The trip is on, and I'm killing a few hours in Chicago before going on to O'Hare. Strange that I'm starting out in the "familiar" city of Chicago which, outside of a few streets downtown and Wrigley Field, I barely know at all. The next update, if all goes as planned will be from "somewhere in England"...

Hey, I'm back online. I knew that the first few days of my itinerary would be the toughest to update-- lots of travel, and to places where access would be hard to find. Starting today, that shouldn't be a problem.

I landed in London about 6:30 and almost immediately everything went haywire. My original plan was to get to the rail station that would get me to Bath, but the quickest way into the station was unexpectedly shut down. This meant that I had to get familiar with the Underground system sooner than expected. After finally getting to the right station, it was also shut down. (IRA bomb found on some tracks.)After about an hour waiting to see if the schedule would resume (I later read that it stayed closed all day), I went to plan B, using a different station to get into North Wales. At the end of all this I wound up in a nice little town called Conwy with a great set of medieval walls surrounding the town. After some sightseeing I was ready to drop-- jet lag and all.

Starting out in Conwy, I went north toward Liverpool, where I didn't have enough time to see any real Beatles attractions but did see the former site of the Cavern Club. What I wanted to do was get to Hadrian's Wall by the end of the day, but I fell behind schedule and, after stopping briefly in Carlisle (putting it in a class with Carlisle, PA and Carlile, WY), wound up in Hexham, about halfway between Carlisle and Newcastle. The new plan was to get to the wall on Friday morning and then on to Edinburgh.

The problem was that you can't get to Hadrian's Wall by train-- you either have to take a bus or walk. And having taken Professor Zupko's course in medieval England back at Marquette, I couldn't let this pass by. (Other subjects which seemed to fascinate him in his lectures were the influx of new rats that caused the Black Death and some bonehead king that got "accidentally" killed while on a hunting trip.) So I thought I'd catch the bus, which connected at another station, but on getting there I saw that it was "only" 2 miles to the actual wall. Well, I can walk that, I thought. Uphill all the way, it almost dropped me. When I did finally get there, I was able to walk along the course of the wall for about a mile, and then I walked back to resume the trip. Through Newcastle and north to Edinburgh, where I saw the Castle and walked the Royal Mile.

I'm kind of killing time in a place where you can log on for a fee, because I'm headed out of Edinburgh on a night train which gets me to London tomorrow morning. Then I'm set up for the rest of my stay. Roaming around with nothing but a single bag and a railpass has been kind of fun. Plus it makes me feel young, because the only others I see doing this are half my age. Or maybe I should have been doing it myself 20 years ago?

Songs for today:All This Time, Sting ("Teachers told us the Romans built this place/ They built a wall and a fort and an edge of the empire garrison town", and The Royal Mile, Gerry Rafferty.

Sleeping on the night train wasn't the most comfortable, but it got me into London at 7 in the morning. Saturday is the big day of the Portobello Market, which is basically like the items on ebay dumped onto one street. For no apparent reason other than curiosity, I got a cricket ball, and am debating whether to go to the trouble of picking up a bat as well. If you remember, that would also have great This Is Spinal Tap connotations. Then I played the tourist and took a tour of Beatles' sites in downtown London, capping off with a trip to Abbey Road studios and "the crosswalk". I was lucky enough to find someone who, like me, wanted their picture taken walking across, so I've got that picture to look for. Then it was a trip around a few sites like Buckingham Palace and Hyde Park.

I've just gotten back (to the internet place anyway) from a pub walk-- there's a service here that offers a lot of theme walks (like yesterday's Beatles walk), and tonight I tried one that went through a neighborhood (Chelsea) and stopped at a few pubs along the way. Before I got a little buzzed, it was normal tourist stuff like the Tower of London and a museum.

One of the stranger things I've noticed about being in London is that I'm hearing more Americans around me. For my first few days in the country I was in places that were a little more off the beaten path, and in some towns I might be the only American, or else one of the few. At one B&B I stayed at, the guest register didn't show any other Americans going back about a week and a half. In London, though, you hear and see plenty on places like the Tube. Damn Americans.

You know what they call a Quarter Pounder With Cheese in Paris? They've got the metric system so they don't know what the **** a quarter pound is, so they call it "Royale With Cheese." (Thanks Pulp Fiction.)

You may have guessed by that intro that I spent the day in Paris. I've been keeping this private in my hip pocket for a while, but today was my Eurostar ride to and from Paris. I now have the experience to be able to write a travel guide, The Seven Hour Paris. Highlights: Ste-Chapelle (as well as that other church that some Indiana college was named after), the Louvre, Napoleon's Tomb, Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe. About the most famous painting at the Louvre: Yes, I saw it. No, it's not as big as you'd guess. And yes, it's a mob scene. This is very important if anybody's ever considering a visit to Paris-- GET A MUSEUM PASS. In just one day it saved me about 50% and you get to bypass all the long lines. Why everyone doesn't get one I'll never know.

Well, we're finishing up now. The last full day in town finally took me to Parliament and Westminster Abbey, which strangely enough I hadn't seen since I'd gotten here, and also places like Piccadilly Circus. Hard as it is to believe, 24 hours from now I'll be back home. This'll probably be the last "official" update, so to anybody who has been keeping up with me, even intermittently, thanks for taking an interest.

Okay, I'll make one last "last" update. I'm back home and the trip is finished. I somehow knew I was back when, after taking more than a dozen separate rail trips on vacation without ever being more than 3 or 4 minutes off-schedule, Amtrak was a half-hour late getting from Chicago to Dwight.

Just a few last comments. 1) I was kind of disappointed I couldn't make any time to see High Fidelity, which opened in England the weekend I was there. It probably would have been silly to take two hours out of a vacation to see a movie, but I really liked it when I first saw it and I was curious as to how Londoners would react to the story's location being changed to Chicago for the movie. From the reviews I saw, they didn't seem to mind too much.

3)Maybe my biggest regret is that I never got around to seeing Jeremy Bentham's body. Not grave, mind you, his actual body. When Bentham (18th-century philosopher) died, his whole body was preserved and put on display, fully clothed, in the lobby of a London college. It's still a tradition for students to take the body out to dinner once a year.

This will be the last update, so one last Song of the Day. If you don't know, it's a practice of mine to make up "trip tapes" of songs relating to areas where I go on vacations, and that's where the "songs of the day" have been taken from. Listening to The Royal Mile while actually walking down the Royal Mile, or listening to Piccadilly while sitting in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, just seem to add to the experience. Some of the songs I mentioned are a little obscure, so given my penchant for making compilation tapes maybe I should make one based on these entries. But first I need to finish up tapes I have already promised to get out.