On Friday October 10 I flew from Santiago to London to visit my grandson Ethan. I got to see his home, and he drove me around on the wrong side of the street. With his British. right-side steering wheel Lexus! Amazing.
First I walked a mile from my hostel to the bus stop in Santiago, got on the airport bus, paid one Euro and was out to the airport in about a half hour. I flew Ryan Air because it was a good connection- but be prepared for gross inefficiency if you need to use Ryan. I flew into Stansted Airport on the east side of London.
At Stansted, Ethan directed me to go downstairs to catch the train for Cambridge. He bought my train ticket and emailed it to me. When I got off the train in Cambridge, he pulled up in his car.
Here’s Ethan in front of his house with his car. On Saturday we walked to his local train station and I took a picture of a thatched-roofed house up the street from him.
Local train stations have a live station-master and hinged gates. These wooden gates go across the train tracks. A few minutes before the train comes into the station, the stationmaster comes out of his guard house, unlocks the gates, and walks them onto the road. Both sides. Now all the cars stop, as the train comes in to the station. After it passes, he comes back and walks them back across the tracks, locks them in place, and car traffic resumes.
Nothing goes up in the air, like our crossing gates. I tell you about this different style of gate, because I was reminded of a bit of family lore involving my sister Kathy and our neighbor Junior Bergman, who were rescued about 60 years ago by an on-duty crossing master one day in Lebanon. They were intently watching the train while hanging onto the gate, were not prepared for the crossing gate to go up in the air and went up with it.
Ethan actually lives close to Newmarket, of racehorse fame, and we went into town for a British breakfast, which has all kinds of things - some greens, a tomato, baked beans— in addition to the foods we usually have. There were a lot of people dressed “ up” for a Saturday and he said they were probably going to the horse races. There was a special breeders’ race that day, a futurity.
Then we went to Cambridge where we walked around several of the many colleges. I posted a picture of us in front of King’s College, but that one would’ve cost us 10£ to enter. Some of the less-hallowed ones were also very beautiful, including Christ’s and Clare’s colleges. We really enjoyed seeing the grounds and squares inside the gates of the colleges. There were some very old trees. We went into a history museum that had a lot of artifacts from the immediate area, some found by archaeologists and some just by local metal detector hobbyists. Ethan said his dad would love to look around there- there were tools and things from Roman times.
Sunday I flew back to Santiago. It was a quick trip but totally worth it to see how well Ethan is doing overseas!
