back

Hi everyone,

I just arrived back on American soil last night. My last few days in the UK were awesome. My trip to Wales with Pritesh and James on Saturday was fun filled as well as educational. We had rented a car for the full weekend, intending on camping, but the day we were to leave, massive flooding began around various parts of England and Wales. So we opted not to join those getting helicopter lifted out and instead of camping opted to leave a day later and drive there and back in one day instead of two or three. It's about a 4-5 hour drive from Cambridge to the Center for Alternative Technology on the central coast of Wales. The Center was very cool with educational displays on all sorts of sustainable living topics for energy, architecture, water, transportation, waste, etc. We spent over four hours looking around there. I talked the woman at the information desk into showing me the reedbed wastewater system which provided some useful insights for my thesis research - well until I was bitten by a fire ant and had trouble forming more questions through the pain. After the center we drove through part of Snowdonia national park and then along the coast with views of old stone walls separating squares of sheep pastures (the sheep are all color coded with spraypainted dots) on rolling bluffs above the water. Sunday I went punting with Pritesh and another of his friends. Punts are these little boats somewhere between a canoe and a gondola that are all along the canal in Cambridge. No proper visit to Cambridge is complete without punting. Instead of paddling, you must stand on the back of the boat and push with this huge pole on the bottom of the canal. Pritesh's skills improved by the end of our ride after saying he had fallen into the water last time he went. I tried too and managed only to hit a few walls and other boats. The sunset light on the old colleges was amazing.

Monday I wandered around London for a day, making mental notes of all the spots I need to go back and spend more time in such as the Design Museum and walk around Waterloo. Tuesday was a seriously long day of travel. I woke up early to take a 2 1/2 bus from Cambridge to the airport. I met up with Mike and Brian in the check in line. When at the counter, we were offered a voucher deal to take a slightly later flight that still arrived in Philadelphia in time to catch our second flight plus offered us 407 pounds!!! So we took the cash, almost 800 dollars US, had some celebratory drinks hanging out in the London airport and still had another layover in Philly, not getting into State College until around midnight. Mike and Brian had taken a ferry across the channel the night before from Amsterdam to come straight to the airport in London, so we had all been traveling for many continuous hours by the time we were done at what felt like 5 or 6 am. Whew. My luggage managed to miss the flight out of Philly, but was delivered this morning, so not to bad. It is good to be back though. Give me a call soon to catch up!

Nicole