Friday, September 30, 2011

It's Fate

There was no way I could not have been a crafter, not with family enablers like I have.  First, my mom rescues the afghan project (and supplies enough yarn for a second one).  Then I see my sister and out of the blue she presents me with this absolutely delicious merino sock yarn from Deep Water Dye Works, dyed by one of her craft show friends.   I'm so lucky!  (And then they combined to supply boxes of quilting fabric, but that's a story for another post.)
lovely yarn
(Yes, that's Biscuit contributing fluff along the top of the photo.  I got several photos of a blurry cat head before his attention was drawn to something outside and I managed to photograph the yarn.)  

Now the urge to instantly cast on a new lace sock pattern, possibly with beads, has seized my brain.  Fortunately (or not) the week is proving too insanely busy to spend time surfing Ravelry for patterns, so I'm still crocheting afghan squares. (I'm over 70 as of this morning...my first stopping point is 108, my second 144.)

Stay tuned for the next gripping episode!  Will she succumb to the lure of the sumptuous sock yarn?  Will she remain faithful to her cheery afghan?  Will Biscuit cover everything with so much fluff you can't see the colors?  (Well, yes, that one's a gimme.)   Not even the knitter knows!

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Compulsively Square

I now completely understand why there are so many crocheted afghans in the world.
Hopelessly square

I can't stop.  Okay, I don't really want to stop, because I'm only on square 42 and I need at least 108 to make a small afghan.    But for a while it looked like I was going to have to, because I blew through my whole backlog of light colors (the ones I wanted to use up) in under a week. 

But my mother came to the rescue, agreeing to give up some of her stash to support the cause.  Actually she said, "Hallalujah!  There is a patron saint of pastel yarn!"  because she knits kid mittens for charity and light colored mittens attract dirt approximately 0.1 seconds after being handed over to the child recipient.    And boy did she come through....this is either going to be a large afghan--or else at least two smaller ones.    Take a look:
Biscuit checks out the new yarn

As you can see, it didn't even make it home before it started getting turned into squares.  And Biscuit is very interested.  I have a feeling I'm going to be grateful for my large zippered yarn storage bags, because the yarn wasn't in the house ten minutes before its cat toy potential was being explored.

Biscuit thinks yarn is a cat toy

I barely had taken my eyes off it and Biscuit had started scooping the smaller balls out of the bag and batting them experimentally across the floor.  I had to wrestle them away from him.    I'm so mean that way.

Now I need to excuse myself.  Must.crochet.squares.now....

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Out With the Old, In With the New

So, one more FO to start- over the weekend I finished the socks I started in San Francisco.   Don't tell me you're surprised--of course I brought sock yarn!  I knew, or at least hoped,  I'd finish the sweater on the trip, and I didn't want to be caught knitless!   So here they are:
blue striped socks
Just plain socks, made from a skein of Lana Grossa cotton/wool blend I picked up when my LYS sadly went out of business this summer.

As for the new project--well, it's like this.  When you use a lot of donated yarn, you find yourself trying to pick projects to go with the yarn. Which I kind of enjoy, because sometimes, as now, I wind up going out of my way to learn something new I might not have done if I'd been choosing the project first.    This is how this weekend I found myself finally learning how to crochet an afghan square.    My grandmother did a lot of crochet, but my mom never really got into it, and so I didn't have the handy instruction that I did for knitting.  I've picked up some odds and ends over the years, but am still pretty much a rank beginner.  And yet, for some things, like bags and blankets, where you don't really want a lot of stretchiness, it's a great technique.

I would be quite embarrassed to tell you just how many misshapen wads of yarn I frogged en route, but I persevered until I got this:
afghan squares

Success!  Amusingly, I'm going to need more of the pastel colors that I started this project to use up, as I'm blowing through them at such a rate that I already know I'm going to run out, or as they say, be a few squares short of an afghan.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Westward Ho!

So, it isn't that I have suddenly become less busy that has let me get caught up on posting FOs, but rather that I was on vacation the week of Labor Day.  Unlike most of our travels, this was not a sudden-death-must-keep-moving-sightseeing-marathon, but a more relaxed trip to the San Francisco area to see family and friends. 

