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.

That requires some explanation: I’m starting a new job in a new industry in mid-June with a company based in England. Like most of my professional career, I’ll be working remotely from my home office in Florida, as well as traveling pretty extensively — including probably monthly trips to the UK once I’m established in the role.

So, this week will be a preview of that (and my future professional life) for me.

Since there wouldn’t have been time to participate in these meetings, fly home, and then immediately return to Europe, I rearranged my travel so that I’ll meet Libby, Emerson, and Mom in Frankfurt, Germany on Friday morning. From there, we’ll be off on a drive through Germany and France. We’ll spend a couple of days in Paris. Then we’ll fly to Dubai (despite it being summer and the holy month of Ramadan, neither of which are optimal for travel to Middle East). Finally, we’ll end our trip in Tokyo, which will include a visit to Tokyo Disneyland (something that thrills the girls).

I should mention this flight as it was my first time in Virgin Atlantic’s Upper Class. The airline recently updated the cabin on their A330 fleet, which now has three rows of single seats that are angled forwards (so, you take off and land at kind of a 45 degree angle to the direction of the plane). The seats and bed (though short) are very comfortable. The food and drinks were just alright. And, while the space in your “suite” / seat module is used very well, it’s used a little too well for my liking. That is to say, there’s very little room on either side of your seat and essentially no storage space other than the overhead bins. Overall, I like Delta’s business class product better — even the much maligned 767 product.

We flew home from Heathrow on a pleasant and uneventful nine hour flight. The short Alanta-Tampa leg was a bit of a goat rodeo as we somehow managed to get screwed out of our Economy Comfort seats and then lost one of our suitcases at baggage claim in Tampa. 

Thankfully, it was mistakenly picked up by a nice lady, who brought it home thinking it was her bag. She called me–profoundly apologetic–while I waited in Delta’s lost luggage line. So, we sat at the airport about an hour (having claimed her correct luggage for her) and swapped bags and pleasantries. No big deal — honest mistake, quickly corrected. We were relieved to have our stuff back (nothing wildly valuable but some books and other souvenirs). 

That’s probably a pretty apt ending to the trip: good, not great, with a few unanticipated and untimely annoyances. 

We started our tour in the kitchens of King Henry VIII, which had the fireplace roaring. This gave the kitchen a wonderful aroma and atmosphere:

From there, we toured the Tudor state apartments, including the Great Hall and Chapel Royal. 

Next, we visited the Georgian Rooms, which none of us recalled from prior visits:

We then moved on to the apartments of William and Mary. 

After touring the grounds, Emerson frolicked in the palace’s playground, which we also didn’t recall but also didn’t have a reason to recall either.

Done with Hampton Court, we took a mid-afternoon train back to London Waterloo. From there, we walked over the bridge to Charing Cross… just in time for the end of a protest by England’s answer to our deplorable Trumpets, which I understand turned mildly violent. 

In any case, I navigated around all of this and up to Foyles for some time book shopping, which Emerson has come to love as much as we do. We then crisscrossed Mayfair and through Green Park to Buckingham Palace (which Emerson really wanted to see). 

We took the tube back to Kensington and had dinner at Nando’s for some tasty chicken and then to Four Winters, where they make ice cream to order using liquid nitrogen:

As a result, we’re usually picking between things to see and do that we’ve seen and done previously… sometimes recently (because they’re a fav), sometimes not (because we only liked them “well enough” to not warrant a rapid return). Of course, as years have gone by the gaps have increased, which makes the decision-making a little more difficult: oh, what to do?

Today we opted mostly for a return to old favorites, starting with Tate Modern that’s undergone a significant and wildly successful (IMHO) expansion. Essentially they added an adjoining tower to the old power station building:

From the top of the new tower, you’re given  panoramic views of London:

I was really struck by the amount of skyscrapers (existing and under construction) that are starting to dominate the London skyline. Indeed, from this vantage point, you can now hardly see “the gerkin,” which used to stand out like a giant pickle on the horizon. 

While Mom and Emerson explored the permanent collection, Libby and I focused our visit on the solo show of the Turkish-born artist Fahrelnissa Zeid. Like other female abstract artists of her generation (like Carmen Herrera), her work was overlooked and under appreciated for years relative to her male peers. Her abstractions–which look hard edge from a distance–are actually quite painterly. We really enjoyed the show. 

Afterwards, we headed to the Borough Market–one of out other favorite places–for lunch. Sadly, the Borough Market area was the recent site of a terrorist attack. That made Borough Market an easy choice: terrorism is not an existential threat. We, as free people of good will, shall not be deterred from living our lives. Thus, today’s lunch visit was not just about eating. It was also a show of solidarity and support, as well as a middle finger pointed at Islamic Jihadists (and really any fundamentalist who let’s their perverted faith term them toward hate and violence). It was good to see the Financial Times staff that showed up in support too:

After lunch, we took the London Underground to Westminster and walked up Whitehall to see the Houses of Parliment, Downing Street, Whitehall Palace, Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery, Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus, etc. We did a little window shopping (and actual shopping) along the way, especially on Regent Street. 

From there, we hopped on the Central Line to Queensway and walked across Kensington Gardens from Bayswater to Kensington High Street. We stopped at the memorial playground for Princess Diana and also walked around Kensington Palace. 

We then headed down High Street Kensington to see the Allen House, our home away from home in London for 15 years. Allen House is now used as serviced apartments for “long stays” (90 night minimum). That’s kind of good news as it leaves open the door that we might stay there again one day. 

Overall, High Street Ken hasn’t changed too much. It now has a Five Guys (positive addition), but it lost the Sainsbury across the street (not a huge loss given Whole Foods and Waitrose only a short walk away). A few other shops have folded (none of great significance to us), which isn’t shocking as I suspect high street shopping here faces many of the same pressures as retailers in the States. 

We grabbed a quick dinner at the good and affordable Whole Foods food court before walking back to our hotel to drop off Mom and Emerson. Libby and I then headed out to the late opening at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, which was delightful as they had live performance art, a cash bar serving London summer-themed cocktails, and a show that was really well selected and hung relative to what I recall from some recent prior years. 

These will give you a sense of the dynamism show:

Here are the performance artists at work “plank snugging” (what else to call it?) in harnesses:

Here are a few works we especially liked, including…

this striking Donald Sultan,

this really smart, conceptual work,

this Gilbert & George,

and this arresting, highly textured piece that just “really worked” in a surprising way:

We also purchased this Paul Huxley edition to add to our collection of hard edge, minimalist, and op art:

After the show, we walked around Mayfair a bit absorbing the “poshness” of it all before heading back to our hotel in Kensington.