The London Finale!

It’s a fitting finale to our anniversary trip to end in London…one of our favorite spots on earth! 

Within a few blocks of Lucy’s hospital by Russell Square is also the fabulous British Museum! Dad is getting pretty darn good at taking these pictures himself!

Though we’ve been there many times, we always see new things.  Just inside the door is this new exhibit on the Gamelan (beautiful Balinese instruments) complete with a couple of gongs, not quite as good as ours, but almost!  These gongs are from Raffles Hotel in Singapore, where I broke my foot on our first round the world trip!

At the turn of the Millennium they put a new ultra modern “lid” on the museum to keep up with that glass pyramid at the Louvre I think.  It’s awesome with the new contrasting with the old:

Of course you can never tire of seeing the Rosetta Stone:

Or the amazing Elgin Marbles sneaked out of Greece from the Parthenon for a pittance by a guy named Elgin. These folds in the fabric look like they might start moving in the breeze at any moment.

My arm isn’t quite long enough to do the picture thing.  I sort of look like the horse!

There are always amazing things in the Egyptian halls

And the library. Look at all these pearls produced by one big clam:

Of course, a trip to London is complete without a trip to HARRODS!  the picture below is for Jonah and Aja because we had sushi here at this bar in the Food Halls the last time we were here:

It just happened to be the pre-sale before the BIG annual sale that opened the next day (Saturday) and the place was mobbed! Especially the perfumery where that great Dad/Rick bought me some Fraicas, his favorite smell in all the world…not even on sale!

True, Nordstrom always has those great piano players (until the recession) but on the Egyptian Escalators, Harrods has an opera star singing arias on one of the balconies overlooking the moving stairs (upper left corner).

The ceiling above the escalator is always gorgeous!

And on the bottom floor is a memorial to Diana and Fyad (whose father owns Harrods).

With our limited baggage space (we didn’t check) we still managed to get out with just a few treasures.  And someone offered to take our picture after finding a sushi bar across the street with wireless..our lifeblood. 

One of the best parts of this day was that it was Gracie’s 8th birthday!  So here you go Grace:

SOOO many memories moving around London, in cabs, in the underground and on buses!  It is slowly being updated with lots of new tile and even new trains!

But some things never change:

 

Red phone booths and crowds on Fleet Street at St. Paul's!

Summer school uniforms!

And Gothic Arches!

And wild statues at at almost every intersection!

On our first night we saw Jersey Boys at the London Theatre and loved it despite the Jersey accents in London and bad language. The music was SO terrific!

Then last night, to top off our Dickens adventure yesterday, we saw Oliver. Dad just happened to call and get the last two tickets which were returns!

We sat in a box next to one of these boys’ Fathers!  The sets were just incredible and it was so fun to hear the first hand details from this very proud father!  You’ll never believe who Fagin was (far right).  MR. BEAN!  He was just absolutely fabulous! 

We spend our last day yesterday where we started in England…at the temple!  As we were getting ready for a session I ran to the mission office to see if Charity had sent anything there for us to take home and who should we run into but The Swintons!!!  It was a delight to give them a great big hug and to thank them for their dedicated and skillful service!  They were just starting a zone meeting at the visitor’s center and couldn’t say enough about how much they love Sister Eyre.  They said that every time she is transferred, the zone leader calls and thanks them profusely for sending her there!  The Elders in Reading said that she was truly a “Baptizing Machine”, meant in the very kindest way!

So here we are in our cute little room at the temple, ready to hit the road again…but this time for home!  We were so glad to have survived for exactly four weeks  with just this much stuff. It made those stairs to the tubes and trains so much easier and it was really all we needed!

What a trip of a lifetime.  Am I the luckiest woman on earth to have had this great guy for FORTY YEARS! The number one criteria when I was looking for the man of my dreams, after the obvious ones of a devotion to the Savior and the church was to find someone to share an exciting, meaningful life with….and Dad/Rick has gone beyond my wildest dreams! 

Although he does have just a few idiosyncracies:

Like wearing these socks to church in York when he couldn’t find his Sunday socks… without batting an eye:

And he’s pretty interesting to eat with. Our adventure diet has been lots of cheese, bread, fruit and bickies in the car and on trains and buses whilst progressing to the next exciting place with an occasional stop at a nice restaurant. Mostly we eat just enough to get us to the next adventure and if there doesn’t happen to be food in the car….wait ‘til tomorrow!

If I see a food at the gas station, I know I’d better get in there and get some fast because Dad/Rick may not stop again for several meals. He just doesn’t realize he’s hungry during adventures…until about 11:30 p.m.

Somehow we were able to find “the perfect place to stay” every night…even though one night, our room was 6 inches higher on one side that the other, with our heads pointing down (note the custom wood made especially for this crooked door along the bottom. It gets pretty skinny behind my chair)!

