Category Archives: Uncategorized

A carpet of apple(?) blossoms has covered our back patio, courtesy of the profusion of flowers on a tree over the fence, petals released by the wind on this gorgeous Easter day and floating into backyards all over the block. It is a cliche to speak of rebirth on Easter, and yet there’s no escapingContinue reading “Rebirth”

At the end of our first week of imposed lock-down, the second week of more or less following these guidelines, we’re all feeling a bit unsettled. Not unhappy. But not happy either. It’s hard to put a finger on it. Why does life seem so qualitatively different? I had an ah-ha moment when a neighborContinue reading “Don’t just do something, sit there.”

Oh, what a difference ten days can make. Last weekend we were having a fun visit with our old friend Yann, his wife Clare and their two children, Victore (age 6) and Honore (age 2 1/2). And now they are trying to figure out life in corona lock-down. A huge thank you to them forContinue reading “Continental Adventures Pt. III: Nantes”

Mandatory coronavirus notice – we feel a bit odd posting all of these travel blogs as the world descends into virus mayhem. We also feel fortunate that by chance we scheduled this trip in the weeks before two of the countries we visited basically closed up. Looking at maps of cases, everywhere we were happenContinue reading “Barcelona”

We just returned from 11 fabulous days exploring parts of Spain, France, and Andorra (where we’d never been).  The full accounting would make for a very long blog post, so we’ll break it up into three over the next few days. We began in Andorra (after a cool rail journey, about which more below).  WhyContinue reading “Continental Adventures Part I: To Andorra!”

What, you might well ask, does any of this have to do with our adventures in London? Well, the invention of the water closet and flush toilet is a key part of a story about, um, crap in London, a story that demonstrates how inexorably the law of unintended consequences functions in environmental history. ItContinue reading “More London Adventures”

London is not just vast horizontally but vast across time. History has left it sumptuously jumbled. -Bill Bryson from The Road to Little Dribbling Before and during our trip we have been reading Bill Bryson’s books about England aloud as a family. Notes from a Small Island and now The Road to Little Dribbling areContinue reading “Hidden treasures”

As is always the case when traveling to a new place, I try to note the interplay of the human and ecological systems. Like any great metropolis, the urban metabolism of London is complex, in may ways a marvel of highly engineered pathways for food, water, energy, transportation, and waste, much of it below groundContinue reading “The Nature of London”

We had only 2 1/2 days back in London before another adventure away. Last Thursday we packed up again, and this time headed across the English Channel (Oceanus Brittanicus to Julius Caesar) to France via the Eurostar high speed train. If you’ve never traveled on a train at 200 MPH, it is hard to describeContinue reading “Crossing Oceanus Britannicus”

Friday, January 31st. The Thames Tidal Barrier. Since the time of London’s founding by the Romans, flooding has been a key element in the environmental history of the city. There is an account of London flooding as early as 1099 in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, and in 1236 people were paddling boats through Westminster. InContinue reading “Tides and pools”