Saturday was to be our last excursion together before Keith and Marlene’s long trip back to Virginia. Carol had applied for tickets to the British Museum’s exhibition of The First Emperor and our allotted time slot was 8:20 PM. I don’t really like to be in London that late but it’s a very popular exhibition and availability is limited. So, we planned ot make a day of it visiting some sights in the afternoon followed by dinner in a restaurant somewhere before hitting the museum.

We began by visiting Tower Bridge. It has a permanent exhibition of the development and engineering involved in the bridge itself. Originally, the roadway was raised by large steam engines powering the hydraulics; today electric motors provide the power. The views from the walkways 140 feet above the Thames are impressive, too, although it really shows what a complete architectural mess London’s skyline has become; absolutely no integrity whatsoever.

Next we sauntered along the south embankment of the Thames and found Borough Market, albeit in the throws of winding down for the day. This is a great Saturday market for foodies but cheap it ain’t. There’s a lot of good stuff there if you feel like paying for it.

Although we started out from Leighton Buzzard in sun, the weather had caved in a little as we approached London which was grey and overcast. Now it was getting decidedly chilly so we decided to go and find dinner in Chinatown before heading up to the museum. We picked a restaurant which apparently specialized in crispy aromatic duck and the three of us managed to brow-beat Keith into one of the set meals for four featuring the very same. The meal staggered up to the dizzy heights of OK, in my opinion. The wine was good, though.

Finally, we travelled up to the British Museum to see the old Emperor guy and his terracotta army.We arrived when the 7:10 PM intake was going in, just over an hour too soon. Marlene to the rescue; she put on her best American accent and sweet-talked the nice young man into letting us in early. Result! Now we were able to get home before midnight. The exhibition was very good even for someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy museums. The terracotta figures were larger than I expected, around six feet tall, much larger than 2,000 year old Chinese people. It was very hot in the exhibition, though, and Carol and I eventually found Keith and Marlene trying to recover from the heat exhaustion by the exit.

Back home by 10:30 PM for the reviving drink of your choice.

Well, not exactly meet, perhaps, since our four friends, Peter, Janet, Steve and Rosemary, who were to join us for dinner on Friday evening had already met Keith and Marlene on previous occasions. This was more like renewing old acquaintances. The originally planned dinner for eight had become dinner for nine with the addition of Carol’s stranded mother. Seating would be a challenge and very cozy. However, neighbour Paul came to the rescue by supplying a few more dining chairs.

Carol came up with the bright idea of making a massive lasagna Bolgnese so my afternoon was dictated by the need to be tied to the cooker for four hours cooking it. We’d start with a selection of ante pasta dishes (cold meat components delicately rolled by Marlene), most of which required little or no preparation and, to make it a truly international affair, finish with another of those American diabetes-inducing sugar-injections called pecan pie a la Keith, baked in a case of Carol’s excellent pastry.

Having seemingly involved almost everyone within striking distance, it all came together as planned and we had what seemed to be a long and sociable evening polishing off everybody’s culinary efforts and, of course, washing it all down with further extracts from our now familiar wine lake.

What a team effort.

Wednesday was time for Carol to collect her mum from her sister’s house in Aylesbury. She was to stay with us for the night prior to being ferried to Milton Keynes railway station on Thursday for her journey home to Auchinleck in Scotland. All went well – initially. I returned from a shopping trip to find our house being turned upside down for an apparently missing train ticket. It turned out that the aforementioned ticket was still pretending to be a book mark back in Aylesbury. Bad ticket! What a nice day for a second round trip to Aylesbury to retrieve said ticket.

Having retrieved the ticket it seemed that Thursday rail travel on the necessary line was out of the question due to some over-running engineering works on the line by Rail Track. Bad Rail Track! We were to have an extra house guest for a few days. Full House. We decided that Carol’s mum should stick around over the weekend while any back log of passengers was cleared so she would eventually get a calmer trip back home.

Next problem – not enough of the daily medications necessary for the extended stay. This was relatively simply fixed by a trip to our local General Practitioner, fortunately. Well done Carol.   Good Doctor!

Drinks needed!

New Year’s Day started very murkily as we had a relatively leisurely pack in readiness for our journey home. After packing and negotiating all the various high-security exits to the apartment complex, Carol and I took a brief stroll around the Dives-sur-Mer harbour development before saying au revoir.

We had plenty of time for the journey; Calais was about three hours away and the ferry booking was for 5:30 PM. So, we decided to call in to a town that we habitually simply drive through on our longer French journeys: Rouen. This is where the English practiced their early barbecuing skills on Joan of Arc. We arrived just before midday and found somewhere to park fairly close to the centre. Being New Year’s Day, France was essentially closed for business but there were a few people wandering about. The town was badly damaged during the war and had obviously not been very sympathetically restored. The Cathedrale de Notre Dame and Palais de Justice were magnificent, the latter having largely been painstakingly cleaned of the years of grime. Scattered between the old elegance, however, were concrete monstrosities serving as stark reminders of the architectural follies of the late 1960s, some of these being covered in graffiti and sporting broken windows. One such building appeared to have incorporated and old historic wall into its structure but the joins were everything but seamless and the new swamped the old thus making the token gesture appear totally pointless. Curiosity sated, I think we’ll resume our former straight through approach next time.

Continuing our northward thrust toward Calais, the weather deteriorated and became depressingly wet and foggy so there was no point dallying further. We arrived at the ferry port and managed to get on to a crossing departing at 3:50 PM which would make our home time more appealing. We were boarding about 20 minutes after our arrival and managed to get a table in the on board Langan’s Brasserie. Apart from giving Keith and Marlene a comprehensive Channel crossing experience (tunnel out, ferry back), my main reason for using the ferry on New Year’s Day was to eat since I wasn’t sure what else might be open in France; a good decision, as it turned out, since little else was.

Naturally, once back on English soil the traffic density shot up alarmingly but we returned home without mishap carrying two prisoners captured from the Normandy Calvados Battalion as a reminder of a splendid trip.

Happy 2008 everybody!