Churchill War Rooms, Cafe in the Crypt, London Eye

Email for June 9:

It is Thursday, isn't it? Boy we're confused. After waking up to housekeeping at 10:30am, we pulled ourselves together, grabbed an apple from our dessert spread last night, and headed back to Westminster. We spent the afternoon at the Churchill War Rooms. They had added a whole Churchill museum since I had been there last. It took a few hours to get through it all, but it was all very well done.

We walked from there to the mall and then over to Trafalgar Square. We wandered into the National Gallery and got lost (both literally and figuratively) in 17th Century Italy (we also found a great image of tax-collectors... take note, Ted or you could end up like them!).

Around 4pm, we were actually kind of hungry (having only eaten an apple), so we went next door to St. Martin's in the Field Café in the Crypt. It was great. We had warm soup, rolls, Tom-sandwich Me-Danish, and then split hot apple crisp with custard and chocolate tart. We sat next to a lovely man who was 75 and has lived in London all his life. All the café workers knew him. He told us it was his birthday last week and he came in and they treated him to breakfast.

After the Crypt, we walked back over to Westminster and hopped on the London Eye and took loads of pictures.

From there we wandered around, hopped a bus back to Trafalgar Square, and then walked up to the Cambridge Theatre to see Matilda.

Review of Matilda: I think the show took a bit to warm up. 80% of our audience was made up of children from schools. This musical was clearly one that was made for children. The music is fun and clever, but not super memorable. The set was also clever. Ms. Trunchbull was a man dressed as a large woman (a great choice for a play made for children to take the scariness out of the character... and that character was quite scary). The book is simple. The musical did a great job of adding magical themes and meaningful add-ons to the story. I'm glad the audience was mostly children. It was a fabulous, sweet, and magical musical and the girls would have loved it.

Big Ben and Shakespeare's Globe

Email for June 8:

I did not anticipate how emotional this journey would be for me. I totally cried as we were landing. Everything about the UK is like coming home. And I'm so excited Tom is here this time to share it.

We had to set an alarm this morning to make it to breakfast. I could have slept all day! :) We had a lovely breakfast at the hotel and then took the tube into town. We stopped at Earl's court on the way in to town to get a picture next to Doctor Who's police box (one of the few actual police boxes still around).

 
Then we went straight to the houses of Parliament to give Tom the first look at London. We walked across the river and walked along the Thames until Big Ben chimed at noon.

 
We wandered around for most of the afternoon. We saw Buckingham Palace, walked through Green Park and found our swanky hotel around 2pm. We checked in, dropped off our backpacks, watched a crazy British gameshow ("For What It's Worth") and then headed out to the Tate Modern. We made it through almost all of the galleries before it closed at 6. We headed around the corner to an Anatolian (modern day Turkey, though we weren't sure what Anatolia was until we looked it up, but it was near the globe and fairly inexpensive) restaurant with yummy food that was right next to the Globe.

We entered the magical globe around 7, got our cushions and programme. It was completely magical. The show started at 7:30, Around 7:50, the sprinklers on the thatched roof turned on in the Globe and drenched the groundings. The stage manager ran out and said: "For everyone's safety, we'll need to end the performance here. Please stand up and calmly head to the exits." Everyone was pretty slow to do so but we all eventually exited the premises and were a giant mass along the Thames. It was hilarious seeing bikes and a maintenance vehicle trying to get through all of us.

 
Finally, around 8:30pm, they told us it was safe to return to our seats. Apparently a downpour earlier in the day caused the sprinklers to malfunction during our show. Eventful, for sure. And then the production was 3 hours long, so we got out around 11pm (it's currently 12:30am).

For those that care, the production review: It was fabulous. The mechanicals were Globe ushers. It worked wonderfully. Helenus and Hermia were Indian and grew up together, so there was an Indian/slightly Bollywood at moments vibe about it. Puck was amazing. Oberon was too dark. We did see most characters in their underpants at various times (the sign outside said: "This performance contains naughtiness of a sexual nature"). It wasn't as lewd as I thought it would be. The Helenus thing totally worked for me. I really actually loved that choice (and he was Good!) All the lovers were great except Demetrius. Meow Meow (she's apparently a big Australian performer) played Titania, so there were lots of songs... which mostly worked (sometimes they were excessive). Overall, it was awesome and magical, and a perfect performance for our first night in London.

