More fun!

Continuing on with our trip in and around London, we had a wonderful time visiting with good friends Lorraine and Gerard. Lorraine has the blog “Mamas Mercantile” that is over on my sidebar. They live on the Isle of Lewis and were gracious enough to come all the way to London to spend the day with Dennis and I! My goodness, it was as if we had known each other all of our lives. We spent hours and hours together and the time just flew by. We had tea in a little shop in Saint Pancras station, then walked over to Kings Cross station to the Harry Potter store to buy some souvenirs for family. After that we had lunch at a wonderful Italian restaurant and just sat and visited for hours until it was time for them to catch the train. They told us of a cottage for sale next-door to them on the island that I think I would love to live in. Lorraine tried to bribe Dennis to move there, with some of her home baked treats. I think it almost worked! It was amazing how much we all had in common with each other. I honestly love all of my blog sisters. What a great time we have when we are finally able to meet.

Here is a photo of Lorraine and I together. I’m sitting down and she’s standing up. She is so tiny and I’m such a giraffe of a person!

We spent a lot of time laughing and sharing our lives.

Here we are just before we had to say goodbye, trying to do a selfie. As you can tell I’m not the best at them. I’m sure you will see more photos on Lorraine‘s blog when they return home. I think our guys became pretty good friends to in those few hours too.

Look at the amazing gifts that Lorraine brought for us. She made me a bag with scenes from London on it, along with a lot of goodies from Scotland. She also gave us a jar of jam that was confiscated by security. I sure hope someone enjoyed it.🤷‍♀️

This is Saint Pancras station where their train into London arrived and departed. We had lunch at a restaurant here in the station.

And, this is the reason we went to London to begin with. Our son Alex and new daughter Tara were finally able to get married! Look at this handsome guy! Aren’t I lucky?

And the equally handsome groom!

In the black cab on the way to the wedding.

And here we are! There were only 9 of us at the wedding itself. But we were able to Zoom with Jamie, Mandy and Piper so the entire immediate families could be there.

Our son Jamie, Mandy and Piper.

They got dressed up to attend the festivities. It was pretty early in the morning for them back here in the US. One of Piper‘s babies even attended!💜

I love this photo of my two guys in the back garden.

The kids had to postpone their wedding plans last year because of Covid and this year they could only get married in the registrars office with 10 or less people attending. The registrar made the wedding very personal and they wrote their own vows to each other. Tara‘s mother and I each did a reading during the wedding. It was wonderful! We were so thankful that we were able to be there, even though there  were a lot of hoops to jump through with testing and travel, etc.  We’re still hoping that they will be able to have a big wedding next year, with all of their friends and entire families in attendance. Covid has sure caused a lot of problems hasn’t it? We had a lovely time though, and filled the entire weekend with wedding festivities. 

We couldn’t ask for a sweeter daughter-in-law and family. We truly believe and feel that we have become one family with hers. We adore her parents, her sister and brother-in-law and her little nephew. They made us feel so welcome and like we were part of the family already. It makes life so much easier when the families get along, doesn’t it? We are looking forward to going back in the spring next year if travel allows. 

Well I guess that’s enough for one post isn’t it? I’m sorry there are no photos of Tara. Her position at work doesn’t allow for me to post photos on social media. I hope you all understand. Rest assured, she is absolutely gorgeous, inside and out. We love her dearly already.

I hope you all have a wonderful week. Dennis and I are zooming off again on Wednesday. This time we’re flying to Spokane for several days. He has to be there for work and I am missing our friends something terrible, so I’m tagging along. We are so lucky to have a great housesitters here to allow us to do that. The young man, (13 year old), across the street is thrilled to be able to mow the grass again for us! He likes to make some money and he does a fantastic job too. He trimmed, edged and mowed both Moms and our yards twice while we were on our trip.

Blessings and hugs, 

Betsy

Deal & Dover

You all seem very excited for photos of our trip to England so at the risk of boring you I will share some more today. we spent three days and two nights in Deal which is very close to Dover in Kent. I completely fell in love with this little town. Our hotel was directly across from the pier overlooking the English channel. And so with no further ado here are some more photos.

