England!

This story begins with an appealing looking conference taking place at University of Oxford. Scott was interested because it was a very high quality immunology conference, I was interested because it was in Oxford, England. So Scott applied for the conference and a grant to pay for it and-- yeah!-- he got both so off he went. And Scott can't go to England without me, so off I went too. Scott left Seattle for London on the 16th of August, and Susanna and I left for Salt Lake City a couple of days later on the 18th.


While Scott showed his fellow conference attendees his poster depicting some immunological research he's been doing for a few years (something about immune tolerance, I think) I took Susanna to her grandparents' home (thanks to my parents' recent and very convenient relocation her two sets of grandparents live only three houses apart), set up her home away from home, gave Scott's mother a document giving my parents medical power of attorney and my mom a document giving Scott's parents medical power of attorney (whoops!), told Susanna that I was going to get dad and then go on a long long trip to England, and, on the 20th of August, boarded my own plane for London.


At length, Friday the 29th of August arrived and we had to leave the beautiful land of sheep, cows, and very nice people: Scott boarded a plane to Seattle and I to Salt Lake City. And on Saturday August 30th we were all three together at last.

I want to pause here to offer thanks to our parents, they helped finance the trip and took care of Susanna while we travelled. We could not have made it happen if it weren't for them. Thank you so very very much.


Photographs and details below.

The rest of London and the end of our trip

I'll give you the rest of London in one post. I can pull this off because we spent most of our time in the National Gallery and we couldn't take photographs there. I can give you a thumbnail of a painting we both really liked though, it's Turner's "Dido Building Carthage" (on the left).

You'll also see photographs of Buckingham Palace and the famous palace guards. We stumbled upon Buckingham Palace roaming around Trafalgar Square before we went to the National Gallery for the first time.

We also spent some time (we could have spent weeks-- or who knows? maybe even years) at the British Museum. If you look closely at the photograph above, you'll see Scott on the other side of the room looking at the controversial Parthenon Marbles.

And here we are at beautiful London Bridge (it looked very sturdy to me).

On the right is a tower from the beautiful parlimentary buildings, of which Big Ben (not pictured) is a part.

Last but not least, here we are at the Globe Theatre (a replica of Shakespeare's Globe). We bought yard tickets (standing only) and saw "A Midsummer's Night Dream." It was hilarious.

We also saw Les Miserables while in London (Scott and I both love that musical and book). And we were not disappointed. Then we headed back for our last night at the Waltmans.

Which brings me to a very important part of our trip to England: my cousin Emily Waltman and her husband Tyler. They not only offered up their flat to us to sleep, but proved invaluable resources in the planning and execution of what turned out to be an absolutely fantastic trip. Unfortunatly, although I got a photograph of three nameless buckingham palace guards I don't really care about and saw only for fifteen seconds, I managed not to get a photograph of them (although you can look at their blog here to meet them for yourselves). We had a great time chatting with them and would have had a great time on Tuesday night hanging out with Emily (while Tyler was working in Spain) had we not gotten lost on the way into town and arrived three hours late.