 

And one night we didn’t realize until morning that we were in a room for the handicapped.

But it was the best room of all with a large flat screen hotel in the pub next door where we could watch Wimbledon when we were going to or coming from Wimbledon and 24 hour Internet Service!

What a guy!  You can tell when he’s reallllly having fun when he hangs his hand down like this:

 

Oh man, I love this guy, adored this grand adventure and I can’t wait to see what happens in the next forty years! 

For the Love of Children!

This blog entry is for the Grandkids! If you adults want to read on too, great!

Yesterday was amazing! We got a train from the Temple to one of the most famous train stations in the world… Victoria Station right in the middle of London.  From there we got on the tube and went straight to Russell Square where we were to meet who we think is the foremost authority in the world on Lucy’s Syndrome, Dr. Philip Beales. He has done almost 20 years of research and has worked with so many families who have kids who have the same thing she does so we learned SOOOO much!

We decided to find the hospital where he works first so we would know just where to go to meet him for lunch.

Here it is!  It is called UCL , which stands for Institute of Child Heath.

 

It is part of a hospital call UCH (University College Hospital)  which we know a lot about because they saved Jonah’s life there when he was a little preemie baby born 9 weeks early and weighed 3 pounds 13 ounces when we were living in London!  We LOVE this hospital, partly because of Jonah but now because this place is also going to help us so much with Lucy!

Since we were early, we decided that we would look around and see if there was anything historical in that part of London. To our amazement, we realized that we were in the cradle of aid for helpless children in England which began almost three hundred years ago! 

In about 1720 a man named Thomas Coram (above)realized that there was no place and no one to take care of thousands of orphans, abandoned children or children whose parents were unable to take care of them and who were starving or left to die.   He was a sea captain with no children of his own but an enormous heart. After a long “campaign” to raise funds and begging for money from his wealthy friends, he finally started The Foundling Hospital  (foundling is a destitute child who has been “found”) in 1739 within a few  blocks of where Lucy’s hospital now stands. 

As we read the sad stories of mothers having to leave their children at this school because they were unable to feed them or because they were single and it was against the law to work as a single mother, we were deeply saddened! This letter is from a mother who has been sentenced to death (probably for stealing bread to feed her children or something) and is writing from prison pleading with the Foundling Hospital to take her child:

 

When the mothers got to the hospital, which not only nursed sick children back to health but put them in school as well they were still not sure their child would be accepted. After long journeys and huge sacrifices to get there, they led them to a kind of roulette machine that stirred up balls. If a blue ball dropped to the bottom, the child was rejected, red, they would have to wait and white, they were accepted! 

If they accepted, they left the loving arms of their mothers to the great unknown of whoever was assigned to care for them at the school.  Can you imagine how sad and scary that would be???

 

Occasionally the mothers were able to come and try to get their kids back but because of the living conditions of the day about 70% of the kids died before they were five years old!  The picture above is of a little girl whose mother has come to “collect” her.

Another man who was an artist named Hogarth also did a lot of good for children in those days because he did lots of black and white pictures as well as oil paintings that showed how badly kids were treated in those days and how hard it was for their parents to provide for them.

There were so many people in who were so poor that many of the mothers just had to leave babies to die if she couldn’t find anyone or any way to take care of them! These pictures are just pictures of pictures so you can’t see them very well, but you’ll get the idea! 

Through the establishment of this hospital and school, Thomas Coram  saved about 30,000 destitute children from certain death and who knows how many people donated to the cause because of pictures like this!

Another interesting person who helped was George Fredrick Handel, who donated concerts for rich people at the chapel by the Hospital every year so they would use the money for the kids.  The first time people in England heard the Messiah was at their chapel and he continued doing concerts there every Christmas until he died!

I got a book with a CD of Handel’s music for the Grammie Camp kids this summer. I can’t wait to share it with you!

 

Only a few blocks away from the Foundling Museum was the house that Charles Dickens lived in when he was a little boy and the place where he wrote a lot of his stories and books. Here’s Grandfather on the front doorstep!

It was totally serendipity that when we walked in, we discovered that Charles Dickens’ great great great grandson was walking around the house with us!  The cute girl at the till introduced us and took this picture for us! (He had a broken arm).

 

Charles Dickens’ stories were full of examples of injustices to children and the sad lives that so many lived in abject poverty!  Do you remember the story of Tiny Tim in the story called, “A Christmas Carol”?

Here’s Grandfather in Dickens’ living room:

The same artist from the Foundling museum (Hogarth) also inspired Dickens to write about the plight of the child in that day. Here is one of his sketches.

Even Charles Dickens, whose Father got into serious debt in trying to raise 6 children, had to go to work for sometimes 12 or 14 hours a day with hardly a thing to eat…in a workhouse putting labels on black shoe polish when he was about 11. The picture above is from a story about a character in one of his books but is exactly like what Charles remembers from being in the workhouse.  He was devastated when his father was sent to prison for debts. The whole family lived in the prison for two years.  These hard experiences opened his eyes to the hardships of people’s lives and gave him lots of things to write about!

