fly home.

Life is an adventure. We haven't watched one minute of TV. We brought Larry's computer with us, but it stopped working almost immediately, so that's not occupying any of our time, either. Other than jotting down story ideas--which have been flying at me a million a minute--I'm not writing. (Except for now, of course...on a computer I borrowed from Bethany.) We've been doing all the touristy things, but we also got lost in a garden maze, picnicked in parks, hung out in town markets and went to a dungeon museum. (Full disclosure, I didn't go into the dungeon. As I get older, my claustrophobia seems to be getting worse.) We've eaten a lot of strange and new-to-us foods. (We liked most, but not all, of it.) And if all of this sounds too good to be true, we have had hiccups. Trains canceled. Trains missed. Rats in the Paris parks. Much more litter than you'd ever find in Rancho Santa Margarita. A French man yelling at Sterling for fiddling with a postal box. A spattering of rain in Amsterdam. Hot and sweaty subways in London.

But it's been so worth it.