Ricke Family Vacation continued

Don't worry. We made room for food. Each couple was in charge of one night's dinner, and we gathered all our groceries from a classic vacation grocery store. You know the kind. This was no Publix. It wasn't even a Piggly Wiggly. It was a proper frontier store, mostly preserved packaged goods. The best we could find for our planned fish tacos was frozen "shrimp". But we all thought on our feet, found everything we needed, and piled back in the car, with two bags of groceries per lap, and drove to the rental house.

We drove, and drove, and drove. We had very clear directions, but they were of the landmark variety. They consisted of "drive down such-and-such road until you see the mountain; then turn right until you see Old Mr Frederickson. He'll point you to the driveway." After much doubling back and doubling back again, we found what we thought ought to be the house (they don't do house numbers in Idaho) and then spent about 20 minutes fanning out across the property to find the keys. But eventually we found them and got in, and it was awesome. There were big, comfy couches everywhere. There were seemingly thousands of rooms. There was a hot tub on the back porch. There was a huge common room with a big TV for Beijing Olympics viewing. And there was an audioanimatronic deer head on the wall. We made ourselves right at home and began our vacation in earnest.

Over the next week, we played countless rounds of flip cup and Mario Kart, watched lots of Olympics coverage, cooked and cleaned in the kitchen, played Ricke Bocce ball in the yard, soaked in the hot tub, built campfires in the fire pit, took silly pictures, played board games, channeled our assigned totem animals (Andrew and I were moose; others were wolves, bears and...beavers? pikas? I can't remember), and spent all sorts of quality time in the house.

We also spent all sorts of quality time in the parks. We drove all over Yellowstone and saw canyons and rivers and burnt trees from the wildfires. We went on hikes up and down and around and through. We saw Old Faithful and its neighbor geysers. We saw eagles and pikas and, according to Andrew, a moose, and, finally, on our last day, a bear. We went not only to Yellowstone but also to Grand Teton, where we walked around a lake and up a mountain or two. One day we took the plunge and went swimming in a glacier-fed lake. Another day we went canoeing in a very shallow river and watched a distant forest fire spewing smoke into the atmosphere. We had some good food along the way, too, including a very slow but delicious pizza lunch and a phenomenal dinner at Teton Thai. We spent lots of time in the van, which brought us closer together than we wanted to be at times but ultimately brought us even closer together as a family.

Some were sick intermittently; others lost their tempers. Such is a family vacation. But we all had a wonderful time being with each other and enjoying the beautiful scenery and the clean air. And all too soon we had to head back to Cody for one last family dinner in a frontier steakhouse, followed by one last game of flip cup, in a hotel that Buffalo Bill built. Then it was a flight to Salt Lake City, a flight to Atlanta, and a flight to Tallahassee. Then, for Andrew and me, another set of flights back to London, away from the wild west, away from America, and back to our own adventure in London.

Getting ready for back again, but making the most of being here now

Andrew and I are moving back to the US this summer (we don't know where, just yet), so I figured I ought to try to catch up on some of the highlights of our time here so I'll have a complete record by the time we leave. The last time I posted, other than a special Amsterdam edition last year, was the fall of 2008. So here, as promised then, is the first installment of our summer 2008 family vacation. It was legendary, as you'll soon see.

The Ricke family has a tradition of wholesome, adventurous, outdoorsy sorts of vacations. We have been to dozens of state and national parks, done the whole camping and canoeing thing, and experienced, many times over, the glories of the cross-country road trip. But it wasn't until this year that we finally made it to the grandaddy of all the national parks, Yellowstone. This was also the first time we all travelled together as a much bigger family, with an extra husband, a fiancee, and a girlfriend (soon to be a fiancee, although we didn't know at the time!) in tow. The only missing family members were of the four-legged variety.

Andrew and I flew over a couple days early and just had time to hang out with Zack into the wee hours of our first night back on American soil. The next day we saw Matt Cooper, Zach and Mary Frances, Owen, and the brand-new Elliott, who was nice enough to let me hold him until my arms ached. We had a riproaring time at dinner and at Black Dog, where we took over the back porch until they kicked us out. We had some high-quality time with the Marders, too, including a very nice brunch, and we crashed Diane Eaton's going-away-to-grad-school party with Matt, but then it was time for the vacation within the larger vacation.

Let me just say, first of all, that I was very impressed by the logistical efficiency of the whole trip. Getting eight people with all their luggage to the right places at the right times is difficult, but we managed it. The first leg of the trip was a short flight from Tallahassee to Atlanta, where we picked up Bryan and Christina and spent the night in a hotel near the airport that featured a pretty decent Mexican restaurant. The next morning (I guess 4:30 is morning and not night) we got up and, I don't want to say forced, perhaps facilitated, our way onto a crowded shuttle bus headed for the airport. We got to the plane with no mishaps and had two long but easy flights, first to Salt Lake City, then to Cody. Andrew and I explained to everyone the elaborate buddy system we had developed in Europe, which meant that each person had a buddy (their significant other) and each set of buddies had another set to look out for, in age order. Mommy and Daddy looked out for Andrew and me, who looked out for Bryan and Christina, who looked out for Nicholas and Katie, who looked out for Mommy and Daddy. Beautiful. And it worked; we came back with all eight people!

