As a change, I thought I’d share a letter from my dad about my folks recent trip to London to visit my brother, Steve.
London May-June 2005 highlights.
Dear Mary,
      We arrived on Saturday morning and Steve was visiting with Josh out at the airport so we just hung out at Steve’s place and did some housecleaning and took a nap.
      Steve came home around 10 or 11 pm and I was watching a cricket match on TV and he got all upset that I would do something so un-American in his house.
      Sunday we just went pub hopping and looked for an Irish session that I had found out about on the internet. We found it at the Porterhouse pub and it was wonderful indeed. They told me of another one (with roughly the same people) that was happening on Thursday at a pub named the “Narrowboat.â€? The days run together even while they are happening, so to look back at them is a mess. One evening Marilyn found a police line and a lot of well dressed people (tux and fancy gowns) arriving at the Royal Opera House so she staked herself out there to see who might show up that was famous. It turned out that it was the Centennial celebration for the Chelsea football club and these were old timers showing up.
      I think Tuesday night we went to see “The Producersâ€? and it was a hoot. The accountant’s voice got tired in the last scene or two, but other than that it was fabulous.
      Tuesday we took a day tour of Oxford, Stratford and Warwick. The tour guide was wonderful and talked a blue streak the whole way to Oxford and then had the gall to say that the tour guide we would pick up in Oxford would be really talkative. She was certainly that, but just couldn’t hold a candle to him if there were a contest for being talkative. Oxford had lots of places where Harry Potter was filmed.
      We also visited some other Harry Potter locations on Wednesday. Stratford on the Avon was a quaint town, and Shakespeare’s birthplace was restored and made into a museum. It is not where he wrote his plays as it was really his father’s house. He lived somewhere else in town but since he was a contemporary, nobody thought it worth saving apparently.
      Then we went to Warwick castle, the best preserved medieval castle in all of England. This is the place to take children (like me). There were walls and towers and dungeons and torture chambers and a power plant where they installed their own electric generator in 1900 keeping up with the times. It is owned by some entertainment company that has a famous wax museum in London so the state rooms had appropriate wax figures in them.
      On Wednesday we went to Bath and some little town I can’t remember the name of, but which is owned by the historic trust. It is something like Williamsburg, except older. You are only allowed to move into the town if you had a grandparent that lived there. This is where some Harry Potter scenes were shot. We finished up the day by going to Stonehenge. The tour guide for this trip was not nearly as good as the one on the day previous, but he was still good enough. Bath was the highlight of this day trip.
      On Thursday, Steve had to work so instead of going out to see the sights of London, we cleaned house again. Thursday night we went out to find the Narrowboat and the session. We found it and except for it being so far from Steve’s place, it was my favorite pub of them all. Of course the experience was enhanced for me because the fiddler let me play her fiddle for several tunes.
      The Narrowboat was the 101st pub that Steve has visited since he has been in London. He is not counting a second visit to a pub in his count.
      That doesn’t look like we did as much as it felt like we did so I’ve probably left out something really important. Ask your mother and Steve to fill in the missing parts.
      Love,
      Dad
I wonder… do all parents clean house when they visit? My mother does that – it’s embarrassing. Even more so when I spent days tidying up the place, and still she finds something worthy of being cleansed.
Sounds like Dad had a good time here in England. I was unaware that Bath had ancestry requirements for moving into the town. Seems a bit harsh.
Stratford-upon-Avon is quite a hike from London, about 100 miles, but then again, so is Stonehenge. Seems like Mom and Dad essentially covered the whole of Southern England in one trip. Good for them. They must be exhausted.