We got a silly amount of snow in the days after my birthday. I mean silly. SILLY. Here's a pic of the racecourse (which y'all have already seen several times, but not the snowy version. That's tooooootally different)...
Ric's coworker, John, arrived on the 18th (not for work but merely because he wanted to check out Jolly Ole England, and since we were here, why not?), and while some of you are already somewhat familiar with John (yes, he's the one I call "the other woman" because he's always calling at 4 am, then Ric has to go out in the middle of the night, etc), I can't continue this without a Dear John Disclaimer. John is....absolutely nuts. He has more energy than anyone I've ever met in my entire life, talks faster than Alvin of Chipmunks fame after having consumed 12 kilos of speed and 30 gallons of coffee, is completely random, and reminds me so much of Joey that the first time I heard him laugh, the hair on the back of my neck stood up. In short, I adore John. The guy is hilarious (and generally without meaning to be, which is my favorite kind of funny). So we pick John up at the airport, and I let him have shotgun so he can appreciate the weirdness of driving on the opposite side of the road. Man, I thought I was a dork on the way to York. At one point, the sentence, "Shit man, this is a GLOVE BOX. Not a steering wheel, but a GLOVE BOX, man!" was exclaimed (I remember this partially because it was funny and partially because he managed to find the vehicle manual that Ric had been looking for the entire time we've been here). We stopped at the TSYS office so Ric could pick up a plethora of chargers that he had left at the office; meanwhile, John and I had a "snowball" fight. I say snowball with quotation marks because John's version of a snowball involved scooping up an armful of snow and shoveling it at me so that I was completely covered head to toe. He then proceeded to accidentally whack me in the head whilst demonstrating to Ric how I came to be the Abominable Snow Bitch. This was foreshadowing as John is a spaz and managed to abuse me unintentionally (at least I hope so) for the duration of his stay. Here's a pic of the bushes in the TSYS parking lot--not particularly interesting, I know, but I just thought they were pretty. It's my blog, and I can do what I want, dangit!
We attempted to go eat at some restaurant Ric had been to with work--as soon as we pulled onto the street, the words "BAD IDEA! ABORT MISSION!" started screaming through my brain because the street was probably a foot deep in snow. Ric got the same message and promptly turned around, pausing for a moment to call John an idiot because at this point, he had opened his car door and was hanging out of the car going, "Snoooooooow!!!" and scooping up handfuls of it as we drove down the street. We neared the end of the street to pull back onto the motorway, then the snow waged war on the car's brakes, and we went sliding out onto the highway in a chorus of "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit" in three part harmony. Not our day to die though, so we missed getting hit by oncoming traffic (narrowly, might I add), then continued on our merry way (well, sort of. We did berate John first about how lucky he was to have pulled his head and torso back into the car BEFORE we went skidding off into the highway traffic). Plan numero uno for lunch having failed, we went with the easy standby and headed into York (driving slowly so John could take pictures of the snow-covered "sexy trees"), where we hit up the Fox and Roman. Here's some of the sexy trees...
Kevin met up with us for lunch so we could add to the multitude of people mocking John for his inability to drink beer. After lunch and saying buh bye to Kevin, we killed time for a bit, then off to London. Getting to London was the easiest public transportation ever. Get on a train, kill a couple of hours with Steven and Ruth, two really cool locals we met en route, then voila, we're there. Added bonus--the cabs in London are badass, and the driver was really cool about pointing out various places of interest. During this ride, John pointed to a number of stores and joked to Ric that he needed to make sure to keep me out of there because it looked pricey. Kid's got a good eye...I specifically remember him banning Dior, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Vivienne Westwood. For a fashion magazine junkie, London and Paris are a combo heaven and hell. Anywho, we spent two nights in London, and since this post has the potential to be silly long, I'm just going to go into London pic mode without giving too much info...
We attempted to go eat at some restaurant Ric had been to with work--as soon as we pulled onto the street, the words "BAD IDEA! ABORT MISSION!" started screaming through my brain because the street was probably a foot deep in snow. Ric got the same message and promptly turned around, pausing for a moment to call John an idiot because at this point, he had opened his car door and was hanging out of the car going, "Snoooooooow!!!" and scooping up handfuls of it as we drove down the street. We neared the end of the street to pull back onto the motorway, then the snow waged war on the car's brakes, and we went sliding out onto the highway in a chorus of "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit" in three part harmony. Not our day to die though, so we missed getting hit by oncoming traffic (narrowly, might I add), then continued on our merry way (well, sort of. We did berate John first about how lucky he was to have pulled his head and torso back into the car BEFORE we went skidding off into the highway traffic). Plan numero uno for lunch having failed, we went with the easy standby and headed into York (driving slowly so John could take pictures of the snow-covered "sexy trees"), where we hit up the Fox and Roman. Here's some of the sexy trees...
