Two more sleeps

Two more sleeps and then I'm off. The pictures above are from my last vacation which also was in Europe ... France, Switzerland and London. That was in 1997 so its been 11 years now since I took more than five days off. These pictures brought back a lot of fond memories for me and were quite meaningful. The top one especially. My brother in law (Bill) had passed away a few years earlier and this was Betty Anne's first big adventure since that time. She also had never travelled beyond Florida before this trip and so I took it upon myself to take her over with me ... to hold her hand you might say. (Not unlike I'm doing with Bonnie and Tom this trip). That's her and I in my driveway getting into the airport limo. Lucy and Laura were already in Europe having gone to Lithuania a few weeks earlier. Betty Anne and I flew over together ( also on my frequent flyer points BTW). The girls and Ron and Lou met us in Paris and we spent a couple weeks in Paris and then headed to Switzerland for 4/5 days and ended up in London for about a week. So we spend some time in Paris and we hop on a train and head to the Interlaken valley in Switzerland. We stayed on the north shore up along Lake Brienzersee in a very nice hotel in a very small city called Ringenberg. Lovely ... We arrive at the hotel which has balconies overlooking the lake and settled into our respective rooms. I immediately ordered up a bottle of wine and found my way to Betty Anne's room and we were sitting on her balcony over looking these spectacular mountains and not one but two lovely rainbows appear in the sky. The biggest smile imaginable came on to my sister's face and she turns to me and says ... " See I knew it ... Bill approves of this trip" This was hubby Bill's way of sending a message to her that it was ok to take off and spend some of his pension money and for BA to enjoy herself. It was also very special for me that this confluence of events happened in this way and I think this is a nice story and that she absolutely was right ... this was Bill's way of sending a message to us all.

The other picture of the five of us in London is real special. Brother in law Ron has a very good friend ... "John" who is a properly certified and licenced tour guide in London England. Ron used him all the time for business tours to London when he worked for Allied Lyons Distilleries. He arranged for John to spend the entire day with us and gave us what you might call the "cooks tour" of London. Man we saw everything and John never shut up the entire time and did he ever have some interesting stories. A lot of minutia as well mind you but we all found it fascinating to listen to him talk us through the history of London England. In retropect I wish I had one of those little dictation machines to record everything he told us about. These official tour guides actually have to study this stuff and pass a test in order to get certified and you can see from his outfit they really play the part. "Play" actually isn't the right word in that he actually lived the part there as no acting involved. Boller hat, umbrella, formal suit and tie etc. I understand that John is still doing this to this day so some day I'd love to go back and spend another day with him ... only this time I would record him.

Till tomorrow.... two more sleeps.