We are back in Olympia, WA, helping Jan and Michael get their house and garden ready for a family reunion tomorrow (Saturday Sept 10th). While we are looking forward to seeing many familiar faces at this event, spending the last week staying in just one place with has been particularly relaxing for us. We had thoroughly enjoyed our tour of the UK and the opportunity to see so many friends and family members but by the end of six weeks, our heads were spinning from staying in so many places and catching-up with so much news.

During the second-half our UK Tour, we wallowed in British history from neolithic burial sites near Penrith and forts in the North and South Downs, to the Churchill War Rooms, which provided a vivid sense of how the British participation in WWII was tracked and planned from London. Within that historical span, we admired York's famous Minster (opened 637 AD), studied a dry stone-wall exhibit and toured the house at Shibden Hall near Halifax (1420), climbed the 311 steps up the monument that commemorates the Great Fire of London (1666 - "we" being Jennie and me while Randall sat at at the bottom), rode a steam train along the Spey River in the Cairngorms National Park (route opened in 1863), and toured (with samples) the Glenfarclas Whiskey Distillery near Grantown-on-Spey, Scotland (1865). We also watched a bit of modern history as medals were won for Britain at an amazing rate in the Olympics. Being our first chance to watch an Olympics in 10 years, Randall was very happy to find that several of our hosts were as keen to follow them as he was.

We ate ridiculously well, thanks to our generous hosts, who were not only good cooks but were determined not to allow us to become hungry...and we were finally introduced to banoffee pie. Mentioned in the film "Love Actually" (one of our favorite Christmas movies), we had no idea what sort of pie Keira Knightly was talking about until it was explained that it is an English dessert made from bananas, cream, and toffee. A sample was eventually found for us and it was good. We walked (and I ran) a fair amount but we will have to be a bit more modest with our munching for a while. In terms of providing food, rather than being fed, perhaps the most unexpected activity of the second-half of our trip was hand-feeding reindeer at the Caringorm Reindeer Center. When we set-off from New Zealand in January, I did not see that coming!

We had good visits with each of my brothers and while staying with Andrew and Judith, we were able to snatch one afternoon when both nephews and their partners could join us, enjoying our first meeting with Tom's wife, Hannah, and Roger's girlfriend, Tori. We met-up with school-friends I had not seen for decades, and got together with friends from Liverpool and Glasgow Universities, and from the River Lab in Dorset.

Although I would do it all again in a heart-beat, I would have to record most of our conversations or make notes at the end of each day because by the end of the trip I found that all the stories were starting to blend together. "Who was going where?" "When had their children done what?" and "How anybody knew the reasons why?" seemed to be relevant questions to everyone, and it was difficult to keep all of the answers organized.

On top of that, I had so many discussions with different people about past events which I could not remember, that I started to feel quite concerned about a the state of my long-term memory. I started telling people that if I did not have a photograph to remind me about something, then it did not happen. I was joking most of the time that I said this, but after a while I started to wonder if that was how my memory was really operating. This was part of my excuse for taking so many pictures wherever we went. Of course, once I started to think about it, I realized that I remembered a few events that other people did not. For each of those people it was just one or two forgotten moments. For me, repeating this pattern of story-swapping so many times over the six weeks, it seemed as though I was forgetting far too many incidents in my life compared to everyone else. Well, that was my rationalization as I tried not to panic... It is also my excuse for continuing to write a blog and a reminder that I will eventually add more entries and photographs to illustrate our land-cruising in more detail.

As if our trip to the UK was not good enough, we also had an excellent stop-over in Iceland on the way back to the USA. We enjoyed a great couple of hours at the Blue Lagoon, we rented a car and drove into Reykjavik for an excellent dinner at the Kopar Restaurant, and early the following morning we drove around the SW peninsular (including seeing a fishing village, huge steam vents, and the bridge over the boundary between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates). To cap it all, it was sunny and clear, and at night we got to see the northern lights, which was a first for both of us. We were so very, very lucky!