Kevin met up with us for lunch so we could add to the multitude of people mocking John for his inability to drink beer. After lunch and saying buh bye to Kevin, we killed time for a bit, then off to London. Getting to London was the easiest public transportation ever. Get on a train, kill a couple of hours with Steven and Ruth, two really cool locals we met en route, then voila, we're there. Added bonus--the cabs in London are badass, and the driver was really cool about pointing out various places of interest. During this ride, John pointed to a number of stores and joked to Ric that he needed to make sure to keep me out of there because it looked pricey. Kid's got a good eye...I specifically remember him banning Dior, Salvatore Ferragamo, and Vivienne Westwood. For a fashion magazine junkie, London and Paris are a combo heaven and hell. Anywho, we spent two nights in London, and since this post has the potential to be silly long, I'm just going to go into London pic mode without giving too much info...
Included are pics of Westminster Abbey, the Parliament building, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, the London Eye, Big Ben, and the Thames.
The white skid at the top right is a plane flying overhead...
The Jesus Birds. Yes, as we passed these, John announced to everyone from London to Jakarta, "So THAT'S how Jesus walked on water!" Okay, I may be *slightly* exaggerating his volume, but it was freakin' funny.
Yup, frozen solid...
I had a bunch of pics of the guys going by, but since I'm a short little shit, most of 'em just looked like weird furry animals crawling across the top of the bystanders.
I LURVED London--wish we had stayed there longer. Westminster was one of those surreal moments where it still doesn't seem like I actually got to stand in Poet's Corner among the many memorials of so many of my idols. You're not allowed to take pictures in most of the abbey (something I was disappointed about at first, but in hindsight, the lack of people pushing past you to take pictures rather than appreciating what they're looking at has kept it more reverent, and I'm now glad that I was able to fully take it all in rather than spending my time there trying to stealthily trip assholes who forgot to turn their flash off and are blinding you while taking crappy pictures that turn out blurry anyway because the flash is still on. Do I sound bitter? Suffice it to say that traveling so much has given me a new pet peeve).
Anywho, this marks the point where things on our journey got...interesting. While we were in France, we passed a newsstand with international papers (I mean like a shelf of about 20 different papers in various languages--seriously, I've never seen so many languages in such a small space before), and out of the 20 or so papers, all of them had front page coverage of the Eurostar mess with the exception of the US paper, so I'm writing from here on out like no one in America ever heard about it...because many probably didn't. See, on a normal day, it takes about two hours to get from London to Paris on Eurostar. It's a fast sucker. So yeah, snow in this area is usually large chunks of ice, so the train's filter is designed to filter out exactly that. However, the snow we got this time around was fine, powdery snow, snow that the filter wasn't designed to catch...so it didn't. As a result, the snow got sucked into the train engine, melted, and caused electrical malfunctions that led to I think five trains getting stuck in the tunnel for about ten hours, thus causing Eurostar to shut down operations and displace thousands and thousands of people trying to travel for Christmas. In short, DISASTER. We were lucky enough to miss being on one of those trains by about a day, but since they weren't running, we wound up taking the old-fashioned way to get to Paris, and by old-fashioned, I mean hellish. Here goes nothin'...we walked to the train station (not the Eurostar station but an actual old-school slow train). This train was *supposed* to go to Faversham where the train would be split and half the passengers sent to Ramsgate and the other half to Dover Priory (where we were heading). When we got to Faversham, they ordered everyone heading to Dover off the train. We stood on the platform for a while trying to figure out what the hell we were going to do when they made an announcement telling all of us to get back on the train. Once back on, they announced that the train would be taking everyone to Ramsgate, at which point those traveling to Dover would catch a different train from Ramsgate to Dover. Okay, no big deal...except that when we arrived at Ramsgate, the train took off, and a Ramsgate employee angrily informed us all that there were no trains heading to Dover at all that day and that, when we were told to exit at Faversham, they knew this but passed all of us off to the Ramsgate station because the people at Faversham didn't want to have to figure out what to do with all of us. This quickly got ugly, and I felt really bad for the boss man at Ramsgate that day for having to deal with the mob of pissed off, exhausted travelers, but he was an efficient little man, and he managed to get us a train to Dover. Woot, problem solved. We get to Dover, grab a cab to the ferry, and take a two hour ride to Calais, France. This was a lot of fun as John booked us in the fancy schmancy lounge part of the boat, so we grazed, got a ferry employee to sneak us out on the employees-only deck to take pictures of the white cliffs of Dover, watched the sun set, and relaxed. It was pretty awesome, and Ric and I had a blast crackin' "I'm on a boat" jokes (which John didn't get, but more on that later). Here's some pics of aforementioned white cliffs of Dover...