Our first weekend was spent with my sister-in-law and her family- Jonathan spent a good deal of the weekend playing with trains with the boys.   We also went out to see the boys' favorite museum (the Hiller Aviation Museum, which I quite recommend), and the Lawrence Hall of Science, which featured a lot of audio-animatronic dinosaurs (always a big hit with the under-3-foot set, but plenty there for adults too).    I didn't take many photos during the first part of the trip, in part because the ones I did take mostly showed three small-boy-sized blurs zipping around trains, planes or dinosaurs.  But my sister-in-law did get this nice one of me with my middle nephew Dash, sitting on a giant fiberglass whale outside the dinosaur museum. 
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We then joined our friends, who took us on a series of leisurely walking tours featuring various scenic areas adjacent to their favorite restaurants.  The food was wonderful...it's a really good thing that we did so much walking though!  A few highlights:
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(Note that we admired the cable cars, but we didn't ride on them...we walked up the hill without mechanical assistance.)
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There was also hanging out, playing games and pickling of pears.  Yes, that's not a typo- our friends have a pear tree in their backyard and have been trying absolutely every recipe they can find to use or preserve the pears.   And they have found the most wonderful recipe for pickled pears . They come out sweet but intensely cinnamony and quite delicious.  I came home with the firm intention of hitting the farm stand for pears of our very own.  And we may not bother to can them...eight pounds or no eight pounds, I really don't expect them to last very long. 

Our last day we took the ferry out to Angel Island.   It was quite windy and the bay was full of sailboats:
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It was strangely disconcerting to walk all around the island and see land all around.   But the views were fantastic. 
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We visited the Angel Island Immigration Station, which operated from 1910 through the forties, and is now open to visitors. It's sometimes called the Ellis Island of the west, but it was aimed more at keeping people out than welcoming them in.   They've preserved some of the heartwrenching poetry carved into the walls by the people imprisoned there.   The rooms with cots and displays of typical immigrant possessions were pretty bleak-- filled to overflowing with people, it must have been awful. 
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After taking the ferry back, we had dinner at Louis Restaurant, with a gorgeous view of the water, and then went straight to the airport to get the redeye home. 

It was a perfectly lovely trip, with family, good friends, wonderful food and terrific weather.  Pretty much ideal- we can't wait to do it again!
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Saturday, September 10, 2011

And Now for the FOs

The most recent FO was the Guernsey-inspired sweater that I knit out of the yarn my mother and I dyed a few months back. There were a couple of kinks in my plan...where I had half the back knit and then discovered that my gauge swatch had lied like a lousy rotten lying thing and I had to rip it all out and start over. And then at the end when I discovered that despite our general similarity in size, my friend Victor has somewhat shorter arms than I do. So I took a couple of inches off the sleeves. But it all worked out in the end:
Victor's new sweater

Victor liked it. Here's a closeup of the patterning.
Guernsey patterning

The FO before that was a pair of Jaywalker socks. I was severely short of yarn, but was able to find some dark brown contrast yarn that went reasonably well with it.
Tan Jaywalker Socks

There was a simple mistake rib scarf with some nice Cascade 220 Heather out of the stash:
mistake rib scarf

Three more pairs of navy mittens. I still have a giant skein of navy yarn, but I couldn't face it so I tucked it away and have been doing other things for a while.
Mittens x 3

I finally wrapped up the ribbed lace socks that I started on the trip to England. The merino-tencel yarn has a beautiful sheen and softness, but is fearsomely slippery. I was happy to be using the little bamboo needles for that.
ribbed lace socks

And somewhere in there I blew through some of the brown sport weight yarn I had a lot of it by doubling it up and knitting a plain ribbed guy hat.
brown ribbed hat

So, not an enormously productive summer in terms of number of projects, but I'm very happy to have the sweater done...with 340 stitches around the chest on size 2 needles, I feel sure that if I were tracking number of stitches knit, I'd be way ahead of the curve!

Saturday, September 3, 2011

The "Things Done" List

So. Now that I've gotten my act together and posted all the vacation photos, you're probably wondering what the heck I've been doing for the last two months. And the answer is that I've spent a good part of the summer whacking at my to do list, which had gotten so far out of control the only thing I could do was hide it in a dark closet and start a new list, a 'things done' list.

Do you every feel like you have so much to do, that you don't know where to start? Like just looking at your "To Do" list makes you tired? Like you could work all day and not even make a dent? Or worst of all-- you start something on the list and then find before you can do that, you have to say, move something, and that reminds you that you need to put in the laundry, and the next thing you know, the day is gone, and you haven't made any progress at all on the first thing you set out to do?

Well. This is when I deploy the "things done" list. Clearly, there are some tasks that need to be given priority. But there is nothing more demoralizing than starting with a plan and having no part of it come to fruition- even though you might have done any number of other things that weren't on the list! But having a large number of projects with no fixed deadline is for me, a guarantee of indefinite procrastination.

Coincidentally I just read the best decluttering tip of the year, which is to forgive yourself for having things being in a mess. Let go of the guilt and move on. So, that's been my plan for the summer.

