eagletravels

This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle The parks. The beautiful trees, the sound they make in the wind and when it rains, the shade they provide. The farmers' market across the street every Sunday. Meat pies. This Earth of majesty, this seat of Mars English ice cream: Scoop. The Cow and Bean. The British Museum. Very big, didn't see everything in six visits, the Greek and Egyptian relics. The Tower. Nothing to fear, just a man in a mask with an axe. La Fromagerie: our shop of sacred cheese. This other Eden, demi-paradise Walking to work through our neighborhood, across Oxford Street, down the finest shopping sreet, through a park and past a palace. Books, Will on #19, Andie on #9. Our local library, big with great books and nice librarians who asked us questions about the books, which kept us from spending too much money at ... Daunt Books. This fortress built by Nature for herself, against infection and the hand of war Castles. The many and varied birds of St. ...

Wear sunscreen, my children As you leave the M6 and start to make your way into the Lake District, on narrow roads through rolling hills dotted with sheep and criss-crossed by meandering stone fences, you pass through charming villages with one thing in common: they have lots of gear shops. I notice these things because I love gear shops, and in the Lake District they are all over the place. Windemere, Ambleside, Grasmere, Keswick - four villages no more than about 20 miles apart, each charming and touristy in a Carmel sort of way - each featuring about a dozen (more in Keswick) cool gear shops. The place is awash in fleece, gore-tex, and hiking and climbing shoes. There are enough tents and sleeping bags to outfit the entire English nation. The walking sticks, placed end to end, would probably reach the moon. Or at least the top of Everest. We wonder, how can all these places survive? When some adventurous businessman walked into Keswick and saw a dozen gear stores, why did he ...

When kings go on building binges, it can be tough on the masses. More taxes, backbreaking labor. But those of us in later generations certainly benefit. Because castles are really cool. Caernarfon, built in the 13th century by Edward I (and never completed due to financial reasons, and, we suspect, problems with the contractor) is spacious and empty if you get there shortly after opening. Last night was violently stormy outside and equally restless inside our little room, with its charmingly uncomfortable beds and zippy trains passing right outside the window, which made it easy to get up and out early in the morning and be among the first to enter the big castle. See, there are benefits to bad hotels! We may be short, but we're a lot taller than you. We explored its towers and tunnels for an hour and marveled at the 3-way arrow slits (so three archers can lay down a path of death at once). I'm not sure what it is, but it is just really cool to clamber around an ancient c...

"Daddy, what's a condom?" "I don't know, Andie, it must be Welsh." No need for a wake-up call. The 5:10am commuter train passing right outside your window does the trick just fine! My new mantra: 3 stars or above!

At home When we arrived at Linda and Philip's lovely home in Chadlington, a small town in the region known as the Cotswolds, Will and Andie immediately raced for the garden. We have a playground just out the front door of the flat in London, and have spent many hours in the parks, but there is nothing like your own garden, like running through a lawn and picking raspberries and running in and dropping them in a bowl and running back outside. That feels like home. The kids played outside, Ava picked peas from pods, and Philip and I walked through the town, past the playground, along the brook, and back again. Just like the last time we had visited their England home, in September, 2001, Linda and Philip provided the comfort of home at a time when it was keenly needed. Apples in the shed Saturday was a perfect day. Breakfast in the sun room, a visit to the Mill Dean garden, and then to the much anticipated Cotwold Falconry Centre. This was a truly superb experience which comple...

Although baseball is the national pastime, it's pretty rare to go to a park in the US and see people playing it. Yes, you often see a Dad playing with a son, usually in the spring before Little League season, but how often do you stroll through a park and see a whole bunch of grown-ups playing pick-up games? Not organized leagues, but genuine pick-up games? Not too often. But here in London, we've seen it all the time. Groups of young adults, men and women, playing softball. Green Park, Regents, Hyde, there they are. They don't always get it right: in one game they ran on foul balls, which is very cricket-like, isn't it? In another about 10 people stood in line to bat, which strikes me as quite British. It's the on deck circle, guys, not the on deck queue. I've seen more softball games than soccer or cricket. Why? Maybe this is a corporate team bonding ritual that is sweeping the city. Maybe it's a dating service - meet your spouse on 2nd base! ...

Yesterday we took the boat cruise up the Thames and ended up at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. This is a small gem. Atop a hill and in the midst of a beautiful park, the small observatory was founded in 1675 to solve the longitude problem. At that time, sailors could determine their north-south position by measuring the angle between certain stars or the sun and the horizon, but determining the east-west position, their longitude, was impossible. This led to many shipwrecks - bad for the sailors, good for the artists whose work line the galleries of the observatory. One method to determine longitude is to have accurate star charts from a fixed location, like maybe an observatory in England. Then you take a reading of your location, like at sea, perform some lunar related calculations, and voila! Longitude! But that was an awful lot of work, and in 1714 Parliament offered 20K pounds to the first person who could develop an accurate timepiece that could be taken aboard a ship...

On our first night in Paris - last Thursday - we sat in a small restaurant on Rue Mouffetard, quaffed a couple of carafes of the house red, and told jokes. I have only the mental capacity to remember one joke at a time, so I re-told the resident of that slot - "these two muffins ..." - over and over, with different accents and variations. We laughed and laughed, delighted to be in Paris, delighted that the scorching day and Ava's death march through the Latin Quarter were over. When the family dining next to us left (locals, we believe) they smiled at us and offered us the rest of their wine, a half bottle of red. Apparently we were very entertaining, or maybe we just obviously needed more wine. I'm not sure what protocol or local custom dictates in such a situation - is it rude to turn down such an offer, or impolite to accept? I didn't have to think too long to decide it was the former, perhaps because the wine looked so good, they smiled so warmly, and ou...

As inventors of our langauge, the English have evolved many beautiful, intelligent, and understated ways to use it. There's "mind the gap", which in American roughly translates to "watch your step." Yes it means the same thing, but fails completely in its ability to convey politeness or that there is, in fact, a gap beneath the feet. In every way, "mind the gap" is what a more fully evolved human should say. Then there's "ordnance survey", which is Great Britain's National Mapping Agency. This is just so remarkably elegant, it's hard to tell where to even begin. First of all, Great Britain has a National Mapping Agency! How cool is that? I suppose we have the US Geological Survey, but do they make maps? Study rocks? Kind of hard to tell, isn't it? But a National Mapping Agency - there's a set of chaps who know what they are up to. But then, instead of keeping that as their name, they go with the far more sophis...

It was over 500 years ago, in April, 1509, that Henry the 8th ascended to the throne of England. The great king was known for his excesses, including too many wives, too many religions, too much weight, and not enough patience, so we have decided to honor him with some excesses of our own. Will is reading too many books. In fact, we were spending a disproportionate amount of our weekly allowance at the fine bookstore around the corner, Daunt Books, until we fortunately discovered the Marylebone branch of the London libary. Andie is walking too much, her legs getting longer, leaner, more strong, as she puts on several miles per day. All of us are having too much ice cream, although I'm sure in Henry's time, just like today, too much ice cream is a contradiction in terms, even if Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard said I scream. The best is the gelato place called Scoop in Covent Garden. It is completely decadent. Henry would most definitely have approved. Off with their con...