Save the Date

Imagine an elaborate black and white movie transition sequence. From a time before computer enhancement, when high-end special effects were multiple films manually superimposed in a cutting room, ankle-deep with scraps of cellulose film.

The Paris scene ends with the couple walking hand in hand out of their favorite little cafe on the Seine, a little dog trotting next to them sporting a petite beret, cocked on a jaunty angle. The screen fades to an old-tyme page-a-day calendar with the days ripped away by an off screen fan. The remainder of November vanishes. The screen then fades to a transitional two-layer collage. The translucent overlay is of huffing and puffing steam locomotives, charming propeller aeroplanes, right hand-drive automobiles and coaches (buses), and passenger ships plying cold Irish Sea waters. These images are underlaid by a dashed track on a yellowed map of Europe: from Paris back to Rome, from Rome on to Dublin via Amsterdam, from Dublin to Kinsale on the Irish South Coast and then to Belfast. From Belfast to Edinburgh, Edinburg to York, York to London, and finally London to Bath and The Cotswolds. The travel images then fade back into the calendar that is now ripping through early-December and stops on Tuesday the 13th. The next scene opens with the writer, sick with a nasty respiratory infection (not COVID though), pensively gazing at a Cotswolds snow-scape from the writing desk of his garret hotel room in a converted English manor house.

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While our travel over the past several weeks has been magical, it’s also had its share of dicey moments: tense border crossings; expecting a sanitized tutorial on Northern Ireland’s “Troubles,” but instead getting dropped into the fray; “Mexican standoffs” with English trucks on snowy single-track English roads.

Suffice to say that we have been busy and have time in Wales and back to London planned before our return to the US later this month. I’m looking forward to some quiet time at “home” in Florida in January where I can organize my thoughts and pictures and write some proper blog posts. (I put home in quotes because we still have to find a home for the month of January! But that’s another story.) Until then, I’ll keep this post short so I can maximize my travel time and absorb all that I can absorb of the British Isles.

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Until then, I’d ask everyone to save the date of Saturday, February 4, 2023 on their calendars (about 4:00 p.m. US Eastern Standard Time). That’s when Rhett and I will be getting married!

…and dude, you’re invited. (Said in the voice of Sean Penn’s Spicoli from Fast Times.)

While the in-person ceremony will be small with close family, as we’ve been working through the details the one thing we kept coming back to is our many friends, colleagues, and extended family all over the world that we somehow had to include. Alas however, since the whole Star Trek “Beam me up Scottie” thing hasn’t yet been invented, we’ll have to settle for the next best.

While we haven’t worked through the technical details and are hoping a photographer/videographer can take care of all that, it’s our intention to livestream the wedding service. Don’t worry, we won’t be streaming the reception. (Nobody wants to see Dan “doing” the Chicken Dance into the Electric Slide into the Macarena. What? I’m dating myself?)

Fair winds, following seas, and Merry Christmas!