Home Again!

For those of you keeping up, I got home last night around 10:30. I am in Oklahoma in body, but not in mind!! It may take me a few days to recover! We had so much fun and did SOOO much stuff, it boggles my mind. It feels weird to be back in the "real world". Now I am off to do all the laundry and unpacking (yay!). Thanks again for those of you who kept up with me on my journey! It was a blast. Check back periodically to see what we find out about the grant we have written to send the 5th grade PV teachers to England! Whee! We will see!!!

Leaving England...my last day!

This is to be my last blog entry from England. Lucy and I slept in this morning and I spent some time loading photos from yesterday and packing. After this, we went to (as Lucy says it) "the beast that is Tescos" to buy good chocolate to take back with me. When we checked out, the lady at the register said her son lived in Oklahoma (weird). Now we are just sitting around waiting until it is time to go and I am trying to get caught up on the blog.

The Milton Keynes Howards (or Howards of Milton Keynes~in ye olde English style) have been amazing hosts. Lucy is probably so glad to see me go, so that she can get some rest. As it is she has 5 more weeks of school and a Year 6 song and dance production extravaganza to put on, so she will be quite busy. Why do all us educators wait until the end of the school year to do these big things, when we are already tired.

I feel so lucky to have been able to come here. It was a great time from start to finish and I am sad to go. I am, however, excited to get home and get on with the business of getting our partnerships rolling strong. Thank you to the Deer Creek Schools Foundation for giving me the opportunity to have this amazing experience. I will never forget it!!

Thanks to Lucy and Jon, for putting me up and putting up with me. Not only did they work very hard to get the house ready, they did so much prior planning for my arrival. I appreciate them so much. They were so amazing to take me around and show me all that they did. I can't imagine having done any more (and survived). Jon is an amazingly nice person, even though he probably won't get me Patrick Dempsey's autograph at Le Mans. Lucy...I can't say enough about you. You are wonderful, funny, creative, and I am SO INCREDIBLY LUCKY (notice the uppercase letters) that you found me. I feel like we have been friends for years, instead of just a couple of months. I look forward to MANY more years being your friend and I hope you feel the same way. Words cannot describe how I feel about you.

Thanks to Angela and Robert Brown (Lucy's Parents) for taking us to the pub and picking us up at the train station and loaning us their car and rain gear for the trip to Bath. They are both terrific and so gracious and accomodating.

Thanks to Chris and George Howard (Jon's parents) for feeding us dinner, putting us up for the night and bringing us our bags to the station. I didn't officially meet George, which is a shame, but Chris is terrifically nice.

Thanks to Emma (Lucy's sister) for taking us on a tour of Bath and to a wonderful little tea house.

Thanks to the staff and administration from Milton Keynes for putting up with my presence and picture taking. It was so great to see that we really are more alike than different. What a terrific school. The kids I would like to thank for being so excited to have me and so curious and asking such good questions about Oklahoma and severe weather.

Day 2 in London: Happy Birthday to the Queen!

Move over, Michelle.... Greetings everybody - Michelle has asked me to do a guest spot on the blog so welcome to London with Lucy... Highlights to include several bridges, the site of many famous executions, a boat trip I did not fall asleep on and a well known department store... Please read on...

We started our day today at Tower Bridge. This is a famous bridge which has a middle section which can be raised to let tall ships down the Thames. We walked around the area round the bridge first - above is a picture of the cobbled dock area (Right here Michelle would insert some comment where she called this cool or amazing and used capital letters). This area also features City Hall where I am sure important things are done by the major of London - Boris Johnson (Any one who lives in America should check him out on YouTube; he fell in a river this week, which is just the kind of stuff he does on a regular basis)

Above is a picture which is of a boat we sailed down the Thames on - it is not really in the right place here as it comes later in the day but I won't mention that and embarrass Michelle...

AHEM, LUCY (says Michelle and notice the capital letters) THIS IS NOT THE BOAT WE RODE ON, BUT THE VERY FAMOUS QUEEN MARY, WHICH IS PERMANENTLY DOCKED IN THE THAMES...

Above is City Hall, as previously mentioned and below you can see pictures of the afore mentioned Tower Bridge - I actually managed to capture an image of Michelle in a photo, I was beginning to wonder if this was possible...(She does shy away from garlic and she hides away from the sun...um... Am I reading to much into this?)

This is one of the towers of Tower Bridge which is now an exhibition.

When we walked over the bridge we found ourselves outside the Tower of London. This is where Anne Boleyn was imprisoned and executed (She of the Henry VIII and the six wives fame - she was number 2) You can see Traitors Gate above. This is where the prisoners entered the tower by boat. The man in the red is a Beefeater, one of the guards of the Tower of London - I know you want one of those hats!
After we walked around the tower we boarded a boat for a trip down the Thames (see the picture Michelle put at the top of this blog). While on the boat we were lucky enough to witness the fly past for the Queen's birthday ( Oh I forgot to mention it was one of her birthdays today - she has two. She's not looking bad for 126!) The pictures below are of the Red Arrows who are an aerial display team, they have coloured trails coming out of the back of their planes - it was very lucky we were on the boat and able to see them (Insert another comment in block capitals from Michelle)

We sailed down the Thames and saw lots of interesting buildings and bridges. We alighted the vessel at the London Eye and walked into Parliament Square to take a closer look at Westminster Abbey, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. More photo's were taken as you can see below...

This is Big Ben and below are some pictures of the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey - once again Michelle has avoided being in these pictures (Um...)

Next we made our way to Knightsbridge and Harrods. We wandered around the lavish food hall and travelled up and down the opulent escalator which is Egyptian themed (nice!).

After laughing at the prices we got back on the tube (London Underground) and went to Covent Garden which is not actually a garden but a covered market with street performers. We strolled around the streets for a while munched on a lovely cup cake!

