Category: It Happened to Me

For family, friends, and the curious, I’m posting some selections from my camera roll from last month’s trip to London.

Day 1

Our flight left Tampa on Friday evening, and we landed in London on Saturday morning, a little before 9:00 a.m. local time.

Upon deplaning, we saw a couple of Queen tributes. Here’s the first one..

…and here’s the second:

We made the trip from Gatwick to London in pretty short order on the Gatwick Express, which ends at Victoria Station, and we took a cab to the hotel from there:

Auth0, my employer, put us up at the Sea Containers hotel, located right on the Thames’ south bank and just west of Blackfriars. Here’s the view from our hotel room.

After a nice post-flight shower and change of clothes, we stepped out the hotel’s riverside doorway and took our first proper trip selfie…

…and then we worked our way east along the river…

…then a tiny bit south…

…towards our goal, Flat Iron Square, for lunch.

It’s a fun, open-air beer garden with food stalls, tables aplenty, and a lively crowd. The South Bank seems to have no shortage of these places.

We got lunch from Lil’ Watan, who serve Lebanese food out of a shipping container…

…and drinks from the bar under one of the arches.

After lunch, we set off to explore the South Bank a little more. In my handful of trips to London, I’d stayed mostly on the north side of the Thames.

Southwark has a lot of railway bridges, and the locals have gotten pretty creative with the underpasses:

We passed by Crossbones Graveyard, and there were these great posters nearby:

And while we were in the area, I made sure to pass by this building on Redcross Street, which is known for its “Take Courage” ghost sign:

On the evening of our first day in London, we passed by Nelson Mandela’s bust and played the first verse of this ’80s ska gem:

We weren’t quite sure how jet-lagged we’d be when we landed in London on the morning of Saturday, June 11th, so we kept our plans simple. We’d limit ourselves to wandering about the area near the our hotel (Sea Containers, right on the Thames’ south bank, just west of Blackfriars).

Within this limited zone was the London Bridge shop of Whisky Exchange. Anitra found it while doing her usual diligent pre-travel research, and being whisk(e)y aficionados, we had to go take a look.

If you get the chance, go there — it’s impressive. Their selection is large and beautifully laid out, the staff are friendly and knowledgeable, and how can you not trust a place like this in a drinker’s city?

We chatted with the expert who was stationed at the desk in the back of the shop, asking for something that would be interesting, local, hard or impossible to get in the U.S. and was under £200. His recommendation: Filey Bay Yorkshire Special Malt Whisky’s Special Release Double Oak #1. There were a mere 2,000 bottles in this release, and yet it was well under the price limit we’d given.

Here’s a video review of what we bought…

…here’s a Japanese whisky enthusiast’s tour of the shop…

…and here’s a CBS Saturday Morning piece on the Whisky Exchange:

My move from Toronto to Florida — a little over eight years ago now — forced me to really apply a rule I try to follow: If you’ve been hanging onto something and never use it, let it go. Sell it, give it to someone who really needs it, or toss it. I’ve had to use this rule more since moving from Toronto to Tampa, as the move required me to take only what I could fit in my old car, and because I didn’t want to treat my mother’s basement in Toronto like a free storage place forever.

In spite of this rule, I’ve hung on to one piece of clothing that I’ve had since the very last days 1999 and that I almost never wear. It’s a grey zippered sweatshirt, which you can see below:

There’s nothing terribly bad about it; I like the color, but the cut’s all wrong, it’s a little too big, it has ridiculous snap-straps all over (in the photo, you can see one of them around the neck).

While it’s perfectly serviceable, I don’t like it enough to keep it under normal circumstances. It would’ve ended up at the drop-off of a Goodwill or some other charity ages ago. Still, I keep it, and I only get it dry-cleaned by professionals. Why? Because it’s a special gift from my dad.

Late December, 1999

In 1999, my former high school classmate André Fenton was doing neuroscience research at the Czech Academy of Sciences and decided that he wanted to ring in the year 2000 by throwing a big New Year’s Eve party in the nicest place that he could rent somewhere near Prague.

He found a great place — Zamek Roztěž (although these days, it’s marketed as Casa Serena Chateau and Gold Resort). It’s a “hunting castle” originally built in the late 1600s in the village of Roztěž, located in the Kutna Hora district, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Prague. I was invited to the party, and while there, had a grand old time:

Upon hearing that I would be staying at a castle somewhere in the central European woods in the dead of winter, Dad decided to surprise me by buying me something to keep me warm. That thing was the zippered sweatshirt, and he gave it to me just as he dropped me off at the airport to catch my flight to Amsterdam, and then Prague.

“I got this for you. I don’t want you to be cold when you’re in that castle.”

I thanked him for the sweatshirt, gave him a big hug, wished him a happy new year in advance, and told him that I’d send photos that I’d take with my still-newish digital camera (1024 by 768 pixels in super-fine mode!) to mom via email (he never had an email address).

It’s not really what I would’ve bought, but it’s big and warm, I thought, and it served me well on the flight, in the castle (which wasn’t all that cold — they’d been doing a fair bit of renovating), and especially well on a hike around the castle grounds with some lovely company on the night of January 1st, 2000.

Twenty years later

Because I am a big ol’ sentimental softie, not only have I kept this sweatshirt that I don’t really like all these years, but I take it with me whenever I go someplace cold, as a sort of comforting tradition. 

I wore it walking through the streets of Prague. I had it  on the slopes at Whistler while trying to figure out how snowboarding worked. I wore it when I was conducting mobile technology assessments in the bitter cold of Athabasca’s oil sands. As I drove through the snow-covered hills of West Virginia on those chilly days of March 2014 as I moved to Tampa to be with Anitra, I had it on. I bring it with me on our trips to Toronto in winter. I last wore it earlier this year when the temperatures in Tampa dropped to freezing and I had to cover the tropical plant in the front yard.

When I need it, it keeps me warm — not only in the physical sense, but also in the way that it reminds me of his kindness and generosity.

Dad died at the end of February 2006. But thanks to this sweatshirt that I normally wouldn’t be all that crazy about, I have a little bit of him that I can take with me when I’m cold and far from home. That’s why I’ll never part with it.

Happy Father’s Day, everyone.