The End of the Day

July 29th, 2002

After we picked up our grandson from soccer camp...

St. Edward's school building

Kids playing soccer

We decided to drop by Bourton -on-the-Water on Monday.We went here on a hot July day, and it seemed half of England was here also. It was very crowded. Then as we drove to the car park and my daughter smashed her car headlight on the post going in. So that started the visit off on a bad foot. When you are driving on the left in a RHD car, the most hazardous time for a person brought up driving on the right with a LHD car is when going around a corner especially a turn to the right because if you are used to driving on the right, you don't know exactly where the other side of your car is. But at this point, my daughter had been living in England for 2 years, and driving without incident all that time.

However, in the car park, the EXIT gate was painted bright yellow, and the post next to the ENTRANCE gate was black. So one focused on the yellow one and the black one kind of receded and got overlooked. She hit the black one (which was quite bent and scarred from being hit so many times by other people).

Smashed headlight

I Hit a Pole...was what my daughter reported at her workplace the next day. "Did he sue?" was the response. English English is quite different in some respects from American English. They say garden, and we say yard. To us a garden is somewhere to grow vegetables, and to them, a yard is a stable yard. So the English would have said that they hit a post and not a pole, which they interpreted as a person of the Polish persuasion.

The most difficult difference in terminology is that when the Brits say that they want 'to table' something, they mean that they want to discuss it, whereas to Americans, tabling something means to put it aside to discuss later.

Our daughter and grandson had been here before, so they had preselected the attractions.

Local people walking along beside water

Fish in the river

We walked from the carpark to the miniature train museum (which did not allow any photographs) and did the Dragonfly Maze which was next to Birdland because my daughter thought we would enjoy it more than Birdland.

Birds and entrance to Birdland

The Dragonfly Maze is a yew hedge maze and Rebus puzzle. There are over a quarter of a mile of pathways, the centre piece being the ornate Central Pavilion, tastefully designed and constructed from local materials. It is, however really difficult to take pictures in the maze (although they are allowed) because things are so close to you. So I don't have many pictures. Then we went to eat lunch, and had a problem getting served because it was a bit late and crowded.

We got Indian food from the Indian take-out place for dinner. Bob liked that better than the Indian food we get here.

Looking at the damage on the car

2002 July 30
Our daughter took the car because she had a hair appointment and had to pick up her son from a friends house where he went after soccer camp. It was a little overcast. We got the bus in front of the house. The conductor told us that the RT fare was £0.55 or £1.10 for two. Our daughter says she never knows what the fare will be - it just depends on how they feel.

Bus stop map

We walked around in Cheltenham a bit

My daughter's print of the Cheltenham Promenade

and went into W.H. Smith where Bob bought some materials to do the narrow boat model that I had bought at the hire place. He said it was a model for adults and was too hard for our grandson to do. Then I walked to the PO to mail a b-day card to mother (which she got really quickly) and post cards to my other grandsons. Mother left some post card stamps there when she visited, which I used. The PO lady said the postage on post cards to the states went up 2p since mom bought the stamps

Cheltenham was very crowded - almost as much as Bourton on the Water had been the day before. Then we got on the bus and went back to our daughter's house. It was starting to rain a bit otherwise Bob would have gotten off the bus to buy car painting supplies to touch up the dings on the Rover from yesterday and then walked home. I organized the 11 rolls of film I had taken (in addition to the digital ones, and I missed one roll and had to send it later) and printed out the address label etc so I could have our son-in-law mail them in the US PO and I wrote up the canal boat trip etc. Bob worked on the narrowboat model. When our daughter came home, she went and got fish and chips from an authentic fish and chips shop for dinner.

Where we ate our fish and chips

2002 July 31

it was really raining hard in the morning - the first real rain we'd had for the whole 2 weeks. We were going to go to Cardiff or back to Gloucester, but Bob said that he wasn't driving anymore because I complained too much about him being too close to things on the left, and besides our daughter needed the car because it was raining.

(The other times she's given us the car to use she walked to work - the buses weren't running so early - and took a bus home.) So plan B was to ride the bus into Cheltenham again. But I just didn't feel like it, so we didn't. When our daughter came home, the four of us (our son-in-law was working out) walked up to the nicer Indian restaurant and had dinner (Indus Tandoori), and brought back take-out for our son-in-law. Then we packed and went to bed. Our daughter had our grandson come in and say good-bye, and she told him to hug Bob even if he wasn't awake, but Bob was just playing asleep, and he started to giggle when he was hugged. That's because we are leaving really early tomorrow to miss the rush hour traffic around Gatwick.

We flew home on August 1st. Our daughter drove us to Gatwick - we found someone's passport in the ladies room. We flew

Soon after takeoff

Flying Home 1 August 2002

from Gatwick to Charleston WV and then had to catch a connecting flight back to Baltimore. It was a very long day.

The rest of 2002