We arrived in London on Sunday very well rested thanks to the late night departure from Tampa and the flat beds in Virgin’s Upper Class. Passport control, luggage collection, train into Paddington — all very easy. Our hotel room wasn’t ready. So, we grabbed a snack and drinks at Vagabond.

After that we headed off to the National Galley (renovations ongoing — so a limited collection seemed to be on display) to look at some art for a while before grabbing a dim sum dinner at a family favorite in Soho, Duck and Rice (where we haven’t been together in years).

Monday started with breakfast at Ole & Steen (cinnamon social — yes, please!) and was followed by a trip to the Wallace Collection for a dog art show and tour around their permanent collection. Libby and I hadn’t been to the Wallace in years, and I forgot just how fine of a museum it really is. Very much worth the visit. We spent the afternoon wandering about the West End — some shopping, sightseeing, and beers / lunch split between a Canadian pub (poutine time) and Indian street food at the Seven Dials food hall. In the evening, we went to see Once On This Island at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre — where both the show and venue were enjoyable and certainly worth the discounted ticket price.

Tuesday saw us taking a train out to Hampton Court Palace, which Emerson really wanted to visit last November. We’ve been here more times than I can count, and I can’t say much has changed since our last visit (maybe the addition of the Chocolate Room?), but it was a pleasant visit on a beautiful day. Indeed, the weather all week was cool-ish for Floridians but often sunny and without rain — just great for us! The other daily highlight (especially for Libby) was seeing Aspects of Love starring Michael Ball. The show clearly has issues given modern sensibilities and seems—as many reviewers put it—kind of “daft,” but the music itself was enjoyable and Michael Ball (along with most of the cast) gave a great performance.

On Wednesday, we started the day with a group walking tour of the West End theaters, which turned out to be just us and the guide, Charlie, on this particular day. Admittedly, we know this area of London pretty well and also have been to many of theaters over the years. However, the tour provided more color and richness (origin of phrases. theatre names — insights into early theatre history and personalities) — even for a theatre buff like Libby. After the tour we grabbed a quick, small lunch of some dim sum at Red Farm followed by book shopping at the Waterstone’s in Piccadilly and a visit to the Royal Academy for a small but excellent show of African-American outsider art. For dinner, we went to Hoppers in SoHo — a recent find for me after a visit to the outpost in King’s Cross with excellent Sri Lankan food (best thought of as a spicy variant of Indian cuisine).

Thursday was our final day in London. We started the day without firm plans other than seeing Rose, a one woman play that’s received excellent reviews, in the afternoon. Ultimately, we opted for breakfast at Ole & Steen (cinnamon social, again… yum!), followed by a visit to Daunt Books in Marylebone (somehow a first for us — awesome curation and organization by country for travelers like us), and a visit to the Tate Modern where we saw a two person show featuring Mondrian (fav of mine) and af Klint (admittedly someone I was unfamiliar with). Mondrian was enjoyable but not revelatory — his work and story is so familiar at this point to me. Like a recent show I saw at the Guggenheim during a business trip to New York that featured Gego, af Klint was thrilling as a discovery of yet another wildly talented female artist finally enjoying wider recognition and place of prominence in the “Art World.” Admittedly, af Klint’s story was complicated by her instructions to not publicly show her most significant work until 20 years after her death. However, once given the opportunity, some museums passed on acquiring her works (even as a donation) — I’m sure they’re regretting that decision now.

As previously mentioned, we saw Rose, which can only be described as an amazing performance and theatrical triumph. The story is of a Ukrainian jewish woman, Rose, and her life surviving her upbringing, life in World War II Poland, loss of family, unsuccessful exodus to Israel, and a rebuilt life American. The entire production consists of her relating this story and all of the associated emotions—for almost two and a half hours—from a bench while sitting shiva. Simply amazing.