By this point we were a little tired so we stopped in a small park by the river and watched world go by for a little bit. Then we made our way to Euston station to meet Jon's mum who very kindly bought us our bags. We boarded a train back to Milton Keynes - below is today's transport picture.

That is about it for today. My mum met us at the station and we gave Michelle a whistle stop tour of Milton Keynes - including the Snow Zone which is an indoor ski slope with real snow. Now we are blogging and getting ready for another welcome night's sleep.

NB: All spellings are in English English, not American English and any mistakes in punctuation are due to differences in the language and not my tiredness or inability to string together a coherent sentence. Laterz Okies. Lucy x

Day One in London!

We started out our day nice and early. Lucy's grandad picked us up at 10:20 to take us to the train station. After much deliberation about which ticket to buy, we went to the platform (not platform 9 3/4 like on Harry Potter, although that would have been cool).

And, OH...I forgot to tell you WHY "Grandad" took us to the station, instead of Dork, I mean Jon. It is because Jon left VERY early this morning to go to France for Le Mans (in Okie, that is pronounced li mawn' ~HEAVY accent on the second syllable, think Steve Martin as Pink Panther). He and his friend Jon (weird right, but not as weird as this...the other Jon's wife's name is Lucy, too) decorated the other Jon's old MG like a racecar, packed up all their camping equipment and other accoutremants and headed to a campsite for this 24 hour car race. The best part is this: PATRICK DEMPSEY IS DRIVING IN THIS RACE (SWOON). I challenged Jon and other Jon to get his autograph...we'll see. Below is the picture of the car (nice):Notice the VERY realistic names of the "drivers" on the side. HMMMM....who is the dork? Jon and other Jon, that is who. I hope they have fun and don't get into a fight with a rival "driver" driving a pink VW bug.

Here is a GREAT shot of us traveling though the English countryside (if I do say so myself). We did not succeed in getting starting out travel shots for every day, so I thought I would make up for it by adding extra ones today!

The first thing we did when we reached the station was to put our bags in "kept luggage" so that we wouldn't have to mess with them. Notice the foreshadowing...you will need to remember this later in this blog entry. After leaving the station we ran to the London Eye, to retrieve our tickets (we had prepaid) and we had to "hoof it" to get there for the time we had reserved...we made it and boarded the coolest "pod" with some other people. Our "flight" started and it was a GREAT way to start out our trip to London, because it gave a bird's eye view of the city and allowed me to get my bearings and get an idea where everything was.

After we got off the London Eye, we walked to the Parliament building and got some good shots of Big Ben. It was so crowded in London today. We walked from the past #10 Downing Street where the Prime Minister lives and set about the task of finding somewhere to eat lunch. We stopped at a little sandwich place and got our food. When Lucy went to her bag, there was NO WALLET there. We were more than a little freaked out that someone could have taken the wallet out of her bag, but sat down and ate our food. I assured her that it was probably in the checked bag at the station. (Sidenote~I was not confident this was the case, but I tried hard to appear that I was.) After wolfing down our lunch we went back to the train station and (thank goodness) it WAS in the bag. Whew!! After we got back to normal, we went to the half price ticket booth in Leicaster Square and got tickets for GREASE. (Grease IS the word). Then we sat and had an ice cream, thankful that we could relax for a few moments after "Wallet Scare, 2009". (Lucy had a double scoop~I guess she needed it after that.)

This is a picture of Lucy post wallet scare.

Cool pic of telephone box in Leicester Square.

Next, we walked to Trafalgar Square, where Lucy had pre-warned me that there were lots of pigeons. (I don't like pigeons~or clowns for that matter.) When we got to the square, there were lots of people, but very few pigeons, for which I was very thankful.

After Trafalgar Square, we walked toward Buckingham Palace. Lucy mentioned that she didn't remember there being so many Union Jack Flags on the way to Buckingham Palace. There were also lots of metal barriors up by the sides of the road. We kind of wondered to ourselves what might be happening today or tomorrow. We walked through a beautiful park and even stopped to sit in some deck chairs (for the low, low price of 2 pounds for an hour of sitting, if you can believe it) and watched people and rested. Then we walked the rest of the way to the palace. It is huge and gorgeous and it never stops amazing me that the Beefeaters can stand so still and do everything in such a regimented fashion. We stayed for a few minutes and took pictures, then wandered through the park next to it. We followed the park sidewalk through to Piccadilly street, where it was very bustling with pedestrians and shops. It was really a cool section of town and if I go back it is definitely one of the things I would like to devote more time to.

We wandered through Piccadilly Circus and looked in the shops some until it was time to go to the Picadilly Theater to see Grease. It was GREAT! We both loved it. We clapped and sang along to the songs, like everyone else. I think Lucy may have even gotten some ideas for the school performance. Lucy said the guy who played Danny Zucko was on Britain's Got Talent and came in second or third. I really liked it.

After the performance, we got back on the Tube and got as close as we could to Jon's parents vicarage. Funny, on the way there, we saw this sign, so I emailed it to my son Beck....well...you get the point.

After the tube ride and a short bus ride, we got to the vicarage where Chris, Lucy's mother in law had some lovely dinner waiting for us. We talked about all that we had done that day and mused about the flags and barriers. Chris told us that tomorrow was the Queen's birthday celebration, so we knew it! Something was going on, all right. We discussed the possibility of going to it and decided against it, as we wouldn't have been able to get very close. The next morning, Lucy's Gran called us to ask us if we were going to the palace to see the queen...it was hilarious. It was a great day...we saw a LOT of stuff and met Lucy's MIL who was so sweet, fun and gracious. We slept really hard, so we could get up the next day and get going again! Great day!