Where to start?

Where to begin?  At the beginning, at the airport, studying a map of London.  When we left on March 8 none of this stuff was happening.  No virus cases reported in Michigan, only 50 in Great Britain. We had planned this trip for many months and unlike our usual way of planning, we made and paid for many advance reservations.  If we thought for a minute civilization was going to implode we wouldn't have gone.  We really are not fools.  Our plan was for 10 days, we managed most of them.

We didn't get to any of our itinerary in London  save for one because we saved London itself for the last three days of our time there and we are now home.   What we did do was wonderful and I am not even going to disrespect that good time by listing the things we didn't get to.

While I'm not into travelogue posts I do owe what we did do it's proper  respect because it was great.

 This little pub, and the emphasis is on the word little,

 has been in continual use since 1583.  It was Dickens' pub.  Francis Bacon lived two doors down.  It was frequented by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and he wrote about the area it's in,Sir Walter Raleigh sailed from the river directly outside these doors.

 But we were on a mission because what mattered to Elizabeth was this staff.   One of the pub's owners now is Ian McKellen, the British actor who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings movies.  This is Gandalf's staff.  Elizabeth asked us to go on a pilgrimage to see this staff in her name.  She gave us a copy of one of her books and we were to bring it with us. 

Of course Sir Ian wasn't there on a Tuesday for lunch but the employees accommodated our request and touched her book to the staff.  I am quite sure Elizabeth will build an altar for the book.

 

The next day the three of us took the Eurostar train under the channel into Belgium to visit Bruges.  It was again a gray, cold, very windy day - that seemed to be the weather the whole time we were gone but not even a gray day could hide the beauty of Bruges.  It's gorgeous and now is in a tie for our top favorite beautiful places.  

This, though, this was an absolute thrilling thing to see.  Our hotel manager told us to take a walk at night to the windmills.  At night the walk alongside the windmills is lit up and he said it was beautiful.  Well, I've never seen anything like this.  Ever.  And I couldn't believe this photo.  I took the shot with my phone and when I looked at it I was stunned so I kept taking more and more and each one was a winner.  The windmills were huge, I was at the bottom of a hill.

I think there were 4 of them...maybe 5 but it started to drizzle and it was so very cold and windy and we had a long walk back to the hotel so we saw just these two.And besides that, we were tired.  I think that was one of the days we walked 13,000 steps.

I am so glad I have these beautiful photos because I talked about them for days.

We loved Bruges but had to leave on Friday.  The train stopped in Brussels where we spent half of Friday and then returned to London.

Saturday we went to a play with Brian, his daughters and son-in-law.  When we returned from dinner everything changed.  More on that later.