Dinner on Thursday was early-ish at Pizzeria Mozza, a London outpost of Nancy Silverton’s Californian institution. As expected from the founder of La Brea Bakery, the food was of extremely high quality with an exceptional crust. That said, I probably wouldn’t rush back just because Californian-style pizza isn’t my favorite take on pizza—I’m a snob for NY-style, classic pepperoni thin crust not inventive, circular flatbreads—and there are just too many great options in London to eat pizza when I’m in town.

Greetings ya’ll!

It’s been a while since my last post here.

I’m writing this from the sort of sad generic “international lounge” at Tampa International Airport. We’re heading to London tonight in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class cabin (my Delta SkyPesos still have some value).

As some of you know, I started a new (now old) job in 2018 that had me traveling very frequently internationally from mid-2018 until March 2020 when the world shut down for COVID.

Along the way, I started losing enthusiasm for this project. Too much travel / activity. Too little time (or desire) for writing.

We did, however, travel to China in late 2019 when seemingly the biggest concern was protests in Hong Kong. I still have a post from the summer of 2019 (a second trip to London) and others from the China trip that are in “draft” mode at this moment. I plan to edit and post them in the coming days as I have time during our current adventure.

I’ll also fill in the gaps in 2020 (nothing other than trips to our house in North Carolina), 2021 (a round trip journey from Florida to New England by car), and 2022 (when we traveled to Canada and around the Great Lakes region, as well as our first overseas trip as a family since the pandemic started). We also managed to visit NYC a couple of times, travel to our place in NC, and also buy a boat (finally!) earlier this year.

This year is a real return to the world. Emerson is now 13! Probably closing in on the 157 count too (I need to do the math). And, so it’s time for another quinquennial adventure around the world — our 3rd time circumnavigating the globe as a family.

Pretty awesome!

To top it off, we plan to head back to South America and Antarctica around Christmas.

Anyway, I’m back… now let’s get going.

Note: I’m actually writing this about 4 months later during our visit to China. Just catching up.

Note #2: as mentioned here, I’m only posting this about 4 years later w/ minimal clean up edits.

Like last summer (which I didn’t write about), Libby and Emerson flew to the UK for a “long weekend” in July to spend time with me during a two week work visit for me. This year it was actually a bit longer, as they left home on a Thursday and returned home on a Wednesday. Given my work schedule, they had to self-amuse a bit on the weekdays, but we still found time to enjoy time together over the weekend and in the evenings.

Here are a few of the highlights (in no particular order):

Libby finally got to tour Buckingham Palace, which is only open to visitors for a few weeks in the late summer and thus usually didn’t work out well with her schedule around the start of school.

We enjoyed a delightful and new walk along the Regent’s Canal from the Paddington Basin to Camden Lock (where we enjoyed lunch at the market) before carrying on to King’s Cross.

We finally saw the hit musical Hamilton, where we had very good seats at a reasonable price! I can’t say that it was my favorite musical ever (though I really enjoyed it), but I appreciated the creativity and novelty associated with it. Emerson was a big fan! I’m willing to speculate that it’ll be an important milestone in the history of the art form.

We ate all kinds of great food at some established favorite spots, as well as some new places too. Highlights included another trip to Red Farm (which the gals enjoyed more in this visit), the Bun House (the salted duck egg custard bun was revelatory), Vagabond (a fun wine bar near Paddington Station), Taqueria (my favorite taco spot in London), the Michelin-started Yawatcha (good not not wildly better than Duck & Rice, which is owned by the same restauranteur), a hipster BBQ place in Shoreditch which I thought was more “alright” than “spectacular” (name lost in the mist of time), and Farm Girl in Notting Hill (which always seems to be wildly popular based on the lines, but we thought was more “okay” than “awesome”).

All in all, this was a fun interlude, and one of the benefits of my current international job — it gives us the airline miles and reason to travel overseas just a bit more than usual.

Note #2: as mentioned here, I’m only posting this over 4 years later w/ minimal clean up edits.

On Friday, we started the day with a visit to the National Gallery, viewing both some old favorites and a small but interesting Sean Scully exhibition. Here are a couple of highlights from our visit.

I’d insert pictures here, but that feature no longer seems to work on the iPhone app.