...and also a rather blurry because I was trying to snap quickly shot of John being goofy because he was just so amused by how tiny the tea spoon was in comparison to his hand. I've never seen a guy so amused by a teacup before...maybe the glass of champagne got to him.
We arrive in Calais only to find out that we've missed the last shuttle from the ferry to the train station. All hell is breaking loose--the ferry had been PACKED OUT with tons of people with luggage, Christmas gifts, children, etc, so not having a ride to the train station was bullshit. We decided to just walk, and since I was already dealing with a mildly jacked up ankle, I wasn't too happy about it. Walking to the train station included dragging all our luggage about two miles in a silly amount of snow and often on sheets of ice. This is how my mildly jacked up ankle got morphed into a royally jacked up ankle--and for those of you who are familiar with my typical language use, you'll be delighted to know that, whilst skidding about six feet down a ramp on the ice with a screwed up foot and the guys several yards in front of me, I invented about thirty new profanities, and I do specifically recollect calling the pair of them "swashbuckling sons o' bitches" at one point. At the time, I was furious (and I've always enjoyed alliteration when angry), so it wasn't funny then, but now, I get a visual of them bursting into fencing in the snow, and it's just hilarious. Ric caught on that something wasn't quite right and came back to help me walk, and John lugged everyone's luggage so that Ric could assist me because my foot got to the point where I couldn't put any weight on it. John got way up ahead of us and walked with Juliet, an English girl we met earlier, and her significant other, an Aussie guy whose name I don't recall so shall henceforth be Romeo. I think I scared the crap out of Ric along that walk because I ROYALLY lost my shit, something I've only done one other time in my entire life. I mean I was bawling on the side of the road because I was in so much pain; by the time we made it to the train station, you could see how swollen my ankle was through the side of my sneaker. Consistent with the luck we'd had the entire rest of the day, when we got to the train station, there weren't any more trains heading to Paris. This is where I sat down with Romeo and we commenced with a camaraderie over how neither of us were going to move again until a train showed up, even if it meant sitting there all night, just because we were so tired. Ric and John weren't so much on board with that, so they went walking into Calais city center to see about getting a hotel room. Naturally, they had been gone a few minutes when Juliet came rushing over, ecstatic, to tell me and Romeo that two more buses full of people were about to show up at the train station, and since the French police were afraid of a riot breaking out when that group found out there were no trains, they had arranged for the buses to drive all of us to Dunkerque, where a train was leaving for Paris. Soooo I hobbled outside and stood there watching the station completely empty out as everyone boarded the buses...everyone, that is, except me because Ric and John were still MIA. SHIT. While standing there, John pulls up in a cab, tells me they got a hotel room, and I, in my absolute best impersonation of an auctioneer, rattle off, "THOSE BUSES CAN GET US TO PARIS GO GET RIC HURRY UP MAN IT'S GO TIME FLY LIKE A BUTTERLY STING LIKE A BEE GOOOOOOOOO!" OKAY, THAT'S NOT HISTORICALLY ACCURATE AND I'M STILL YELLING...whoo. Sorry. Got caught up in the moment. Anyway, John turns to the cab driver, tells him to rush, I think he may have held up a fist full of cash (you know, the internationally understood way of saying, "Do what I want, and do it now"), and they fly back into city center to find Ric. Meanwhile, the French police and the bus drivers bombard me wanting to know whether or not we're supposed to be on the bus, too, so I tell them what's going on, and the driver tells me that we have exactly five minutes to be on the bus or they'll have to leave without us so that everyone else doesn't miss the train. This entourage keeps coming up to me giving me time countdowns. This is to make the injured little American girl wet her pants. Repeatedly. The taxi comes zooming in like a bat out of hell at the 20 second mark (they gave me that update, I shit you not. I peed my pants repeatedly that night, but I shit you not), so they hurl our luggage on, we climb aboard, and we're off to Dunkerque. Well, sort of. The bus was stuck in the snow, so the French police actually had to push the bus out in order to get us on the road--this made it immediately apparent who on board was from where as everyone NOT French thought this was hilarious. Oh, also funny--we get on the bus, and John goes, "Does anyone on here speak English?" The guy sitting in front of us, this bohemian looking kid, turns around and goes, "We're French. We all speak English." A few minutes later, I comment to Ric that after having been in York so long where they drive on the left, I felt like we were driving on the wrong side of the road. The same guy turns around again and goes, "You mean the RIGHT side?" I just started laughing and said, "Dude, I'm from Columbus, Georgia, USofA, so this is the right side for me, too!" This is where le homeboy goes, "Oh, you're from Georgia? You may be interested in this then..." and starts telling us about Brittany Murphy. Oh, the happy merry French. That guy seriously tripped me out. Sucks about Brittany Murphy.