The flights were notable to me for two reasons: one, Katie and I discovered we brought the same silly but enjoyable vampire book to read. That Katie is a quick reader; as fast as I am. Two, the flight to Cody was on a plane about as big as the table I'm sitting at. It was a fairly smooth ride, but we were all pretty happy to get off the plane. Happy, and hungry. First we had to pick up the car, which involved estimating how much room we and our luggage would need, to determine if we needed the huge van or the ginormous van. We went with the huge van, based partly on Katie's confident guess that we would all fit. She was right, with mere inches to spare. So we piled in and drove into "town." More on Cody at the end of the trip, but at that point we needed food. We decided to try the Silver Dollar Cafe, which promised the best burgers in the West. They were not the best burgers in the West, as it turns out, but they were decent, and we all ate as if we had never eaten before. Well, maybe that was just me.

After lunch, we made for the open road and drove, and drove, and drove. One by one, we drifted off in the back seats, and I remember waking up to find that we had finally reached the eastern edge of Yellowstone, about three hours after leaving Cody. We stopped at a gift shop in one of the little villagey clusters of facilities scattered through the park, then we got back in the car to keep driving. But at that point, it was no longer a chore; it was an attraction. As we neared the very heart of the park, we started to see animals. First, a buffalo on the side of the road, then ten buffaloes, then, all of a sudden, hundreds and thousands of buffaloes, spread across a great plain. We stopped at some mud pools, and there was a buffalo there, too, not ten feet away from where we stood, not so securely, on the slightly raised boardwalk.

The mud pools were unlike anything I had ever seen. Or smelled. They were sulfurous, which doesn't really sound all that bad, but imagine a swimming pool full of sulfurous fluids, and you start to get an idea of the odor. With the breeze blowing the fumes in our faces, we felt like visitors to an egg factory gone horribly, horribly wrong. They were fascinating to look at, though. The pools had muddy water in them, and the gases rising up through the hot water made it bubble violently as if it were boiling. There were tiny cones of earth, too, sending wisps of steam up into the dry air. The landscape looked as though it should be very hot, but it was mild because of the altitude. It was dry, though. There is not enough lip balm in the world to keep me comfortable in that kind of climate.

After the mud pools, we drove through a traffic jam of cars and buffaloes. Sometimes the cars were simply stopping to let vacationers hang out the windows and take pictures of the buffaloes, but often the animals walked right onto the road between the cars, forcing them to stop. We took about a thousand pictures of the buffaloes. We saw them standing, eating, nursing, rolling, tumbling, even running. They were the perfect embodiment of nature: grand and majestic, but at the same time, completely silly and unpredictable. I would not go so far as to call them elegant creatures.

As we drove west, through the park, we saw more mud pools, more buffaloes, then rivers and waterfalls and many mountains. We stopped for a few photo opportunities, but tried to push on so we could get to the grocery store in West Yellowstone and from there, on to the cabin in Idaho. That's right, this is all still on the first day. We found the grocery store and, along with it, a quandary. We had planned to buy all of our groceries at once so we wouldn't have to go back to the store, but with all of us and all of our luggage, there was no room for food. And in our group, no room for food is a serious problem.

More soon.

Amsterdam photos

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=61880&l=c268b&id=509253462

A quick jaunt to Amsterdam

For anyone still reading, yes, we are still here in London, and having a great time. You can see photos of our Marylebone flat here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=57499&l=a4305&id=509253462. You don't have to be on Facebook to see them.

We just got back from a trip to Amsterdam. Andrew had some extra vacation days to use up, so we took a couple days off, packed our backpacks and flew down there last Sunday morning. The flight was only about 45 minutes; I didn't realize it was so close! We landed and easily found our way to the trains and then into the city. There was no line at customs, and the language barrier wasn't a problem since almost everything is written in English as well as Dutch. It was almost...too easy. Except, at 9:00 in the morning, I was happy not to have to think too much.

We got to the central train station, bundled up in the freezing cold, and started walking through the city. We got to see Amsterdam wake up, as nothing was open when we started walking but after about an hour we were able to get some coffee and little toasted ham and cheese sandwiches at a cafe. Andrew tried out some Dutch phrases on the waitress and made her laugh. Everyone there spoke English as well as we did! After our warm interlude in the cafe, we found our hotel and were able to check in even though it was only about noon. Thank goodness! We curled up under the warm blankets in our very nice room and took a nap to prepare for more walking around later.

We woke up to see a few flakes of snow in our Dutch sky and tons of snow on Sky News. Apparently we missed England's biggest snow storms in a hundred years! It was certainly cold enough for us in Amsterdam, though. We wanted to see the city, but it was almost unbearable outside, so we bought tickets for a tour of the canals, inside a nice, warm, enclosed boat. It was a great introduction to the city, too. We had fun listening to the narration first in Dutch, then in English and Spanish, and trying to predict from the Dutch what it would be in English. Dutch sounds very much like English (I thought it sounded like something in between English and German). We saw all the main canals and lots of pretty buildings and bridges from the boat. We even saw some of the bridges up close because our driver ran into a few of them. The boat was about six inches narrower than the narrowest canal and about six inches shorter than the turning radius between some of the bridges. I'm surprised we didn't hit the walls and bridges more often. 

