Saturday -- Pushing On

When you arrive somewhere from overseas. it's best to just push on. Try to stay awake. Don't allow yourself to sleep the day away, or else you won't be able to get on your new schedule. Nate and I were not capable of doing that, so we took a long nap for about three hours after arriving at my friend Amanda's house.

After I gained consciousness, I realized that Amanda's house is an incredibly charming older home, with an amazing backyard garden. We took a walk with Amanda and her kids Ben and Pippa to enjoy the charms of her small town. We saw St Mary's in Saffron Walden, a place that has been a church site since the 1200s. We also saw the Walden Castle ruins, which was the site of a centuries old fort and castle, which Nate said if you didn't know what you were looking at, you'd think it was a rock pile on the side of a road. We tried to go into a Labyrinth, but it was locked up, possibly for trimming. You never want your labyrinth to get overgrown, because then it's just a mess. We saw several lovely gardens and old Tudor style homes. But we were also trying to keep Pippa entertained, and that involved a trip to the bakery where she could get a 'pink' -- a donut with pink frosting -- and we also picked up more fresh baked bread for the weekend. We also hit the grocery store so I could get something for my diet coke cravings and we also picked up a selection of European chocolates to sample after dinner.

Once back to Amanda's, we watched a recording of a horse race that happened earlier in the day. The winner was a 1 in 100 bet, a long shot, the kind of story stories are made of. It was fun to watch, even though it made my stomach churn every time a rider and his horse would miss a jump over the hedge and the rider would fall and sometimes even get trampled by other horses. Out of 40 horses and riders, only 17 completed the race.

Amanda's husband Keith took us to a nearby pub while Amanda and the kids watched Dora the Explorer and she put them to bed. We talked British sports and enjoyed not watching the Dora the Explorer... plenty of time for that once we have kids. And once we came back it was time for the grown ups to toast with some champagne... we had to toast to Nate's and my engagement. Then we had homemade lasagna and wine, and as we had more wine the conversation became more and more lively. The wine and chocolate even brought out some funny stories and good laughs. Now everyone's heading to bed and Nate and I are battling with computers again, hoping to get this blogging experiment to work for us!

Tomorrow, we will continue to press on, hopefully with some more sleep under our belts.