Killingbecks in London

I decided to entitle this blog entry Round-about Barcelona because that’s what we spent a lot of our time in Barcelona doing—going around roundabouts. While Barcelona is a beautiful and exciting city, one of its downsides is that its streets are very poorly marked. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that we missed our turn (we had a rental car) and had to circle around in the roundabouts to get back to where we were supposed to be. In addition, there are a couple of really big roundabouts—not as big as the huge one around the Arc de Triomph in Paris, but still, 5 or 6 lanes around—some of which have traffic lights, and I got caught in them a couple of times unable to get to the outside lane to exit ... read more

When I was uploading this week’s pictures to my computer to organize them for the blog, I noticed that I really haven’t taken that many pictures the last couple of weeks. Part of that is probably because we haven’t been traveling, and another part of that, I think, has to do with the fact that we are really becoming used to all of the novelties of London. I think we’ll have more pictures the next couple of weeks because we’ll be traveling a bit. At the end of this week Gretchen and I are renting a car and driving up to Yorkshire (about four hours north) to the towns of Leeds and York, where my ancestors (on my dad’s side) are from. As odd of a surname as “Killingbeck” is (right after Gretchen and I got ... read more

This blog entry is going to be mostly pictures again. (There will probably be two pages of pictures, so look for the links to the other pages of pictures at the bottom of this page.) Gretchen and I have spent the past five days in Paris again. We went to Paris about six or seven weeks ago, but we just didn't get to do all that we wanted to do in three days, so we went back with John and Heidi. Rather than flying this time, we took a train through the Chunnel (Channel Tunnel). Instead of flying--and having to take a train to the airport, arrive at the airport 2 hours early, wait in a security queue for an hour, and then end up checking our carry-on luggage because the UK currently has the most ... read more

Yesterday morning Gretchen and I were flipping channels to check the weather. (Speaking of which, somebody described London weather as living inside a defrosting refrigerator—I think that’s probably as fair a description as any.) At any rate, we stumbled across the channel, The HITS, which is that VH-1 type music video channel here that we were watching when I wrote the England’s Top Twenty blog. We stopped at that channel just in time to see the beginning of Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve. (Oddly enough, here in England the music video channels actually still play music videos.) We ended up stopping and watching the whole thing because—more than anything else I’ve seen—it perfectly illustrates what it is like walking on London’s sidewalks (Londoners use the term “pavement” instead of “sidewalks”)! Before you go any further reading ... read more

Note: I am posting this a couple of days late. I wrote it earlier, but it takes a while to load all of the pictures, and I haven’t had a couple of hours to sit down and dedicate to posting it. Just FYI…Also, I should mention, for my parents' sake, that we were not in Rome when the trains crashed... First off, let me just give a quick clarification here in case you missed the last post. All of the pictures that we post on this blog have captions with them—even the ones at the bottom, below the text of the blog. If the captions do not automatically appear, just (double?) click on the pictures, and the picture will become enlarged and the caption will appear. Okay, enough of that… I tried to get Gretchen to ... read more