Our small ship this time will be an American Airlines 333, which seen up close would appear to be a large ship. But as seen from the perspective of its flight path across the wide Atlantic Ocean, it seems to me like a tiny little barque, winging its way high above the deep waters. I know that air travel is the safest mode of transportation by far, but I confess that the idea of a transcontinental flight makes me a little apprehensive. If anything goes wrong, after all, where would we land?
But there is every expectation that nothing will go wrong, and God willing we will depart Charlotte next Wednesday and land safely at London Heathrow next Thursday. I have only flown twice before now, once 15 years ago when Martha, Katy, and I flew to London for one week, and once eight years ago when we flew to Boston for the Boston Marathon. 15 years ago nothing went wrong, and I remember that we entertained ourselves during the eight-hour flight watching movies we had not seen. And sleeping.
During the last few weeks, we have been organizing ourselves for this wonderful 23-day journey which will begin next week - passports, travel clothes, compression socks, and all the many other things we will need. The compression socks (along with aisle seats and frequent flexing of leg muscles) are intended to prevent Deep Vein Thrombosis, which we have read affects runners because of their higher red-blood-cell count. I don't think we are leaving much to chance! Our British friend and Boston Marathon veteran Brian immediately gave us advice we have heard from many quarters: "Bring an umbrella!"
We will be taking a Trafalgar tour (the same company we used 15 years ago) which will take us from London to Scotland and Wales, then across to Ireland and back. Some of the places we will see will be Stratford-Upon-Avon (Shakespeare's birthplace), Edinburgh, St., Andrews, Glasgow, the Lake District, Liverpool, Dublin, Belfast, Galway, Limerick, Blarney, Waterford, Cardiff, Bath, Plymouth, ending with that iconic prehistoric monument on the Salisbury plane, Stonehenge, before returning to London. Yes, we will kiss the Blarney Stone (and immediately clean our lips with hand sanitizer)!
As an English Major, I know many of these places through literature. I wrote my senior thesis about Joyce's Ulysses, which famously takes place on a single day - June 16, 1904 - in Dublin. I had the opportunity to take a trip to Dublin at the time with some of my professors, retracing the steps of its hero Leopold Bloom, but alas I was a poor scholarship student and could not afford to go. So 50 years later I am looking forward to seeing that Dublin Castle immortalized in Finnegans Wake: "riverrun,
past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a
commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
And, of course, we will visit Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-Upon-Avon, as well. I think I know England through Shakespeare as much as anything; even when set in Denmark (Hamlet) and Verona (Romeo and Juliet), these plays somehow seem rooted in what Blake called "England's green and pleasant land."
This blog, then, will fall silent for a few weeks, but I will plan to catch it all up again, day by day, as I did when we traveled to California and back in our Mini Cooper in 2016. On that trip, I took plenty of photos and made notes in a little journal each day which I referred to when we returned. I spent some time last week in several shops in Highlands looking for an appropriate journal but came up empty-handed. When I told this to Martha, she smiled and said, "I think I have one for you," and in no time, uncovered from some secret and magical storage space, this beautiful little journal:
What could be more appropriate than the famous woodblock print by Hokusai on the cover, "The Great Wave off Kanagawa," with its little barques struggling against the great wave of time and distance and fate, the sacred Mount Fuji appearing in the background.
We are ready to embark. And the little blackboard in our kitchen says this:
Martha has created a wonderful chronicle of your trip through photos, and now we have the travelogue! Rick Steves has nothing on you two. Eagerly awaiting - I expect you picked up a Muse of Fire somewhere along the line.
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