The architecture in Amsterdam is beautiful. Because of all the canals and what I imagine must essentially be islands in between, a lot of the older buildings are crooked because they are slowly sinking. The houses all follow one or two designs, but they don't look like cookie cutters. There are endless variations on similar designs. Each facade rises several stories high to accommodate a house in such a narrow space. The roofs apparently mostly run perpendicular to the streets, and to hide the ends of the roofbeams, the Dutch developed the famous gables that we saw on almost every house. At the top of each gable, we could see a beam sticking out with a hook hanging underneath it. We couldn't figure out what they were for, but the narration on the tour finally explained that, due to the narrow houses (they were taxed on the width of the houses rather than the depth, so they are all tiny in the front), no one could fit furniture in through the doors and up the winding staircases, so all the houses were built with hooks that allowed them to lift furniture up and into the windows to get to the upper floors. I would love to see a piano lifted up that way. There's a piano in the flat on the other side of the wall from us, and I suspect it must have been lifted up there, too.

Our canal tour took us through the canals in the center of the city, out into the harbor a little bit and back into the center, passing briefly through the red-light district on the way. I caught a glimpse of a couple of the red lights, and that was quite enough for me. It was not nearly as sleazy as I imagined, though. All the buildings were still beautiful, old brick buildings, and everything was very clean; there just happened to be illicit activity going on behind closed doors. We saw a lot of coffee shops all over town, too, where customers can buy drugs. It was weird to see that, and a few times we smelled marijuana on the streets, but mostly Amsterdam was just like any other European city.

After our canal trip, we found a grandiose cafe with high ceilings and cool vintage posters on the walls. We got some Belgian cherry-flavored beer called Kriek, and had some french fries and bitterballen, a Dutch specialty that is basically a fried cheese ball, as far as I could tell. They were delicious. Then we walked around a little bit more and went back to the warmth of our hotel room. One of the things we've learned to enjoy about travelling is just sitting and relaxing and not feeling like we have to be sightseeing every minute of the day. When dinner time rolled around we just headed downstairs to the French brasserie on the ground floor. I had a nice salad with a poached egg and lardons, and Andrew had some really good French Onion soup. The restaurant was nearly empty, and we struck up a conversation with an American guy about our age who was sitting by himself at the next table over. After dessert and some coffee, it was bed time.

The next day we had some breakfast and headed out to see more of the city. It was still cold but not nearly so windy, so we managed much better. We walked further south in the city, down to the museum district, and found the Van Gogh Museum first. All the museums were really expensive (but then, we have been spoiled by the free museums first in DC and now in London). I think they were mostly worth the expense in Amsterdam, though. The Van Gogh Museum was nice. They had a lot of his earlier paintings, most of which I didn't recognize. Everything was laid out chronologically, and it was very easy to see how his style changed from very dark, earthy brown paintings of Dutch peasants to the wild, colorful style that he became famous for. The museum had some of my favorite paintings, including sunflowers and irises and orchards with bright blue skies. It also had a few paintings he made where he was copying Japanese prints. Those were kind of funny because we had just seen some Japanese prints at the V&A Museum in London, and his copies really weren't very good. Sorry, Vincent. But the other paintings were wonderful. They also had a special exhibit of landscape sketches by a group of nineteenth-century Danish artists. They were really nice. Andrew usually likes sketches and prints better than paintings, and I like seeing them with him because he finds such interesting details in them that I would miss otherwise.

