Once you fall behind a little bit it is easy for the gap to become wider and wider and suddenly three months go by. March was rather uneventful, other than that spring, which the global warming nuts were afraid was coming too soon (narcissus blooming on the Scilly Islands earlier than ever before and other signs of impending doom), was repeatedly postponed by blasts of Siberian cold air masses. Kumiko and Alice went for a trip to Japan, my uncle came to visit for a few days, but due to the cold temperatures I did not really get in the mood to do any substantial traveling. I made only one short trip outside of London, to the Northern Downs. The Northern Downs (there is a matching Southern Downs) is a linear ridge of chalk rising above the rather flat topography of southeastern England. You may wonder why a topographic high is perversely called a “down”. Well, nobody knew and so I had to go to a bookstore and look in a large Oxford dictionary: down actually means a high, it has the same root as “town” and is of a Celtic origin. The ridge is quite impressive and in the first half of the 19th century it was fortified in preparation for a possible French invasion which never came. But the fortifications were maintained during the subsequent wars and during the SWW Canadian troops were stationed here.

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Not traveling very far or very often is not a big problem in London, there is always enough to amuse you right here. A public toilet outside of our tube station was (until they realized the silliness) decorated with an advertising poster for Italian coffee. I just wish I had a copy of that poster to put on the doors of our toilet at home! Generous aroma? You bet!

We did get out of town a little bit, however. At the end of April we headed out to the Netherlands to see the tulips and our timing was impeccable. We visited Kyukenhoff and also some of the fields, where we could see first hand the decapitation of the tulips. The flowers are cut so that the strength of the plant goes into the bulb – most tulips in the fields are grown for the bulbs and not for the flowers. As an added, but unplanned benefit, we arrived in Amsterdam on the 29th of April – queens birthday and a reason for big public celebration. The Dutch know how to party! We had a fairly hard time getting into our hotel – lucky we traveled light. The amazing thing was how quickly they were able to clean up. By 8 o’clock next morning – not a trace.

We made one more trip to Spain, this time leaving Alice at home because she used up all of her vacations in Japan. We headed to Costa del Sol to a town with difficult to remember name – Benaldanema. Walking distance to Torremolinos and about 30 minutes by train west of Malaga. Two kilometer strip from the beach inland has been thoroughly colonized by the Brits all along the coast. Both retirees and tourists – Spanish appear to be in a distinct minority. Once you walk little bit further inland the Spanish take over again and one gets the feeling of being abroad.

The hotel catered almost exclusively to British package guests. Now I believe the statements that obesity is a quickly growing (no pun intended) problem in Britain. While you do not see many fat people in London, you can see lot of them in Costa del Sol, many of them displaying themselves by the pool. Enough to make you loose your appetite but clearly not affecting theirs as we could observe daily at breakfast and dinner.

It was May and the water still was not warm enough to swim in (at least not for Texas conditioned visitors) but the weather was sunny and ideal for sightseeing. We took the ferry over to Africa and visited Tangiers for a day and we also made up for last year when we did not get around to visiting Cordoba. That was the only day it rained, much to our surprise but a cause for rejoicing by the locals, they are having a rather dry year and a little bit of extra water will help. We filled in the rest of the time by walks along the promenade and trips to nearby Malaga.