And I'm happy to say that it's been working very well. Every day I try to record at least one 'thing done' in my pocket calendar. It might be a routine chore like dishes or laundry or working on a larger project, or simply taking care of something I've been meaning to do for ages. For example, I have:

a) Scrubbed all the green slime off the garage door (a chore that has been on my 'to do' list since 2002 when I bought the house).

b) Repainted the front door and doorway trim on the back slider (started last summer and not finished).

c) Started the deck rehab – I've completed step 1, scrubbing the black mildew off the deck. I've had good intentions on this one for at least 5 years. Now we're at the pulling nails and replacing damaged boards parts. It's got to get stained and sealed before it gets too cold, but I'm taking it one step at a time.

d) Pruned bushes in the yard and suppressed the bittersweet. This should be done annually, but I didn't get to it last year, and now I'm paying for it. But I'm about halfway around the yard, and have done most of the worst bits.

e) Cut off the ugly miserable stumps of the overgrown boxwoods that I removed in 2003, even with the ground, which makes them much less obtrusive than they were. I filed this one under 'extreme pruning'... I'm not totally sure that they recommend cutting through 8" diameter logs with a Sawzall.

f) Removed the folding cot and the ladder from the upstairs (where they have been littering my husband's office since the great house re-construction of 2006) and returned them to their proper storage locations in the cellar.

g) Cut off several pairs of my husbands' jeans that were holed at the knees, and hemmed them for shorts. They look very neat and he's actually been wearing them to work when it's very hot- handy since he has some distance to walk. I cleared out the pile of mending while I was at it.

h) I picked up a decent table and chairs on freecycle and freecycled a bunch of crappy folding chairs and other junk from the basement. I also have donated many boxes of books to the library book sale and books and other items to the humane society yard sale, clearing out a bunch of closet space.

And best of all? The time I've spent on these chores has largely come out the time I would have spent obsessing unproductively about the amount of stuff on my 'to-do' list. No really. It's true I haven't added a lot of knits to the project list lately, but I've finished some socks, and I've been working on the fine gauge sweater (after getting about two-thirds of the back done, I discovered that my gauge swatch had lied like a rotten lousy lying thing, and I had to frog the whole thing and start over. This is the Guernsey; I'll post photos shortly. And take a look at my Book Reviews for 2011 (also linked in the sidebar)- I'm at 109 books so far this year, which surprises even me a little, what with all the knitting and projects and working full time.

So, if you're a listmaker who's demoralized at the length of the 'to-do' list--and especially if you've ever added a chore you've just finished to your list so you could check off *something*... do consider putting it away and start a 'things done' list. Celebrate the accomplishments instead of focusing on the non-accomplishments. I'm betting that you'll not only feel better about how you've spent your time--you'll actually get more done, too.

Day 11: And Back Again

This is the last entry in a series of posts on my vacation trip in May. The prior posts were:
Prologue:  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Day One: The City of Dreaming Spires
Day Two: Eccentric Ramblings
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Palace
Day Four: A Day in Alfred's City
Day Five: Déjà Vu - In a Good Way
Day Six:  Artists and Patrons and a Walk by the River
Day Eight:  Now That is a Castle!
Day Nine: From the White Cliffs to Cathedral the Third
Day Ten: Pilgrimage


Monday May 30

Our last day was spent in a last walk around London, idling through favorite places and doing our now-traditional shopping. We admired the handsome buildings:
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We stopped by the British Museum and admired once again the lovely atrium.
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We found a doughnut shop in , another American transplant, across from Picadilly Circus:
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We stopped at our favorite London bookstore, Hatchards, and visited the Neal's Yard Dairy for artisanal English cheeses. And took a final turn through the park.
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Yet another awesome vacation. We keep finding new things we want to see in England and have such a wonderful time that we keep going back. I can't wait for the next time.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Day 10: Pilgrimage

This is the latest entry in a series of posts on my vacation trip in May. The prior posts were:
Prologue:  To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
Day One: The City of Dreaming Spires
Day Two: Eccentric Ramblings
Day Three: A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Palace
Day Four: A Day in Alfred's City
Day Five: Déjà Vu - In a Good Way
Day Six:  Artists and Patrons and a Walk by the River
Day Eight:  Now That is a Castle!
Day Nine: From the White Cliffs to Cathedral the Third

Sunday- May 29

The last thing we’d done every evening for pretty much the entire trip was to check the weather report for this weekend. We’d built some flexibility into our itinerary, but the hotel reservations were fixed and we’d selected this Sunday as being the most promising weather for our walk to Canterbury. We had such a marvelous time in on the long distance hike in the Cotswolds last time that we’d wanted to do something similar over the downs in this part of the country. Our planned route would take us along the North Downs Way, a marked long-distance hiking trail, through several small villages and ultimately, after 18 miles of walking, to Canterbury.