One museum down, it was time for lunch. We set out to find a specific restaurant but got some bad directions and ended up wandering through some very nice neighborhoods for a while. We finally found the restaurant, but it was closed for lunch, so instead we went to another French-ish sort of cafe, which seems to be the standard in Amsterdam. I had a nice salad and Andrew had a sandwich, accompanied by more coffee (we drank a lot of coffee on that trip). Then we bundled up again and headed for the Rijksmuseum, which is the main art museum. It is undergoing major renovations, so the museum is closed, but they have one wing open with some of the highlights of the collections. We really enjoyed the Rijksmuseum. It was nice not to be faced with miles of galleries, like you would normally get. We just saw the best stuff. The highlights exhibit was also set up nicely for an introduction to the Dutch Golden Age, which was in the late 17th century, mostly. There was a lot of maritime art, including a huge model ship. There were examples of silver and gold work and displays of Delft pottery, and there were paintings showing the reach of the Dutch trading companies at the time, including India, Indonesia, the Caribbean, and Africa. Upstairs, there were rooms full of portraits and rooms dedicated to specific artists. Our favorite portraits were a pair showing a father and his son. The father looks like a Pilgrim, all dour and serious in black clothes and a simple white collar, while the son, a rotund 20-year-old, is dressed in bright red silk, with curly hair and the haughtiest expression I have ever seen. Fantastic. The museum had lots of paintings by some of the Netherlands' native sons, including Franz Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer. The Rembrandts were dark and atmospheric, as ever. The Hals paintings made me smile like they usually do. His subjects always look like they're having a good time, which is unusual in portraiture. The Vermeers caught my breath when we walked into the room. There were just three of them on display, all in a row. They are tiny paintings, only about 2 feet high, but the light and the colors are just amazing. There was one of the exterior of a house that was almost photographic in its details. The other two were paintings of women. One was a woman standing in a reception room, looking up as if she's just been distracted from an activity that has held her attention deeply. She stares out from the painting with an intense look, not angry but surprised. The soft light highlights her pale, smooth face and her furs and pearl jewelry. The other woman is a maid pouring a jug of milk into a bowl. The light in this one is harsher, and her clothes are rougher and more colorful, but Vermeer gave her the same level of intensity and dignity as the woman in the pearls. The final painting in the exhibit is the museum's most famous: Rembrandt's The Night Watch. It's a group portrait of one of Amsterdam's powerful private militias in the late 17th century. The militiamen are wealthy merchants, lawyers, and politicians, rather than actual soldiers, and I thought it was funny to see them showing off their guns, guessing they probably wouldn't know what to do with them in real life. The painting is enormous, much bigger than life size, and it includes all the details a painter's eye could find. The structure of the painting is very strong, as with Vermeer's paintings, and all the people are arranged symmetrically (but subtly) around one central figure, who stands with his hand outstretched in the very centre of the picture. There weren't too many visitors in the museum, so we were able to stand and look at the painting for several minutes. I think I liked it because it seems to capture the essence of the age in which it was painted. It's full of power and wealth and arrogance. It's intimidating, but you know that the power of these men won't last. I think Rembrandt knew that when he painted it.

From the museum, we walked back up to our hotel along smaller side streets during rush hour. Because the streets are so narrow and the city is so compact, almost no one in Amsterdam has a car, but everyone has a bicycle, and all the streets have bike lanes. It took us a while to realize this, and each of us was almost hit by a bicycle at one point, but the riders were at least friendly! Rush hour meant hundreds of cyclists, everywhere we could see. It was great! One of the streets we walked along, which had fewer cyclists to look out for, was lined with antique stores with jewelry and pottery and paintings and objets d'art all jumbled up in their windows, like some sort of fantastical garage sale. After a short rest in the hotel, we went out again, to meet Aleksey, the son of Andrew's mom's colleague at the library, who now lives in Amsterdam. We met him at a bar around the corner from our hotel for a few drinks and a nice chat about living abroad and how to avoid getting killed by cyclists in Amsterdam. 

After drinks, we got dressed quickly and caught a cab to a restaurant called De Kas, which means greenhouse in Dutch, and which is housed in an old greenhouse that used to supply plants for the city's parks. The main space is a huge room with gleaming glass panes that reflect the light beautifully. The decor was luxuriously minimalist, and the tables had a lot of space between them, which is hard to find in a European restaurant. De Kas grows a lot of its own produce right in the greenhouse, and they serve seasonal food in a pan-European style (Dutch cuisine is nothing to write home about, so you get a lot of French-ish and Mediterranean-ish food there. I think the Dutch are a lot like the Americans. If they see someone else doing something better, they'll adopt that). De Kas doesn't have a menu but a set dinner that changes every day, so we didn't know what we were going to get, which was kind of fun. We started with a glass of champagne and the bread and olives and white bean hummus that the server brought out right away. We ordered wine pairings to go with the meal, which we had never done before but will certainly do again when our bank account recovers from our trip to Amsterdam. Our server asked if we had any food allergies or if there was anything we didn't like (we couldn't think of anything), and a few minutes later the sommelier came with the first two wines for the starters, followed by the server with the three starters. We took a deep breath and got down to work.

The starters were smoked duck with sauerkraut and smoked apples (with a light chardonnay); a tart made of a whole caramelized shallot, with marinated chioggia beets and rocket; and lobster ceviche with langoustine sauce and black olive tuile (the tart and the lobster were paired with a dry riesling). The wines and the foods were delicious, some of the best of both we've ever had. The wine pairing was a real eye opener. I know a little bit about matching wines with foods, but because the restaurant: a) has a sommelier; b) creates a unique menu each day and controls all the flavors down to the last detail; and c) only has one set of foods to match wines to; these pairings were precise in a way that I had never experienced before. The sommelier was adamant that the chardonnay went with the duck and the riesling with the others and said that they wouldn't taste right the other way around, so of course I tried the riesling with the duck to see the difference, and she was absolutely right. I would have thought riesling would be perfect with the duck and the apple and especially the sauerkraut, and it did taste good with them, but it didn't elevate the flavors in the way the chardonnay did. Extraordinary.

After savoring every last bit of our starters, we moved onto the main course. The sommelier brought out the next wine, a pinot nero (which is the Italian version of pinot noir). Then came the food, which turned out to be braised veal shanks with demiglace sauce, roasted potatoes, celeriac wrapped in Iberico ham, and a bowl of crisp, bitter endive in a lemony dressing. The meat was sticky and tender, the vegetables aromatic, and the endive refreshing on the palate after all that food. The wine was a little bit tart and not at all heavy like so many red wines. It was at this point that we deemed De Kas one of the best restaurants we'd ever been to.