For lunch, we went to Red Farm, which is one of my favorite places for dim sum in London. The food isn’t especially traditional. Instead, it’s rather more creative and playful, though the flavors are generally spot on. Here are a few of the dishes:

I’d insert pictures here, but that feature no longer seems to work on the iPhone app.

The rest of the day was spent wandering about the West End…

On Saturday, we set out for Kew Gardens, which was featuring a Dale Chiluly (sp) exhibition set in the gardens and greenhouses, as well as smaller works in a gallery setting. This reminded us of the Chiluly works that had been on display at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville. Like that show, we found this a joy to behold. Mom, who hadn’t seen the show at the Biltmore, seemed to especially like it.

We returned to London and ate dinner at Duck & Rice, an Asian fusion gastropub, which I took the girls to the prior year.

On Sunday, we didn’t have time for much beyond walking over the High Street Ken for a quick bite of breakfast. We then took a car service to London-Heathrow, where I dropped the gals off before heading on to Oxford to start my work week. This was kind of depressing, if I’m honest, because I ended up remaining in England for two full additional weeks only returning home on June 21.

We probably could have saved some time (maybe 20 minutes?) by buying our tickets in advance, but it worked out fine. We visited the State Apartments (some rooms closed for restoration work), didn’t see Queen Mary’s Dollhouse (more work), but did visit St George’s and had a chance to stroll about the grounds.

Aside from Emerson, we’d all been there before some years ago, but it was nice to return.

We reversed our journey back to London and arrived at our hotel before 4:00pm. I had some work related stuff to do before heading out to dinner at the Churchill Arms, which has remarkably good Thai food vs. a more traditional pub menu. This was my properly spicy pork stir-fry:

After dinner, we stopped at Caffe Concerto on High Street Kensington for some sumptuous desserts. Here’s my pistachio cake:

We departed the ship in Civitavecchia at 8:15. We found disembarking to be very easy — it’s one of the benefits of passengers rolling on and off the manifest at most of the ports-of-call. You simply don’t have the mad crush of an entire ship disgorging itself all at once.

We met our driver at 8:25 for the trip to the airport (€150), which took about an hour.

Check-in had a little bit of a queue at British Airways, but it wasn’t too annoying despite my lack of status with the airline. All told, we had to waste about two hours before our scheduled boarding time.

Unfortunately, once we’d boarded the plane, we sat on the tarmac for nearly an hour while they struggled to load and unload the luggage. It seemed they were mysteriously short-handed in the baggage handling department?

The flight was otherwise uneventful, and I managed (finally — they’ve been out on other BA flights) to enjoy one of BrewDog’s Speedbird 100 Transatlantic IPAs (brewed to commemorate the centennial of BA and named, of course, for Concorde).

We were about 45 minutes late into London as a result of the baggage snafu, which further delayed our arrival at our hotel due to increased traffic during rush hour. Nonetheless, we made it to our (very small, otherwise fine) rooms at the Hotel Xenia by around 5:45.

After dropping off our baggage, we left for dinner at The Bolton, a nearby pub with excellent food and beer.

Mom and Emerson had burgers (British beef/cheddar and wild boar/chorizo, respectively). Libby enjoyed the bangers and mash, and I went for a traditional steak and cheese pie:

All in all, this made for a nice “welcome to London” end to our day.

We left the ship around 8:30, took a shuttle bus out of the port, and then a taxi (€15 euro, maybe a rip off?) from the cruise terminal to the train station, which saved us a 30 minute, uphill walk.

Once at the train station, I bought us Cinque Terre Train Cards, which included unlimited train transport, bathrooms, WiFi, and use of the trails within the Cinque Terre National Park. This was €58 euro for the four of us (including a book) — which was about the cost of a single “on your own” excursion organized by the ship. Of course, it put the burden on us to “figure things out,” but that was no problemo to me. The trains just run in two directions and the villages are only a few minutes apart.

We opted to take start at the most distant village and work our way back, which minimized our return travel time (in case… whatever happened).