I found this sweet little yarn shop just one block from our hotel and next-door to the coffee shop we stopped in at each morning. I did find two skeins of sock yarn that I’ll be showing you later. The owner was so sweet and friendly and we had a nice chat. I would love to live in this little town and have this be my local yarn shop.

This is the ocean-front road. Our hotel is just left to the center, with the dark blue first floor.

The pier was directly across the road from us as you can see by the above photo. You can see the handrail in the lower left corner.

This is a very small view of the Queen Mum’s garden at, I believe, Walmer Castle. After a while I started forgetting the names of all of the castles. 😔

Here I am taking a walk in the water just below the white cliffs of Dover. I was the only one brave enough to walk in the water and it was surprisingly warm. The beach is very, very rocky and you definitely need to have water shoes on.

Stunning!

Dover Castle. This is where the plans were made and executed to rescue almost 300,000 soldiers from the beach in France during the War.

Photos cannot even begin to do justice to this amazing place. We spent seven hours there and also explored the underground tunnels that were used during the war. We could easily have spent another day there.

So beautiful!

How would you like to cook banquets in this kitchen?

The view was absolutely amazing. We walked around the tower wall which took quite a long time.

WOW!

Blogger got a few of the photos out of order. This is another view of the gardens at Walmer Castle.

The church and light house at Dover Castle.

Inside the church.

And not to be left out, yesterday was Piper‘s first day of third grade. Can you believe it? She loves her teacher and she had a wonderful first day.

This was the view Tuesday night from the place we used to stay in Washington on Loon Lake. They are under level three evacuation’s as I write this, which means “get out now.” I guess I’m relieved that we’re not camping there this summer, but we do have many, many friends there who are frantically making plans to pull their trailers out.  Many homes have already been lost. The fires this year in the west are just horrendous.

I have been trying to get this post up for two days but Blogger refused to let me post any photos until this morning. I wonder what it is with Blogger that it just decides to have these little glitches? Anyway, here you go and I hope you all enjoy them.

Have a wonderful Wednesday evening and I’ll be back soon.

Blessings,

Betsy

Home Again!

We are back home! I apologize for not posting sooner, but we were so busy all of our time in England. As soon as we were out of quarantine we took off exploring and didn’t stop until our feet touched the ground in Omaha again. We had an absolutely wonderful time. Are you ready for photo overload? The pictures I’m showing you today were all taken on the same day. On our first day out of quarantine we went to Stonehenge, the Salisbury Cathedral and the Winchester Cathedral. I’ll try to keep the comments to a minimum and just tell you where we are with each photo. I think the dark clouds lent an air of mystery to Stonehenge, don’t you? As you can tell by my hair, it was quite windy that day.

The sheep were right behind us when we took the two above photos at Stonehenge. A knitter can’t leave out photos of sheep can she?

We parked about a mile away and hiked up the road behind Stonehenge so as to avoid all of the tourist crowds.

Here we are in Salisbury at the Salisbury Cathedral. It has the distinction of having the tallest spire in England. It is a stunning church both inside and out.

And here we are with Alex being silly. His face reflects his feelings about that tall spire! Ha!

The inside is amazing. Masks weren’t required at a lot of places, but we tried to be respectful and wear them anytime we were indoors.

Isn’t it stunning?

And here we are at the gates leading out into the town High Street.

A beautiful little stream running through the middle of town. It always amazes me to see so many people out walking when we visit.

Then it was on to Winchester where we visited the Winchester Cathedral. We couldn’t go inside because of the concert that was taking place, but we did get some lovely photos of the outside.

One of the things I love about England is it’s beautiful gardens. Winchester was no different. Isn’t this lovely?

This is Keats Riverwalk and we strolled along a portion of it.

I love this picture of my two guys. Their pose is almost the same. We had such a great time with Alex.

Lunch was at a pub where we ate outside under umbrellas. The food on entire trip was amazing.

And that was the end of day one out of quarantine. We sure packed a LOT into that day and all of the others too. The best part was spending time with our kids. 

I am sorry for not posting more often, but we wanted to spend every second possible visiting. It had been 21 months, almost two years, since we had last seen Alex because of COVID, and we were determined to spend every second we could with him. Thank you for being patient and also for worrying about us.

I’ll stop here and give your eyes a rest before our next outing in the next post! 😀 I hope you’re enjoying the pictures.

Blessings and love,

Betsy