And that was even before dessert. We were surprised when we got another visit from the sommelier - these were all very small glasses of wine, mind you - with a dessert wine. This one just about blew my mind. It was a muscatel anejo, an aged Spanish wine, and it was like drinking a caramelized orange blossom. It was also like drinking heaven. The actual dessert was lovely, too. It was a bread pudding with blueberry sauce and caramel ice cream. It didn't compete with the sweetness of the wine at all. They complemented each other just as well as all the other pairings. We ordered some coffee, which came with three little sweets (almost more than we could handle at this point): a little lemony shortbread, a tiny pastry with fig filling (basically, a fancy fig newton), and a chocolatey-oaty sort of brittle. It was all delicious, and at that point, we were absolutely full to the brim. We got a cab back to the hotel (by a different route, accidentally, so we got to see more of the city), and fell asleep immediately.

On our last day, we started as usual with some good continental coffee, then caught a tram - I forgot to mention the tram lines. So when you cross the street, first you remember you're not in England and look left instead of right to see if any bikes are coming in the bike lane. Then you look further to the left to see if a tram is coming in the tram lane. Then you look further left to see if any cars are coming in the car lane. By this point, you are in the middle of the street and have to look right for cars, then trams, then bikes. It's a wonder we're still alive. So we caught a tram to the Anne Frank House museum, where we got to see the attic where she hid with her family. It was eerie standing there, imagining what she went through and how she managed to record her experiences and pass them on. Andrew and I both agreed, though, that the museum was not as powerful or moving as it could have been. It left us with more questions than answers. But I suppose that's not a bad thing.

After a quick lunch, we walked across town to the Rembrandt House museum. This is the house where Rembrandt lived and had his studio. We weren't clear on what happened to the house in the intervening years; surely it hasn't always been a museum, but there it was, all set up as it would have been in Rembrandt's time. They have a big collection of his etchings, and we got to see a few of them on display, but the fascinating part of the museum was that they had a woman there demonstrating the etching process, from the original sketches to the finished drawings on copper plates to the inking and cleaning of the plates and the actual printing process.

After the museum, we had time for one more cup of coffee, then we caught another tram, then a train, then our flight back to London. Then another train, a bus, and a few steps to get back to our cozy flat. It was an intellectually and culinarily stimulating trip, with plenty of relaxation and general atmosphere-soaking-in. Just another weekend in glorious Europe. I'll post some photos soon.

Bits and pieces

I failed to mention in my last post one of the highlights of our London summer, which was the opportunity to hang out with Alex while she was doing her VT study abroad program here in May and June. We saw Alex several times and had a great time showing her some of our favorite London places. She came out to Enfield with us to do some cooking after a trip to Borough Market, and we met her in town a few times, too. My favorite time with Alex, though, was at Fortnum and Mason. She met me there after work, and I enjoyed a slice of Black Forest cake and a cup of tea and watched as she demolished the biggest ice cream sundae I've ever seen. Way to go! Afterwards, we walked around Green Park and talked about books and boys and Mr. Darcy. Come back, Alex! I miss you!

The final excitement of the London summer, before we went home for the Ricke family vacation, was Andrew's birthday. I think I was almost as excited about it as he was, and we both had a great time. Since he is a banker and a London gentleman, I wanted to give him a suitable birthday celebration, so we went to Mayfair for some old school, old boys fun. I had to work that day, but Andrew took the day off and met me during my (extra-long) lunch break. We went to Bentley's Oyster Bar for lunch. We had seen the chef, Richard Corrigan, on one of Jamie Oliver's TV shows and liked his food philosophy, so we wanted to try one of his restaurants, and it did not disappoint. When we showed up for our reservations, the staff greeted us by name, and as we were ushered through the restaurant, everyone said hello and wished Andrew a happy birthday. We sat down at our table in a beautiful room with antique silver everywhere and walls covered in William Morris fabric. As soon as one server handed us our menus, another handed us glasses of champagne on the house. As the name suggests, the restaurant specializes in seafood. Andrew started with some squid stuffed with chorizo and feta, and I had a lovely, ice cold gazpacho with little toasts and rich, garlicky aioli. Then I had grilled sea bass with baby leeks and romesco sauce, and Andrew had a gorgeous fish pie with huge scallops, prawns, and chunks of salmon. We barely had room for dessert, but we shared a coconut-lime rice pudding, which topped everything off quite nicely. After lunch, we walked over to Jermyn Street, which has long been the place for gentlemen to buy shirts, and we looked at some for Andrew because he was getting ready to start his new job at Barclays HQ. After that, I sent him off to the Tate Modern to look at a photography exhibit while I finished work. Later, we met the Kiwis for some tacos and margaritas in Notting Hill. The food was delicious, but the tacos were the size of saucers. And I mean little espresso-cup saucers. They were so tiny! But we had a great time, and we knew we would soon get some real Mexican food at home.