Tonight, Grandfather and I are going to see Oliver, a new play in London which shows the story from one of his books called Oliver Twist that shows the sad lives of the poor kids who lived at the time of Dickens! Maybe some of you have seen the movie Oliver. If not, maybe you should! That book helped a lot of people suddenly realize what a hard life children and families were having in London at that time.

Charles Dicken’s mind was full of amazing stories and he wrote, sometimes day and night to get them all written down!  Grandfather is sort of like that too. Have you noticed? Not only that, he had nine children just like Grandfather and I!

This is a picture of Charles Dickens sitting in his room, surrounded by all the characters that he created in his books. This summer remind me to show you the antique collection that Aja’s mom gave Grandfather and I of all the books written by Charles Dickens that used to belong to a famous American composer named John Phillip Sousa! They’re amazing!!!

What a mind this great man had…even though he did have funny hair!

Grandfather and I were amazed to realize that people are still helping children today in this very same place in London through this incredible children’s hospital, helping children with rare and special problems.

We can’t wait to tell you all we learned about Lucy that day at lunch with “Dr. Phil”!  She’s going to have a very exciting life which will be made even better because of the things this Doctor and others who are working to learn more about her syndrome!  What a great day!!!

Beyond Imagination!

Well, we were so lucky to get into Wimbledon on Tuesday with tickets, but we decided that we would just go ahead and get in “THE QUEUE” on Wednesday. Since Dad/Rick just breezed through the line on Monday and Andy Murray was playing on Tuesday, which we were sure was the reason for the mongolio line, we just decided to have “an experience”. Which was very brave of Dad/Rick as his most un-favorite things in this world is crowds and definitely the most abhorred thing of all is….standing in lines! 

We walked,and walked and walked and walked (like pioneers) and just couldn’t find the end of the line no matter how long we went. More and more aghast at what we had gotten ourselves into, it was now too late to turn back!  Even the British who love queues were in absolute unbelief that we just couldn’t find the end!  Finally we got to an enormous football field where there were several rows about the length of a football field of people, reading newspapers and getting ready to receive their “Queue Cards”!

 

As you can see, some are in line and some are still going to the back of the line.  By the time we actually got to the end of the line (really truly half an hour of walking) we knew that we were in the MOTHER OF ALL LINES! 

I was giggling uncontrollably and Dad was rolling his eyes uncontrollably when they finally handed us our coveted “Queue Card” which was our only passport to the prestigious but a bit snooty All England Lawn Club. 

Note the number on our very formal Queue Card. This was the real number that they had handed out for the evening.  Plus there were at least 2000 people behind us!

Dad/Rick is worried that his kids are going to lose faith in what they all know has his firm resolve never to stand in a line. But I say that it was worth it just for the experience! 

You wouldn’t believe the tents lined up where people sleep to be in line for grounds passes at 6 a.m. the next morning.  FUN!

We just can’t help but chuckle about the British rules!  Rules and following the rules is one of the most important parts of the British etiquette! Here are the list of rules for Queuing, posted about every 50 feet along our long path as we marched along with newly lain metal sidewalks over the grass and through the fields to the turn styles

I especially like the bit there at the end that says REMEMBER!!! No barbecues or fires are allowed in the queue!

It was worth it just for the experience! It only took an hour to get back to the gate where we gave them our fourteen pounds to enter the hallowed ground, which as you can imagine was a little bit crowded! It was 7 o’clock and we still have two more hours of fun tennis.

 

His the disgrundled but happy kid!

Like the royal guards at Buckingham Palace waiting for the queen to immerge , these were the Royal Air Force and Army guards waiting for the players to immerge!

Here is the new one hundred million dollar roof over center court that is debuting this year. I must admit that I took this picture while watching TV because we didn’t have a helicopter, but it’s pretty amazing!  They did close it partially one day because it was too sunny for the royalty. I’m sure they’re actually hoping for rain this year so they can try it out!

I guess they spent all their money on the roof, because they still have little guys manually changing the scores on the outside courts!  We saw a great doubles match which they finally called because it was 9:30 and getting dark.

This is where Dad and I were sitting that year when we looked over and nearly fell out of our seats to see Shawni and Dave and Max in his stroller walking over by Murray Mound aka Henman Hill (below) where thousands watched the matches on a giant screen TV since they have grounds passes only!

 

 

Besides people, the whole place was bulging with strawberries and cream and purple petunias!

That’s an experience we won’t soon forget, including the fun ride to and from the train station on a double-decker bus that maneuvered it’s way through tiny streets and 90 degree turns that just weren’t possible!  This was a comparatively ENORMOUS street!

Ah Wimbledon!