Moving Days (Aug 31 - Sept 2)
Two weekends ago we moved into our new college apartment. I got the keys to the new place on Thursday and we had to be out of the old place by noon on Saturday. It was very nice to have the overlap, since most of the moving period was not on a weekend! During the day on Thursday and Friday I made many trips on foot, shuttling over as much as I could carry and pull in a wheely suitcase. I have too many books. Then in the evenings David helped out and things went much faster! We cleaned the old place on Saturday morning (I really hate that part) and even turned in the keys on time.
Once we'd gotten everything into the new apartment, what we already knew became even more clear: this place is significantly smaller, and with far less storage space. We don't have a hall closet, any cupboards in the bathroom, or space for our bikes. And the bathroom is really small. David stopped at Costco on his way home Friday and got a nice wire rack like we had in our garage back home and some frozen food that we finally have room for. On Saturday we made an excursion to HomeBase and Habitat (a modern-style home decor store) to get some more shelving, lighting and such, and spent the rest of the day putting things away as best we could. In the above photo, David's attempting to organize his stuff onto the Costco rack in our bedroom. Our bikes now live outside in the bike parking area.
By bedtime on Saturday, we had done pretty darn well. All that remained was a stack of boxes in the hallway (which are still there). The kitchen table was even cleared off so we had a nice dinner that was entirely from David's Friday Costco trip: chicken and ravioli with tomato and marscapone sauce. We celebrated finishing the move with a free bottle of champagne we'd gotten with a £25 purchase at Marks & Spencer long ago. (Nice champagne flutes we have, n'est-ce pas?)Overall, I'm quite happy with our new place and think it is far better than the old one. It is so nice to have pretty kitchen counters, a lack of olive green and mustard yellow, ceilings that aren't cracked, and drawers that actually slide open! And the oven is really nifty - I don't know if it's an actual convection oven, but it has a fan with the bake setting and heats up really fast. We also have a microwave for the first time here, which we got for a good deal at Costco.
Visit from Dad, Lisa and Vanessa (Sept 3-11)
The day after we moved in, company arrived! My dad, stepmom Lisa and stepsister Vanessa arrived in Oxford in the early afternoon on Sunday. These were our first family visitors so far (pretty impressive that two people from my work got in there first!) and it was really nice to see them.
They arrived tired but in good spirits, and managed to stay awake until about 8PM. We met them at the bus station (on foot), rode a black cab with them to the University Club, and got them settled in. They stayed across the hall from Carol and William's room, which was next door to Brendalee's room... we're really getting to know that place! We chatted for awhile in their room and received a generous selection of American treats, including mac & cheese, wholegrain pancake mix, and refried beans. Yum!
We had lunch/dinner in the Club at around 3:30, and it was quite good. We were pleased that their first Oxford culinary experience was a good one! Dad and Lisa have been to England before, when they visited me in Edinburgh and we came down to Bath and Shrewsbury. But this was Vanessa's first UK trip and she seemed to really like it. David and I led Lisa and Vanessa on a brief walking tour around the city center, then left them all to rest and headed home to do some resting ourselves.
On Monday, poor David had to return to work and the rest of us took a double-decker sightseeing bus tour around the city. That manner of touring worked really well for Dad since he can't walk very far and it gave them (and me!) a good overview of the city. It was pretty fun to be at eye-level with the gargoyles on the colleges. 
We hopped off at Christ Church to explore the "Harry Potter" dining hall and the main part of the college, which everyone really enjoyed. They decided to skip Christ Church Cathedral, though, as they'd already seen a lot of churches. Hmmph! :) We had lunch at G&D's ice cream shop across the street, which also sells bagel sandwiches and such. We ate outside in the bright sun with a nice view of Christopher Wren's tower at the entrance to Christ Church.