The only other thing to report from the summer was our next flat-finding expedition, which was as easy as the first flat finding was difficult. We knew we needed to move closer in so Andrew could get to work at Canary Wharf more easily. We dithered for a while about where to look, then Andrew had the brilliant idea to figure out our ideal location and work down from there. So one Sunday we went to Marylebone High Street to talk to some estate agents. We discovered that the estate agents' offices close early on Saturdays (makes sense to me...) but we found a guy who was just closing up shop and who was willing to have a chat with us. He made us feel like we could potentially find a small place in Marylebone at the very upper edge of our budget, but we didn't get our hopes up too high. He showed us a basement flat that we could afford, but it was teeny-tiny, even smaller than our flat in Enfield. We gave him our information and didn't expect to hear anything, but I got a call from him the next week about a flat, went to see it the next day, and put down our names right away. We sent in our deposit but had to wait until early October to move. That was the only drawback, though. I'll write more about the flat and post some pictures soon. And on my next post, our family vacation in the Wild West!

The summer roundup, part two

After the Marders left, our next guests were Maura and Gilbert Borrego from Blacksburg. They were going to a wedding in Greece and stopped for a few days in London on the way. They stayed with us in Enfield for a few nights, and we showed them around the city a little bit. We all went over to the Kiwis' house for a Fourth of July party with hamburgers and cole slaw and potato salad and cherry pie...yum! We took them to our favorite Indian restaurant and on our favorite along-the-river walk. We even had the pleasure of running into them by accident outside the National Portrait Gallery on a rainy Sunday afternoon! It was nice to see old friends in a new place and nice to have two more people to share our city with.

After a couple weeks in Milan and Paris, Monica came back to London to continue her study abroad programme in Holborn, and we got to see her several times over the summer. She came out to Enfield to have dinner and sleep over a few times, and we got to hang out with her and her roommate Christina a few times, too. We all went out for pizza and saw the new Batman movie to get a little American goodness, and we all went out for fancy ice cream sundaes at Fortnum and Mason to get a little British goodness. It was great to hear about all the fun places they discovered, and I can't wait to try the cupcake bakery in Notting Hill that they raved about. We saw it the other day but the queue was really long so we skipped it. I saw the cupcakes through the window, though...very tempting.

Near the end of July, we rented a car and drove up to Cambridgeshire for the weekend. We spent two nights camping on an organic farm with a beautiful lodge that looked like it was straight out of Rivendell. The lodge also contained a restaurant serving almost entirely local produce, and we had a glorious meal there the second night. The first night, we missed the restaurant's closing by about 15 minutes and ended up having snacks from the car for dinner, as we were in the middle of nowhere and couldn't get to any food. The adversity felt somewhat familiar from our last camping trip. 

But the next day dawned and we made a fresh start. We headed out on the open roads (that part of England is very flat) to Wicken Fen, where we learned about the fenlands. Anyone who has read the Chronicles of Narnia would recognize this landscape from the Silver Chair. The fens are marshwiggle territory. The land is very soft and wet, and it is laced with narrow canals, which were dug hundreds of years ago to drain the marshes for agricultural production. In Narnia, the marshwiggles are tall, spindly creatures that gather reeds and catch eels for a living. The inhabitants of the real fens historically made their living the same way. At the museum, we even talked to a man (tall, thin, brown, and scruffy, with a straw hat and a pipe) who still catches eels and who looked exactly like Puddleglum! (Does anyone know what I'm talking about? I was so excited, and I haven't found anyone yet to share my excitement.) He showed us his eel traps and his special boat with a huge gun on the front for shooting ducks en masse. He was, shall we say, a character. He told us a lot about the history of the place, too. We didn't spy any of the elusive eels, because they were all hiding in the mud and the reeds, out of sight, but apparently there are just millions of them in the canals. The local people used to pay their taxes in eels, and the nearby cathedral city is even called Ely (eel-y). We didn't see any eels, but we did see all manner of other creatures. We went on a short boat tour down the canal, and we saw dragonflies and little fish and lots of birds, including, according to our guide, a Harrier Hawk, which is apparently quite rare. After our boat trip, we wandered along the paths through the reeds and climbed a tower where we could sit and look out over the vast expanse of nothingness. It was beautiful in a desolate sort of way. It started to drizzle a bit, as it does, so we stopped in the cafe for a cup of tea, as we do. 

Then we drove up to Ely to see the gorgeous cathedral and the charming riverside. Now I have seen a few cathedrals in my day, but this one was really something. The main part of the cathedral - the nave? the apse? I can't remember - was richly decorated, and the ceiling above the altar, well over a hundred feet up, was painted with a choir of angels. The pillars running down both sides of the aisle had typical English carvings on them, with alternating patterns of sawteeth, stripes, curving lines and diamond shapes. The side chapels were poignant, as usual, with their lists of veterans from the wars and their battered battle flags from the local regiments. But the really remarkable part of the cathedral was the Lady Chapel. English cathedrals usually had chapels dedicated to the Virgin Mary, and these chapels were usually targeted by Henry VIII when he had the cathedrals purged of their Catholic imagery during the Reformation. This Lady Chapel bore clearly the marks of Henry's desecration. You could see every injury perpetrated by the soldiers. Every carving (and there were hundreds of them) had its face bashed in. Only a few faint patches remained of what were once brightly colored walls. Most stunningly, all the stained glass had been stripped away and replaced with plain, unadorned, clear glass panels. With the afternoon light streaming in, it was a place that wore its sorrow and its calm resignation like a gentle cloak. It was incredibly peaceful, in spite of the violence that had been done to it. Henry may have damaged it, but he didn't take away its soul.

