Vacation Report: Part Two (of Four)

After spending a day reminiscing with Sylvine and Celia, and looking at ALL of our photos (approximately 8,492,797 in total), I took the tube ($8! I swear that's the last time...but really...$8!) to Paddington Station and with nary an abandoned bear in sight, caught a train to Overton, the bucolic new home of my friends Kathrine and Tom. They bought a house last summer and have been living the domestic life, gardening, painting, scraping wallpaper, etc. They have a beautiful garden complete with a small pond (at the moment filled with frog eggs), a tiny gazebo, and a paddock in back (their next-door neighbors are actually using it for its intended purpose--keeping a horse). After a busy day in London, this was the perfect place to relax for a few days. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and we went walking in the fields, had lunch at the pub, and strolled around town. One day we watched England play France at rugby. This was lots of fun, even if I didn't understand it all and had to ask the occasional question to figure out what was happening ("what was that penalty for?" "are they allowed to lift them up like that??" "do ALL the players have cauliflower ear???"). But once I got a grip on the rules, it was a really exciting game, especially with Tom and Kathrine and their friend Al yelling at the TV (while his fiancee Rowan, fearing disappointment, hid behind a newspaper), and England won, which made it even better.

One day Kathrine took me on a tourist excursion. First stop was Stonehenge. It's a pretty impressive circle of stones, I must admit.

However, I also must admit that we were too cheap to pay the entrance fee (you can't even go near the stones anyway) so we had to stay outside the fence, and instead of an audioguide I had Kathrine and later Wikipedia to inform me about interesting Stonehenge historical facts.


Later we continued to Bath, where we had lunch and shopped for lampshades. For the rest of the time we just hung out, had dinner with their friends, and watched amusing new reality TV shows. We ate curry, cake and treacle, and digestive biscuits and had tea. It was all very fun, very relaxing, and very English.