Sorry No Photos

I think I need a better connection than the Wifi offers me here to upload photos. I promise to get something to you when I can.

Now for some random thoughts on Britain and the British.

The countryside is gorgeous. The green rolling hills of England in summer are beautiful. We've not hit any cities since leaving Manchester airport and gotten a great view of the beauty of the country. If the photo upload would work, I'd show you.

Britons are as nice and friendly as their Canadian cousins. So far everyone has been very kind and friendly to us. This is true even when we are a hoard of 67 Americans heading off somewhere all at once. I even got my first "cheers" today from the fellow at the "newsagent" shop when I picked up a newspaper. As the Brits say, "Everything is lovely."

The British need to settle on a unit of measure system. They mix up their measurements and I'm not talking about keeping the pint for beer. Liquid is routinely down in metric. You see it on bottles and we've been trying to correctly calculate the price of gas into American dollars and gallons from about 1 pound 20 a liter. Our best guess is somewhere between 9 and 11 dollars a gallon. Distance, however, is in miles and yards on road signs. Speed limits are in MPH. Then there is weight. On the tour of Burghley House the tour guide was trying to tell us the weight of a giant silver piece and had to convert from the Old English measure of stones into pounds.

All together that makes 3 different systems in one country. I don't know why, but maybe after giving up farthings and shillings in their money to go on a decimal system they resisted any further conformity.

Finally, even if the dollar hadn't been decimated by W's continuing failures, it would be expensive here. Janet and I have have tried to not do automatic conversions every time. We try to save it for things we are debating purchasing. For example, I didn't even ask for the price on my single malt scotch at last night's dinner. I was going to have it and I didn't care about the price. For Janet, that applies to many of the Jane Austen items we will be seeing tomorrow.

Time to go. Hopefully more tomorrow.