Feeling refreshed in mind and spirit, we returned to the campsite for a nap before dinner. And what a dinner it was. Everything, from the flour for the bread to the vegetables to the pork in my dinner and the wood pigeon in Andrew's, was sourced locally, most of it from that farm. And everything was delicious. It was quite a departure from our usual camping dinner of bread and cheese! Andrew got a kick out of his dinner, too. Those pesky wood pigeons were everywhere last summer, and they were loud, loud, loud, so to learn that they are also delicious felt like payback.

The next morning we packed up early and set out to Northamptonshire, about an hour away, for the highlight of the weekend: the Festival of History. It was amazing. There were thousands of people there in a massive field dotted with tents, arenas and exhibits. The festival was populated by history re-enactment groups with costumes, weapons, and props from every era of English history. There were Druids, Romans, knights in real armor, Elizabethan jesters, cavaliers and roundheads, redcoats, Victorian ladies, World War I Tommies, and even some "American" GIs. We had a great time wandering around, looking at all the displays, but the best part was seeing the people from different historical periods interacting with each other. Roman soldiers cheered on jousters, and World War II paratroopers walked through the encampment of a Renaissance papal envoy. It was great fun. The shows were impressive, too. We enjoyed the jousting, archery, chariot racing, and trench re-enactments, although the trench gunfire was a little too real for me. The soldiers laughed at me. But I suppose one has to keep up one's spirits on the front line. The best show, though, was the D-Day re-enactment. They had real Spitfires and Messerschmidts, and about ten people parachuted down onto a field in front of the crowd to prepare for battle against the Germans. There were explosions aplenty, and one paratrooper had to use his reserve parachute when his first one failed, so it was all quite exciting. I'll try to post Andrew's photos from the event. When it was all over, we found the car (after about 30 minutes of searching) and drove back to London. Well, Andrew drove. I just navigated. What a good husband he is, to drive me all over the countryside. Lesson learned though: just pay the extra 20 quid for an automatic!

What we’ve been up to

Hi again! It’s been a long, busy summer full of sunshine and warm weather…oh wait. No, it rained all summer again. But we still had a great time, and I have much to write about.

When I last left off the regular-ish blog posting, I had just gotten a promotion and Robert and Diane Eaton had just visited us in Enfield. See Andrew’s post, below, for a description of our trip to Ireland with that dynamic duo. So, to catch everyone up on what we’ve been doing, here is a list of the summer’s highlights.

My parents (of both the Ricke and the Marder variety) gave me ballet tickets and a dinner at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant, Fifteen, for my birthday. We went to the ballet in May, and we went to Fifteen in June. It was a wonderful experience. We went to the Fifteen in Cornwall last summer, and the one in London was equally delicious. There are four Fifteen restaurants, in London, Cornwall, Amsterdam and Melbourne. Each one is run by young chefs from disadvantaged backgrounds who learn to cook and then work in the kitchens. It’s a charity I can really get behind. And the food was amazing. In Cornwall we had the nine-course tasting menu, but this time we ate in the trattoria part of the restaurant with an a la carte menu.

The room we were in was familiar to us from seeing it on some of Jamie’s TV shows, and it added to the excitement of the evening. Everything was decorated with dark wood in curvy, modern shapes, and the bar at the front of the restaurant was groaning under the weight of dozens of plates of antipasti, breads, desserts, and wine bottles. Everything spoke of abundance and easy comfort. We started with some seasonal cocktails: a strawberry rum punch for me and something citrusy for Andrew. We shared a plate of the mouthwatering antipasti we saw when we came in. There were marinated carrots, artichokes, tomatoes, fennel, olives, peppers, eggplant, salami, and fresh mozzarella. And that was all just one portion! We both had risotto next (mine with Sicilian lemon and chili pan grattato; Andrew's with about a billion different kinds of seafood and saffron). For main courses, I had roasted cod with lentils and braised fennel and Andrew had roasted chicken with olives and sundried tomatoes. Dessert was strawberry prosecco cheesecake for the gentleman and an apricot-raspberry tart for me, and we each had a glass of limoncello to finish. Wow, writing about it now from some previous notes brings it all back. I think Andrew and I are both really good cooks, but I’m not sure we’ll ever make anything that tastes quite that good. We are trying, though!