The train journey isn’t very scenic. Most of your time is spent in tunnels. Indeed, you only get brief views of the villages and seaside at the stations themselves… assuming you didn’t stop in a tunnel there too!

Our first stop was at Monterosso al Mare, which is the flattest of the villages and seemed to have the most beach / coastline too.

Next we moved on to Vernazza with its attractive natural harbor:

We then skipped Cornilgia in the interest of time, as the trains run every 30 min or so. Thus, one wants to be judicious about hops on and off lest you waste a lot of time in the stations.

Instead, we moved on to Manarola, where we enjoyed a lovely fried calamari and potato lunch while walking around the village and along the cliff side walkway:

Or, final stop was in Riomaggiore for a look around (and some dessert — always good to have a traveling feast):

We then boarded one of the trains for our quick trip back to La Spezia. Since we had enough time remaining before our ship was scheduled to depart, we ambled down through the town and along the water front to the cruise terminal. Like Genoa, this feels like a real, “lived in” place too. It doesn’t get a lot of attention from the guidebooks, but we thought it was a perfectly nice town and could have happily spent more time exploring it.

I really like days like today when we see lots of new things and I get to put my travel skills to good use. That’s always especially fun… savoring both the place and my small victories as a traveler of the world.

We grabbed a quick dinner at the buffet and otherwise spent the rest of the evening getting ready to depart the ship in the morning.

Work continued to be a source of interruption and frustration for me, as it’s been for most days of this trip. I’m planning to avoid that in the future, if at all possible, as I’m gone a lot for work anyway so would rather be fully present when I am with Libby and Emerson.

Genoa has a storied history as a major port city — arriving via ship seemed very apropos. It feels “lived in,” which I mean in a nice way. I like the contrast between its narrow medieval lanes and grand piazzas.

Unfortunately, being a Monday the city’s museums were closed. Alas, this is one of the challenges of cruising: arriving in port for a one day visit that doesn’t align with local happenings.

We did, however, make limoncello out of our lemons by enjoying a gourmet pizza lunch at Savo — top quality ingredients, made with care. Just my kind of place:

We spent a bit more time wandering around the old port area (which had been revitalized) before returning to the ship.

For dinner, we ate at the ship’s teppanyaki restaurant, which was one of the best teppanyaki meals I’ve ever had in terms of both flavor and the show (which was participatory). Here’s Emerson trying to flip an egg on a spatula:

The waterfront of the historic city center is very attractive:

The Fesch Museum was mercifully uncrowded and contained a number of high quality works by artists both familiar and unfamiliar to me.

Maison Bonaparte was a bit less exciting in part because the explanations were entirely in French and also the smaller space was a bit more crowded with tourists. Nonetheless, it was interesting to see (though not Angelina Jolie’s handprints in concrete in Cannes interesting).

The other major sight, the town’s Cathedral, was closed. So, we returned to the waterfront and enjoyed some ice cream and drinks at one of the restaurants that were open on the quay:

Today’s Box Score: +1 Country (Corsica)

We started by taking a taxi to Parq Guell. Unfortunately, no tickets were available for the day (despite arriving at 9am!). Oh well. From there we walked to Sagrada Familia. Guess what? No tickets available there either. Oh well. We’ve visited that before too.

We then walked to the Eixample where we viewed a number of the Modernista masterpieces.

We then spent the remainder of the morning and early afternoon exploring this area and the Gothic Quarter, which is quite evocative with its narrow alleys and warren-like feel.

We then crossed Las Ramblas to have lunch at Guell Tapas in El Raval. Here’s Libby enjoying a delicious cava (sparkling wine) sangria:

Lunch was equally good.

I think we could eat tapas every day for a month and remain happy perfectly happy.

We returned to the ship by 3:00 and had dinner in the ship’s Pan-Asian restaurant by Roy Yamaguchi. I had sushi, which was great. Emerson and Mom also seemed to enjoy their dinner, but Libby didn’t love her dishes (having tried them, I tended to agree they were kind of “meh” at best).