By Land, Sea, and Air

This dispatch is being written from a hotel room in Edinburgh, Scotland, where we arrived after a marathon journey from Tucson on October 22. This is our big 50th wedding anniversary blowout trip and we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves. should have been posting all along the way, but somehow there was always something else to do more appealing than sitting at this laptop and composing a recap of the day's events. Now it is time to catch up.

First, we took a hire van from Tucson to the Phoenix airportwhere we caught our flight to JFK in New York City. Apart from staying in the most wretched acommodations for the next three nights we had a delightful time with our son Benjamin enjoying a few things this exciting city has to offer. (For our review of the motel click here) We visited the USS Intrepid, a decomissioned aircraft carrier now serving as a museum and home to the space

shuttle Enterprise. It was very interesting to us, especially since we were about to board a large ship ourselves. We also visited the 9/11 monument, Alexander Hamilton's grave, and took a cruise around Manhattan on a Circle Line boat featuring a very entertaining narrator. It was Ben's 36th birthday and I hope he enjoyed it as much as we did,

On October 25 we got on board of the Queen Mary 2 for a trans-Atlantic passage to Southampton, England. The ship was massive, likely as big as the Intrepid, and carried about 3,000 passengers. For seven days we crossed what seemed to be an endless expanse of water. On board were so many restaurants, lounges, and recreational facilities it is hard to imagine how anyone could be bored by this liesurely trip across the ocean. Jayne joined a

volunteer choir that practiced every day prior to their performance on the last day of the voyage and I spent a lot of time in the pub lounge playing darts. There was a competition every day, with different rules, and the same group of people showed up to play. It was delightful, and I actually won once. On the seventh deck there was a boardwalk all around the ship where one could accomplish a mile in three laps, and there was a library at the front of the vessel that featured 10,000 volumes and a daily newspaper (printed on board from AP news and other sources). On our last evening we attended a theater show that featured a painfully cheesy music review that I enjoyed very much; it was a lot like the old Bill Murray nightclub singer sketch he used to do on Saturday Night Live. If you like Lawrence Welk you would have liked this show. Using this show as an example, many of the venues on the QM2 are filled with the gray and infirm, and at times it felt as if we were residents of a floating rest home. Still, it was the trip of a lifetime and we are glad we took it.

We landed in England on November 1 and took a bus provided by the Cunard company for our ride into London, about sixty miles away. We then took a cab to our hotel situated right across from King's Cross railway station in the heart of the city. We were pleasantly surprised to learn the Charles Dickens home and museum was right around the corner and we paid a visit to see the digs of the great writer. Amond many of the documents and artifacts on display was the desk he wrote some of his novels on. Looking at it gave me a particular thrill I must say. Later that night we took a cab down to Buckingham Palace and walked over to Parliment Square to see Big Ben chime 6:00 pm. Another sight in this area effected me deeply; among the statues of all their past prime ministers the British people have placed a very fine sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. It almost brought tears to my eyes to contemplate the greatness of that man in comparison to the orange lunatic who is also numbered among our past presidents. (I am writing this the day before the US election. Jayne and I voted before we left and we fervently pray our beloved country is spared repeat of that orange lunatic in the White House.)

After our day and two nights in London, we took a high speed train for Edinburgh which we reached in four hours. Amazing! Today we will tour the famous castle and I will report on it afterwards.