Barbara & Tom walking and eating in Oxford

19-June-06

I guess I'll have to practice with this weird way of writing date and time.

It's 2:00 (am). I've finally gotten enough sleep and I'm ready for breakfast and a nice walk. I just need to kill another 5 hours or so.

I'm here because Barbara and I like to walk. We were on our way to walk the Foothills Trail a few months ago when Rick Steves came on the radio talking about walking the Cotswold Way. We weren't able to get it out of our minds and began planning. We thought about walking the entire 108 miles of the Cotswold Way but, following the shiny object method of travelling, we decided that Barbara would show me Oxford while we decompressed from jetlag, walk part of the Cotswolds, visit Edinburgh because it's there, and spend a while in London before I go home and Barbara returns to her Shakespeare studies in Oxford.

My plane left on time - 18:40. I had row 35 and was nearly the last to board. That meant that about 30 rows were classier than mine. The seats in the first section were just scattered about and were more like daybeds that would recline into night beds. They had big leather fans for privacy from the next bed. The next section was upright but seemed a bit like barcoloungers. I was pretty excited about the promise of comfort. Then I entered the slave quarters. We were stacked like cordwood.

I had an aisle seat but that just meant that my left side merged with my seatmate while my right side was bumped everytime anyone squeezed through the aisle, which was constantly. My knees hit the seat in front of me but at least I could read - until the guy ahead of me finished his bourbon and wine and reclined into my lap. The tv on his seat back was about an inch from my nose. Does not work with my optical prescription.

After I rested my knee on his elbow and blew on his bald spot awhile, he sat up a bit. My noise-canceling headphones kept out the roar of the engines and were a great relief to my seatmate who really didn't want to talk to me. I listened to Bob Edwards shows, Emmylou Harris, Robert Earl Keen, Kinks, etc and watched King Kong (pretty good with no sound, the Pink Panther remake, something subtitled, something with Queen Latifah, Pele playing soccer, an Australian kid movie with a cheetah as costar and pieces of many other things. I should have brought heavy drugs to make me sleep since I was way too uncomfortable to do it on my own.

My favorite tv show was the map showing where we were. We went from Seattle to Calgary to Hudson Bay to Greenland and Iceland. Not familiar territory for me. We were a cute little airplane on the map with a red line showing where we'd been. We left a couple of red circles over Oxford and a big loop zeroing in on London while waiting for clearance to land. For awhile the plane just spun in place.

Barbara was right where she was supposed to be - at Caffe Italia, which amazed me because I had a terrible time finding anything. We found the bus for Oxford and the driver wanted to load luggage by stop and kept calling out strange names. Eventually he stared at us and asked where we were going. "Oxford," I told him. Apparently all the strange names were in Oxford. I pointed to the hotel map as if I didn't understand the language and he was able to figure it out. We had a lovely drive through the countryside for an hour and a half. I decided that I'd rather take the bus to Europe next time, it's so much more comfortable than the plane.

I didn't see any of London. Once we got beyond the airport traffic and cellphone billboards, we were in the country with hilly green pastures with hedges for fences and wild forests never managed by Weyerheuser. I was shocked by the lack of sprawl. We passed a couple of "model villages" which I suppose were "planned communities," but even they were very tasteful and isolated.

We took the bus to the end of the line and still had a Ł7 cab ride to our Inn. At first glance, Burlington House is just an old house with twelve rooms for rent. Its charm and homeyness became more apparent as the jetlag wore off. Barbara's room is on the second floor, I'm on the third. The rooms are very large for closets, but they are comfortable. Their most noticeable feature is the traffic noise. (I'm wearing my noise-cancelling headphones right now.)

We immediately walked back to town. I'll be lucky not to get killed trying to cross streets. Who knows where the cars, buses and bikes come from or where they're going. Drivers aren't even in the driver's seat. I hope they're used to clueless tourists.

I was starving but it was bad timing (about 16:00). We found a favorite pub of Barbara's that actually had a non-smoking room and realized that they didn't serve food for another hour. All they had was soup - carrot orange coriander soup. It was wonderful and fueled us for a couple more miles of walking along centuries-old stone fences and colleges and the Thames, where teenagers were trying to pole boats along (punting, I learned).

We settled on another restaurant and filled up on adequate food. I was beginning to sputter into other dimensions and thought it would be a good time to head back to our rooms. Never mind that it was not even 19:00. We figured out how to take a bus with only slight humiliation and I collapsed. I'm ready to get with it now (2:00), though. Where is everybody?