The only trouble was, the best day of the four we’d planned for Dover wasn’t actually all that good. As the day approached, we decided we’d plan for the best and play it by ear. We set the alarms for 5 am and had most of our gear already packed.

Sunday dawned gray. Miserable and gray. The skies were dark and there was a raw chill in the breeze coming off the channel. Jonathan looked outside. “I’m not so sure this is a good idea,” he said. “Let’s see what the weather report is,” I suggested. The weather report was virtually unchanged…white cloud, cool and windy in the morning, getting brighter and windier as the day went on, but not actually great. About the only thing you could say for it was they weren’t predicting rain. “I can live with cloudy and improving as the day goes on,” I said positively. We had a GOAL, and I wasn’t about to let a few clouds stand in the way. “It doesn’t look very nice,” Jonathan replied glumly, “but I guess if you’re up for it…” “Improving as the day goes on,” I repeated firmly. Surely the obliging English weather wouldn’t be so cruel as to disappoint us at this late juncture. Jonathan perused his maps and pointed out that we had bailout points if it proved uncongenial, but we shouldered our packs and got checked out. We left the hotel about 6 am.

I actually didn’t mind it—yes, it was cloudy and raw, but walking uphill with a backpack I was plenty warm enough. Jonathan led the way with grumpy determination. I should point out here that ‘grumpy’ is Jonathan’s default setting in the morning (as it often is mine-Jonathan comments that he's had to put up with me sans breakfast, which is far worse--a claim that has a certain justice). Anyway I didn’t take his glum mood in the least personally. I was sure he’d feel better about the idea once he was properly awake. We climbed out of the river valley up to the downlands where we could pick up the North Downs Way. We found it with no difficulty and it immediately led us through a picturesque churchyard and a tunnel carved in the abundant greenery.
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In the early morning gloom it was more like walking through the setting for a suspense story or an English murder mystery, but we discovered no corpses and continued walking. We met our first setback when we found that a large section of the trail was closed and we had to detour. We took an extended tour of a very modern suburb and a retail strip full of unpicturesque box stores (I declined to photographically document this part of the hike), and kept going. One part I did document- the goat on the trampoline. Yes, you did read that right. Don't believe me? I took a photo:
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This led to a certain amount of speculation as to whether you got a free goat with every trampoline in England. Another unanswered mystery, I fear.

We had to skirt a highway interchange and climb over a fence, but were able to rejoin the trail past the closed section with little trouble, and returned to vistas of woods and fields.

The day did start to grow imperceptibly brighter and I brought out the camera:
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As the morning wore on and the miles fell beneath our sneakers, there was a distinct lightening of the sky, which I attempted to point out to Jonathan.
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He stuck his fingers in his ears and declined to listen on the grounds he didn’t want to jinx it.
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I ceased and desisted, since there’s nothing more aggravating to someone in a crummy mood than excessive cheeriness. But soon, even Jonathan couldn’t deny there was something going on:
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The blue sky is a dead giveaway. At that point the walk ceased to be merely interesting, and became a positive pleasure. The trail cut across fields—
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—often bordered by masses of poppies:
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We passed through another churchyard, this one featuring an ancient yew tree:
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Jonathan told me that it was once the law that yews be planted in churchyards so as to ensure the supply of wood for English longbows. This one was certainly ancient. The day continued to improve and we crossed a field full of sheep. (Obligatory fiber content for my crafty pals!)
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We discovered fields of…something. Anyone? Our best guess was some kind of bean. The bottom part of the plant had roundish leaves, and the top was all these great spikes absolutely covered in seed pods. Whatever it is, they grow a lot of it in Kent. A considerable amount of websurfing has given me no clue as to what this crop is:
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It was around this point that Jonathan turned around and said, “I’m so glad you wanted us to go on with this.” It was turning into a really gorgeous day, much better than the weather forecasts had led us to believe.
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We saw a literally rose-covered cottage with a lovingly maintained thatched roof:
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In fact, the only thing we weren’t seeing much of was places to eat. And by this time, we’d been walking for about six hours and the sheep were starting to look good.
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We’d passed through several tiny villages—so small they didn’t have a pub. We strode on with renewed energy, looking for the next town. Which turned out to be the village of Patrixbourne, home to charming brick houses and an actual working ford (note the footbridge on the right for pedestrians):
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But it turned out to be rather on the small side, as we noted from the house numbers:
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And there was no sign of a pub or other eatery. So we tromped on to the next village, Bekesbourne, which we knew had a train station. "If we don't find something here," I said a bit reluctantly, "we might have to hit the train station and bail." I hated to think it, because we were only three miles from Canterbury, but we were getting quite hungry.