We took the sightseeing bus back to Broad Street, where we got off at the Sheldonian Theatre and crossed the street to Blackwell's bookstore. Blackwell's is supposed to have over 3 miles of bookshelves and is the largest in Britain, I think. Dad browsed the crime fiction and science fiction areas for a couple more vacation books to read while I wandered around the nearby cooking section. I found an excellent Marmite cookbook for him to take home, but oddly enough he didn't want to buy it. Meanwhile, Lisa and Vanessa explored other floors and tried to get a sense of the 3 miles of books.
We finished with Blackwells in time to catch the last Wolfson minibus at 2:30, and we all headed to Chez Joyal. They toured our new apartment (takes about 5 seconds) and then we relaxed and chatted and read travel books on England until David got home around 5:45. Then we all climbed in Wilma (who scraped the ground with a rather horrific sound on every bump but held herself together) and went to a pub on the outskirts of Oxford for dinner.
The pub is called The Trout Inn and had been recommended to us by our American neighbors as a good place to bring guests. It was wonderful. It has a large, free parking lot, tables outside by the river, and lots of rooms with woody ambience inside. We sat inside. We were all quite happy with our meals and they had their first sample of brown sauce and British hard cider. (Unfortunately no one thought to take pictures, but see below for a few I snapped on our second visit.)
The rest of the week, Dad took a taxi over to my place every morning after breakfast and spent the day hanging out with me while Lisa and Vanessa toured the city. Dad mostly read while I worked on my Ephesus research, but it was nice to spend time with him. We ate lunch in the Wolfson dining hall twice, where the food was edible and cheap and the dessert was the highlight (that's the usual experience in the Hall). The other days were Marks & Spencer pizza and sandwiches. Dad really enjoy sampling the M&S food, which is almost universally fantastic. Their kettle-style sour cream and red onion crisps and Devon scones with clotted cream were especially a hit. Then every day after work, David would drive Dad back to the Club.
Meanwhile, Lisa and Vanessa were having a great time exploring colleges, browsing free museums, and climbing towers. And on Friday they went punting! It's pretty bad that David and I haven't gotten around to doing that yet, as Wolfson has excellent access to it and the weather has been really nice. They rented a punt for an hour and had a really good time and didn't even fall in.
We all had dinner together about every other night, which ended up being the Trout twice, the Victoria Arms (another nice riverside pub with a parking lot), and the Oriental Condor (our favorite, very non-fancy Chinese place).
On Saturday, Dad stayed behind at our place while the rest of us took Wilma to Avebury. Since David and I had been there before, we mainly explored more of the village while Lisa and Vanessa walked around the stone circle. We checked out the gift shop and David bought a yellow boomerang for £1, which he tested out in a part of the stone circle while I took a few photos of stones. He was like a happy little boy with it, and had it tucked in his belt for the rest of our time in Avebury.
We explored a manor house and garden, where David set up a timer photo of us on a bench, and then we chased butterflies and bees around the garden with our cameras for awhile.
Then I fully photographed Avebury's parish church. It has some Saxon (c.1000 AD) remnants but is mostly Norman (c.1100s AD) and has an old stone-carved font that shows Christ trampling on dragons. It is thought that it might reflect the struggle of Christianity over paganism in these parts. Meanwhile, David just barely managed to restrain himself from ringing the church bell.
With the help of our cell phones we all met up again and had lunch in the Red Lion pub and ate at picnic tables outside. My caesar salad had a dead fly in it but was otherwise good, and the chips and onion rings were excellent. Vanessa had a steak sandwich that came on some beautiful, thick bread. Our fellow diners were a group of American bicyclists - I wonder how far they are biking! As we were leaving, a huge group of motorcycle men and women came in, along with a small group of people in Renaissance clothing, brooms and a cauldron. That's Avebury for you.
We then drove just a couple miles south of Avebury so I could photograph a couple nearby ancient monuments for my website: Silbury Hill and the West Kennet Long Barrow. Lisa and Vanessa were interested to see them too, so it worked out well. David was somewhat interested, but in the end decided to stay in the car and attempt a nap. He has had a cold for most of the week and was a cheerful but worn-out chaffeur.