So we get to the train (which amazingly, let all of us ride for free, and this was a NICE train, so that was really cool of them, and a loss of a lot of money for them, too, since there were so many of us), ride to Paris, take a cab to the hotel, and we're FINALLY THERE. What would've been a two hour ride on Eurostar was instead a seventeen hour ordeal involving two taxis, three separate trains, a ferry, a boat, and trekking it on foot for a few miles. Out of all the people traveling that day, Ric, John, and I were the only three who made it all the way from London to Paris relying solely on public transportation and our feet. After all that, I needed only three things in life--food (thanks to John for the room service), a cigarette, and a laugh. The laugh wound up being provided, interestingly enough, by my cigarettes. See, after all the craziness and hell and whatnot that we went through that day, I get all the way to Paris only to be told by my cigarettes that I'm going to be impotent. Seriously...
I have a bum ankle, a foul mouth, and erectile dysfunction. C'est la vie. We stayed in the rest of that night, and I made the mistake of explaining all our "I'm on a boat" references by getting John to youtube Lonely Island. Oh great googly moogly, I created a monster! The ENTIRE REST OF THE TRIP, John pretty much ONLY spoke in the context of being on a boat, being like a boss, having jizzed in his pants, or by throwing things on the ground. He's no longer a part of our system. =D Seriously, youtube "So I threw it on the ground" to understand. It really is hilarious (see what you started, MELINDER!). Here's about a zillion pictures of Paris and Chartres...included are the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Chartres, Sainte Chapelle, La Conciergerie, and probably some other stuff, too...
Pretty cool--the floor of Chartres Cathedral is printed with a labyrinth at the center of which used to be a plaque. People would walk the labyrinth on pilgrimages, or sometimes would walk it on their knees for repentance.
I had a fascination with the gears that pulled the elevator up Eiffel Tower. You know me, anything colorful and moving grabs my attention...We went to the very top, but it was foggy, and my camera wasn't so much feeling like cooperating, so I may have to steal some of John's pictures and post them later. It was really beautiful up there, though!
Please forgive my obsession with ceilings--I know, I'm weird!
Heh...so yeah, we entered the Louvre, Ric went the wrong way, and John stood at the base of the escalators laughing at us because we came in the door and immediately took the escalator toward the exit. Pretty neat view from inside IM Pei's pyramid, though!
Winged Victory
I know this is a shit shot of the Mona Lisa, but frankly...I've never really cared so much about the Mona Lisa. Blasphemy, I know...but it gets worse. I've seen the Mona Lisa made out of toast at a Ripley's Museum, and...well...I kind of thought it was cooler. I'm a horrible person.
More ceiling shots...without being the nutty American who sprawls out on the floor in the Louvre, it's kind of difficult to get a pic of the ceiling, hence the skewed angle. My bad!
Venus de Milo
Code of Hammurabi...
Bathsheba at her Bath (Rembrandt)
The Three Graces (Regnault)
And for anyone who has ever wondered how the hell they keep the damned thing clean what with all the pigeons flying around and all...
John left from the Louvre to the airport to fly back to the States; Ric and I spent the rest of the day roaming around the Louvre, then swapped hotels to a room right across the street from the train station, where we took Eurostar Thursday morning, and made it all the way back to York in a third the amount of time it had taken us to get from London to Paris.
So that concludes the London/Paris excursion...the following weekend, we decided to go to Wales. Just for S's and G's, ya know. We made a pitstop at Tintern Abbey, then drove to Cardiff and roamed a while. We also drove through Bath on the way back, but we were losing daylight, so I'm only posting the one pic from there because I didn't take many, and most of 'em were car window crap. Here's the pics from Tintern Abbey...
Cardiff Castle...
These things are really creepy. No matter where you are, they look like they're staring you down.
Bute Park...
Gorsedd Stones
River Taff
Bath...
The next day, we got bored and decided to drive aimlessly around Yorkshire, so we went to Hole-of-Horcum. Seriously, I couldn't have possibly made up a name like that. Legend has it that a giant was trying to build a hill, so he scooped up a handful of earth and plopped it down to form Blakey Topping, thus leaving the 400 foot deep, 3/4 mile wide hole in the ground.
WHEW. That was exhausting. I will have you know, my fine stalker friends, that it has taken me THREE AND A HALF HOURS to write this post and upload all these pictures. Someone leave me comments and make me feel it was worth it, or I'm going to throw myself into the Hole of Horcum. Okay, not really. "She died in the Hole of Horcum" just couldn't be taken seriously in an obituary. And I digress. Hope everyone has a very happy New Year's, and I love you all mucho muchly long time!!