At Bekesbourne we found we actually had a choice. There was a sign for a cafe, but it was a mile off our route (so would add 2 miles to the walk), or we could go to the train station. "What do you think?" Jonathan asked. "There's no guarantee it'll be open," I said. "Let's try the train station first. Even if it's small they might have vending machines." Most of the train stations we'd seen up until then had a small building, often with a coffeeshop as well as vending machines, so this wasn't a completely unreasonable guess. And the train station was quite a bit closer. So we turned off onto Station Road and very quickly came to the smallest train station we'd yet seen. In fact, calling it a station was a misnomer- what it had was a platform and a small shelter, like you'd see at a bus stop. There were no vending machines, and no rest rooms.

"Well, darn," we said. And "Now what?" It was then we were given a sign. No, really. It was an excellent sign:
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"Let's try the Unicorn pub," I said.

"We don't know how far it is," Jonathan pointed out. "Or if it's open."

I replied, "The arrow points up a walking path. I'm guessing it's not too far. And it says, 'real ales', and 'home cooking', and 'using fresh local produce'.

We followed the arrow. The pub was not hard to find—it was visible from the path:
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The pub turned out to be awesome, the kind of place we'd have gone well out of our way to experience if we'd known it existed. For one thing, it wasn't just busy, it was mobbed with locals. We wound up sitting outside because there wasn't any space inside. And it had live folk music (which was going to be later in the evening so we unfortunately didn't get to hang around for it but it's the sort of thing we approve of.) The menu was extremely enticing. And they had a pub cat. Clearly she had a lot of confidence in her staff because she didn't need to supervise them closely.
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They gave us refreshing beverages with considerable alacrity. We had a nice chat with some of the locals while we were waiting to order. We were spoiled for choice—they had several locally made ciders.
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Out of a native sense of caution, I started with lemonade and only then ordered a pint of cider. Jonathan was less restrained. He had a pint of cider—what we Americans would call hard cider—on an empty stomach. He went back in for another drink to go with the food, and was offered a sample of a local raspberry cider which was so delicious he had a second pint with lunch.

Lunch exceeded our wildest expectations. Homemade sausage from a local farm, locally grown vegetables. It was outstanding. Even granted that we were quite hungry, it was a wonderful meal. I finished before Jonathan and sat back and pulled out the sock I was knitting. It was then that I absentminded felt the back of my neck, which was rather warm, and realized that the cool breeze had kept me from realizing that I'd gotten a blistering burn back there. I groaned...it's not the first time I've gotten a bad burn in England, but I never seem to learn. I belatedly put some sunscreen on it, and covered it against further damage. But filled with good food and drink and with our packs off, I couldn't be too worried. It was truly gorgeous

We ate, and rested our feet and when we were done we pooh-poohed the idea of bailing out. "It's only three more miles!" I said. "We're almost there."

We redonned our packs and set off with renewed enthusiasm for Canterbury. As we left the pub, I noticed that Jonathan was not managing an entirely straight path. Imperial pints are larger than American pints, and he rarely drinks at all—two whole pints of cider, which is comparable in alcohol content to some wines—well, it was a lot more than he was used to. Between the food and the drink, we strolled on at a rather leisurely pace compared to the morning.

By now we were seeing more habitations, and encountered another mystery.
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See the white things on top of the roof? We were darned curious as to what they were, so I took the photo. But the internet has failed us. My best guess would be some kind of wind generator, but I haven't been able to find anything remotely similar online.

We got into Canterbury rather later than we'd intended, but we had no complaints. We didn't get to see the Roman museum, but we did take some more photos of the cathedral, taking advantage of the sunshine:
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We saw more of the city.
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We had more cold drinks (non-alcoholic this time), and stopped for snacks at Patisserie Valerie. We ambled gently on sore feet back to the train station and took a fast train to London, and checked into the hotel and dumped baggage.

Although we had arguably eaten enough for one day, we decided to pursue dinner anyway. We set off with the vague intention of trying a Chinese restaurant on our 'interesting places we might like to eat list', but before we made it there, we happened on a barbecue place. That turned out to be exactly what we were in the mood for, and when we went in, we found that it was (unsurprisingly) American themed and showing a Red Sox game on the television. The Sox were tied with Detroit. That settled it, and we sat down for a modest sandwich before heading back to our hotel, footsore but happy with our last full day in England.