Silbury Hill is a man-made mound of soil and chalk that was constructed for unknown purposes around 2660 BC. It is the largest man-made hill in Europe. Visitors are no longer allowed to climb on it because it causes damage, but there's a viewing area next to the highway. I did some grumbling because the sky refused to be blue and my pictures would not be great, but it was neat to see anyway. I sometimes forget to enjoy sights with my eyes as well as my camera!
From Silbury Hill, we walked about a 1/2 mile along the highway and then another 1/2 mile uphill through a field to the West Kennett Long Barrow. The picture below shows it stretching across the brow of the hill, with a few standing stones at the entrance on the left end.
This was used as a burial mound, possibly for a clan or tribe, from 3700 to 2000 BC. You can go inside the stone burial chambers at one end, which are empty of bones now but still quite interesting. Neopagan-types had left tea lights and wildflowers in each of the chambers, which added to the ambience.
(I've posted about 40 more photos of the barrow to Sacred Destinations here.)
Then David suggested that we just continue to Stonehenge and make a circle of it, even if we only just drive by. Lisa and Vanessa had planned to skip it because of the commercialism, but were happy to take him up on his offer.
This time, I managed to get a clear drive-by photo of the "Tank Crossing" signs in the Ministry of Defense area near Stonehenge after many blurry attempts.When we arrived at Stonehenge, we parked down a side street, crossed the highway, and looked at it through the fence. There were a ton of people there, and it had a whole different feel from when David and I visited on a cold April day. Lisa and Vanessa were completely satisfied with their free view of the monument and were glad they came.
On our way out, we stopped to use the very stinky bathrooms in the parking area and chatted with a woman on a smoke break who has been cleaning them for 31 years. Wow, that's something to remember when you are really hating your job!
From Stonehenge we got on the motorway and headed north for home, which took about an hour. Back at our place, we relaxed for a bit with Dad and downloaded our photos (David put Lisa's on a CD for her), then we all went out to our second dinner at the Trout.
This time we sat outside by the river and it was lovely. Our table overlooked a nice little wooden bridge and a duck would occasionally hop up on the patio and look hopefully at tables.
We all ordered small meals and focused on dessert! The best was a hot chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream - so very good. It's a good thing it was worth waiting for - it took over 30 minutes for the dessert to come and it became quite cold after the sun went down! We were so excited for its arrival that I completely neglected to take any photos of food, I'm sorry to say. But David and I will be back!
On Sunday morning (yesterday), David did a double taxi service, first taking Lisa and Vanessa from the Club to the bus station and then taking Dad from the Club to our place. The girls were headed for Gatwick airport, where they are flying to Dublin for a few nights. Then they will return to London and stay there a few nights before flying home.
Dad isn't going to join them for any of those adventures and he flew home by himself early this morning. He spent Sunday with David and I and we had a pretty relaxing day: David and I forced Dad to watch the Formula One race, we picked up some more food from Marks & Spencers, and I got a couple web articles done on the sights I saw on Saturday.
I made Swedish meatballs with mushroom sauce and pasta for dinner, which turned out pretty well, and for dessert we had a M&S lemon tart that was unbelievably fabulous. David went to bed around 11, but Dad and I stayed up until 3 AM, when we walked up to the Lodge to wait for his taxi to the bus station. I saw him off at 3:15, and he planned to catch the 4 AM bus to Heathrow for an 8 AM flight to Chicago and Portland. Airplanes sure force you be awake at ridiculous hours! I really hope everything has gone smoothly for him and will be anxiously waiting to hear from him when he arrives home around 2 PM Portland time today.
So today life is back to normal for us for the first time in awhile, and I started off this morning by turning in various college forms and paying the remainder of my fee on a credit card. We got the unpleasant news a few days ago that we have to pay four months advance rent again this year, which seems really stupid. It's not a big deal financially, though, as David has a UK credit card with a large enough limit to cover it and we'll pay it back over the next four months without incurring much interest.
I hope everyone is doing well and I apologize again about the long delay between posts. I plan to do more frequent - and shorter - updates after this one!
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