The rest of the story

We weren't able to see my sister and her younger daughter because Eilish had gotten really sick with a very nasty stomach virus. In the interest of not spreading germs around, we all agreed we would have to skip visiting them. But we still saw Avalon, our older niece.

We sort of overslept Sunday. I can almost always wake up at whatever time I tell myself to wake up, but without cats or street noises, I slept clear through until almost 8 AM. Factoring in all the trains and cab rides, we had a nearly two hour trip to get to Avalon’s school, Marlborough, and needed to be there by 11:30. But we made it, and got to have lunch with her. After lunch, she showed us around her school, and then we had to go.

On the way back, we took a minicab from the train station to our hotel. Minicabs are unregistered and this web site warns you of the dangers involved in using them. As you can see, we survived. The driver didn't really know his way around but he had a GPS so he didn't get lost. His GPS route took us through some neighborhoods with really narrow streets. On one street, we drove around a very dark skinned man wearing a Superman bathrobe, complete with the giant S emblem, and nothing else that we could see, not even slippers. He was bent half into a car sitting in the middle of the street talking to the driver. Our cab driver and Kent both thought we might have interrupted a drug deal.

The next morning, we flew home. So that was the extent of our quick, fun trip to London.

Fabric

I had three goals while in London last weekend:

• Shop for fabric
• Eat Indian food
• See my sister and her daughters

On Saturday we checked off the first two. Let me tell you, we weren’t misled about the amazing fabrics to be found. We looked at Cloth House (two locations on Berwick, which were quite closes to each other—we found that a little confusing that there would be two shops within blocks of each other) and Misan, which also had two locations. I could have spent hours in Misan. We both were overwhelmed by the huge selections in all the stores. The prices played a role in that too, I’m sure, since so many of the fabrics started at £35 per meter.

Those prices were still better than what we found at the Liberty store. Those lovely cottons (cottons!) also started at around £35 per meter. Kent uses three yards to make a shirt, so he’d need just under three meters which would bring the cost for only the cloth to £105. I just used a converter, and in dollars that shirt would cost about $169. Oh but what a shirt it would be.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to get an old phone unlocked to use a prepaid phone card with data, so we couldn’t access the maps we’d carefully prepared. So we missed a whole group of stores we’d planned on seeing but that’s OK. We were both overwhelmed by everything we did see.

We had an early dinner of Indian food here in the Seven Dials area and then caught the train back to our hotel and crashed hard. 

So much to say

Because we board early, I’m always able to indulge my love of people watching as they parade down the aisle to find their seats. The trip from Atlanta to London was no exception, especially because international flights generally take much longer to board. Our plane had a two-three-two seat configuration, and we had the two seats on the left side. A mid-20s woman sat directly in front of Kent and the seat in front of me went empty for a long time. Then he walked down the aisle.

This man was at least 6 feet 6 inches tall, and had not an ounce of fat on him plus he was good-looking. His upper arms were bigger around than my thighs and almost bigger than Kent’s thighs. The guy had muscles on his muscles, enough that we speculated perhaps some supplements were involved. When he sat in his seat, his shoulders extended beyond both sides by at least four or five inches. He wore his sunglasses almost the entire time and we figured it was partly to avoid making eye contact with guys who might want to try to prove how manly they were by taking him on. He took them off shortly before landing and was very pleasant, talking with the man across the aisle from him. Turns out Muscles is Welsh and lives in the US.

I felt for him though. The poor guy got hit by everyone boarding the plane and by every refreshment cart that came by. It's not like he could lean away from the aisle enough to avoid getting hit the way I can. Even if he'd known his seatmate, that would have required a serious invasion of her personal space. The guy was just huge. And I'm sure his size is why he waited to board until the very end. If I were his size, I'd have waited too.

We also had a man removed from that same flight. The pilot made an announcement about 10 minutes after we should have taken off and said "A passenger won't be making the flight with us today." Turns out he was massively drunk. Delta sent another giant of a man onto the plane to act as the silent enforcer to back up the three female flight attendants. Kent and I joked that Delta could have just asked Muscles to stand there. I know that would have been more intimidating than the man they did send because while large, he was clearly not fit. The removing process took a while because his traveling companion (girlfriend? friend? don’t know which) had to figure out if she too would leave the plane. She did, and of course then their luggage had to be identified and removed before we could take off.

At KCI, one of the tugs that push back the planes was painted in the breast cancer pink. I mean the whole thing was pink. You couldn't miss it, and I wondered if they would paint it back at the end of October.  Then on our return trip, we noticed that part of the housing under the wings of our plane was pink. Our pilot later told us we were flying on Delta’s signature Pink Plane.

And all of this happened before we even got to London! More about the rest of the trip later.