ENGLAND 2011 -- 5

+ updated at 1:44pm here in England (8:44am ESDT) on Wednesday,August 17, 2011


+ I finally picked up a good Southampton guide at the airport where I rented a car yesterday. It suggested Romsey. While Mary heads to Bristol with Mandy, I am driving there leisurely. So, here I am in the historic market and abbey town of Romsey eating lunch at a Cafe Nero with a view of the town center and the abbey which I visited earlier. Good cafe americano! Very historic and well preserved abbey. I may insert a link here some day! And a photo. I am taking onefrom where I am sitting enjoying view and coffee and caramel chocolate shortbread after a tuna melt panini. Now I will try to log on here.


+ I must blog now that we have enjoyed the first 5 days of this adventure.


+ We are so glad we did not change our plans because of the threat of more riots in London. We joined tens of thousands of happy tourists and others visiting the popular attractions. We had already seen most of them so we decided to take the tube to Kew Gardens. I took at least 50 photos there. WOW! Because of construction on the tube we had to figure out an indirect route to get there from Paddington. Bakerloo and District instead of ... OH I Forget now! It was very hot inside the trains.


+ We saw WE WILL ROCK YOU at the Dominion Theater. Great! On Sunday we went to our home church whenever we are in London: St Martin in the Fields. The seron preached by Richard Carter was powerful. He had some very thoughtful, prophetic and compassionate remarks in the aftermath of the riots which broke out last week in London and other cities. We ate there at The Cafe in the Crypt. Then we took the tube up to the British Library which has an excellent display of many ancient and historic documents including the Magna Carta, a John.Milton notebook, the Codex Sinaiticus (earliest complete Christian Bible from the fourth century) and the Codex Alexandria. (I will edit this for spelling later and possibly add to it)


+ Our weekend in London included some frustrating moments and resulting stress for both of us. Our first room of 3 at the Hotel Indigo Padington was at the basement level. We didn't like the dungeon feel! Fortunately we didn't have to stay there. But I managed to trip a circuit breaker trying to get my European cell phone charged. The very pleasant staff moved us to a room on the second floor which was just painted. I have always dislikued the aroma of fresh paint and I quickly got a sore throat and headache. We had to stay there for one night. On Saturday the very pleasant staff moved us to a smaller room on the fourth floor which had a nice view. We really liked it. I tried one more time to charge my phone and tripped still another circuit breaker. Here in Southampton I found a very helpful man at amobile phone store who had the charger I needed. He also knew.how to get our second cell phone.going. It had a very dead battery.


I expected the GPS on my Galaxy tab to work here in the UK but it doesn't work. That is really frustrating since we will be renting a car for 2 weeks. Yesterday I bought a relatively inexpensive Navman GPS for Great Britain and Ireland at Halfords in Southampton. I had fun figuring out the train and bus routes. Soon (Tuesday afternoon) I will be taking the bus to the airport where I will pick up a car at Hertz.