The next event on the summer’s social calendar was a visit from Andrew’s family. They were here for about two weeks, and we had a great time relaxing and showing them around. They arrived in Enfield and spent a couple days seeing the local sights, then Walter, Linna, Monica and I took the train out to Gloucester, picked up a rental car, and drove to Amberley, the tiny village in the Cotswolds where the Marders have stayed a few times and where Andrew and I spent a lovely day last summer. I was put in charge of navigation in the passenger seat, while Monica stayed in the back to keep Linna calm as Walter tackled the narrow country lanes. We made it in one piece, and in good spirits, to the cottage the Marders had rented for the week. It was just like a hobbit hole with low ceilings and exposed beams, built into the hill side with flowers bursting forth from every spare inch of ground and even in the crevices between the stones outside. That evening we picked up Andrew, who had to take a later train after work. The next day we went to the Stroud Famers’ Market, where we stocked up on local veg and snacks (including scrumptious homemade doughnuts), tasted some English wine and cheese, and watched adorable children in big wellies dancing to a live band playing folk music on old-fashioned instruments like hurdy-gurdies and fiddles. It was picturesque and refreshing and real (or what I like to think of as real, at least, which is probably more surreal than anything else). I was very happy.

From Stroud we drove up to Hidcote Manor Garden, near Stratford-on-Avon. Andrew and I went there last summer, riding a bus, then walking two miles up hill only to find that it was closed that day. We felt victorious when we returned, in the car, and got to explore the garden behind those tall brick walls. I love English gardens because of their exuberant lushness and the quiet fastidiousness that goes into their gentle chaos. I also like them because, although you can always tell that they are English, they never look exactly alike. This garden was set up differently from any other garden I’ve ever seen. It was many gardens in one, and each individual garden was in its own room, surrounded by hedges or trellises or beds of tall flowers. Each mini-garden had its own theme. There was a white garden, a red garden, an Alpine garden, a “wilderness,” even a meadow complete with a herd of wooly sheep. The weather was, I think, perfect. It was gray and wet and chilly, but that meant that the flowers were all covered with dew and when the sun did shine through, it illuminated isolated features that we would have missed on a sunny day. My favorite flowers were the delphinia, peonies, and fuchsia. I’ll post some pictures soon.

After our interlude in the garden, we drove back to the cottage through some of the gorgeous little villages for which the Cotswolds area is famous. There are entire towns that are all built of the same honey-colored stone, with thatched roofs on the houses and flowers in hanging baskets lining the main streets. Like the farmers’ market, it was all just a little bit better than anything strictly real, but it wasn’t like Disney World, either. People live in the villages, and they have chosen to keep their towns looking beautiful and quiet and historical. And thank goodness. I think they’ve managed to preserve something of the true British character, even if that character can be hard to find in modern day life.

That night, Andrew and I made dinner with our haul from the farmers’ market. We had roast pork with broad beans, carrots, potatoes, and mushrooms. The piece of pork we got was from a local farm, and it still had a few dark piggy hairs on it; it was just that fresh. All the food was delicious.

Later that evening, Andrew, Monica, and I walked up to the village pub and had a few drinks. Monica was excited to be in England but was eager to start her study abroad program in Milan. She leant a sympathetic ear to our gripes about London and made us feel better about our situation. Sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes to see for yourself how good your life is. We all had a great time and were giddy as we ran down the hill through the town in the pouring rain to get home to our warm beds.

The next day, we all went to Woodchester Mansion, which is a country house that a 19^th-century gentleman started building in the 1850s. By the 1870s, when he died, the house was still nowhere near finished and his children didn’t carry on his work. Today, you can take a tour of the building site. Only one room is finished, and the rest of the house is like a skeleton. There are walls, windows, and staircases, but some parts of the house don’t have any ceilings, and there are areas where you step into a room and look up to see the fireplaces and windows of what would have been the rooms above. There are even ladders and scaffolding set up still. Everything is as it was left when the construction stopped. Because of the safety risks of the place, you can only see it on a guided tour, on which you learn more than you ever wanted to know about Victorian-era stonework construction techniques and the personal history of the gentleman owner, who “went over to Rome” and was shunned in his later life for being a dirty Catholic. It is a sad place, burdened by its unfulfilled potential. It would have been beautiful if it had been finished. It does have a sort of neo-Gothic splendor, though, and apparently it is popular at Halloween, when groups come from miles around for ghost tours and bat watching. I for one missed neither the ghosts nor the bats.

Andrew had to take the train back to London that night, but I stayed on for one more day with the Marders. We spent the next day driving around the countryside some more and eventually made our way to Avebury, which is another pretty village surrounded by a huge stone ring that is even older than Stonehenge. The stones are scattered all around the buildings, and sheep graze right up to the feet of them. We walked around the stones and paused to watch a guy in a tie-dye shirt banging solemnly on some bongo drums. Priceless.

The Marders stayed in Amberley for a few more days before returning to London. We took them out to our local Indian restaurant and led them on our favorite London walk from Borough Market, past St. Paul’s, along the Thames, through Whitehall to Victoria. The next day we went to Regents Park and Marylebone, to show them where we wanted to find a new flat. By that point, Andrew knew he was going to get to work at Canary Wharf in Barclays’ headquarters, so we were starting to think about where to move. Monica left for Milan the next day, and we had one more night with Andrew’s parents before they flew back to the states. The last night was a lot of fun because we got to just hang out with Walter and Linna like we would have with a couple of old friends. What fun to be an adult! And what fun to show people around London!