We saw the artistic director sitting close to us. We also sat next to a lovely couple that were fascinated by the fact we lived in Alaska. The husband really wanted to come visit. The wife said: "I only go South. I went to Scotland once but it was so bloody cold, I swore I'd never go back."

We just got back to find champagne and dessert and a card wishing us a happy 10th anniversary from the hotel. I'm telling you... the treatment is divine! (Not really sure what to do about the champagne, but we're definitely doing to dig into that yummy dessert before sleeping super soundly!).

We Flew to London in Business Class

In June we dropped the kids off with their grandparents and we took a 3 week trip to the UK. It was fantastic! To start off, we ended up in with business class tickets. The first benefit was that we got to use the American Airlines lounge at O'Hare airport while waiting for our flight, where we had our pick of breakfast items and comfortable chairs. And once we got on the flight the perks kept coming.

 
(Every day while gone we sent an email back home, so for the sake of simplicity, we'll for the most part just be using the text from the emails here with a few pictures.)

Email from June 7:

We're at the hotel here near Heathrow. We walked off the tube to rain and thunder and lightning, but fairly warm and muggy. We were on the second row of a 767 with fully reclining seats. They gave us tablets with movies to watch with Bose noise cancelling headphones. It seemed like they were constantly bringing us food all day. We had a delicious strawberry rhubarb gallette for brunch and ravioli for dinner and a bunch of stuff in between, all of it restaurant quality. Even the mixed nuts were served warm in a glass dish. We may never have such a comfortable flight again!

May

One of the exciting things that happened at our house in May was the birth of the moose babies in our townhouse development. We had seen the mom walking up and down the street for a few days, and then these two babies appeared. They chose a secluded area behind one of our neighbors' houses as a sort of home base. They would walk around our yards for a while to feed, and then go back and lie down in their spot. They hung around for about a week and then they were gone. It was a lot of fun having them around, but we also had to be extra careful when the kids went out to play.

The other big event was Sabrina's preschool graduation. They had a petting zoo with pony rides, which were thoroughly enjoyed. Then as a separate event the kids gave a concert performance and got their diplomas. Now it's on to the big leagues in Kindergarten.

Celia's Baptism

Celia was baptized in April. She was very excited, and we were very excited for her. She's so grown up!

Grandma and Grandpa and Nana and Papa came up for it.

Celia decided to wear the dress Marel wore when she was baptized.

Celia requested that afterwards, we all get pizza at Moose's Tooth and then go swimming at the hotel Nana and Papa were staying at, so that's what we did.

March

Celia had her 8th birthday in March. For one of her gifts she received Marel's old Josefina American Girl doll. She was very excited. (She had a party and invited some friends, but we didn't seem to take any pictures of it. Also, Caleb had his 2nd birthday in February, which we posted about at the time.)

I don't know if there is a story behind this picture. It kind of looks like Marel fell on the floor and decided to take a picture of the kids eating lunch. Whatever happened, I thought it was an interesting photo.

We hardly got any snow last winter, so any time we did we had to take advantage of it.

The kids always like watching the snow plows, but they hardly came last year.

I can't seem to remember why I needed to buy a sheet of plywood in March (we're always working on something around here) but Caleb went along to help me out.

Celia raced in a Pinewood Derby, and she was very excited to win 3rd place!

January

In January, we decided Caleb had finally outgrown the 30-year-old port-a-crib he had been sleeping in, so it was time for him to graduate into a real crib. Which meant Sabrina needed a new bed, because our crib doubles as a toddler-size bed that Sabrina was sleeping in. So we moved that into Caleb's room and put the rails on, then built a new bed for Sabrina that fit under Celia's bed, and adorned it with a Welsh flag duvet cover (since her middle name Carys is Welsh).

One day Caleb built a train track around the Buddha statue. We captioned this photo "Derailed on the track to enlightenment."

Marel and I got to go to our first Alaska Aces hockey game, thanks to some friends who gave us tickets.

One of the fun things we do a couple times a year is our informal dutch oven cook-off. We go up to our friends' house way up on the hillside overlooking the inlet and we all cook something new in our dutch ovens, then we have a big feast with everything we've cooked. It's sort of like a rustic, backwoods Thanksgiving. We always make a dessert, because you can't have a feast without a good dessert, and most people make ribs or meaty stews or salmon and halibut. I don't remember what we made this time, but it was good.