The 2nd day of our London trip was only nominally in London. Up relatively early for breakfast, we made a couple of local tube connections to Paddington Station, thence bound via overland via choo choo to Oxford. Home of colleges and college students, as well as our target: the Ashmolean Museum. As has been previously discussed (I think?) when we were formulating this trip part of the impetus was a review for an exhibition entitled Pissarro: Father of Impressionism. That was the anchor for the day , but a lot went in to making it happen.

There’s a true thing about Europe that we have not yet gotten used to: train travel is efficient and mundane. In the States, John never having lived in the northeast corridor, a train trip was a frippery. We’d plan a trip to Portland and say “you know what would be cute? Taking the train down!” And, you know, it was. Nice change of pace, no driving. We’d occasionally think about taking one of the headline Amtrak routes, to Chicago maybe, or down the West Coast to Los Angeles maybe. Never once did it occur to us to use the train just as public transportation. Here, well… trains are everywhere. They go everywhere. England in particular has laid tracks the way the US paves highways. Dots on the map for which you’d be hard pressed to explain the purpose of their existence nonetheless have at least a train depot, and maybe not every train stops but at least one or two will. “Where can you not go in England by train?” is probably an answerable trivia question, but we suspect it’s a short list. Point being (there’s a point?!) train travel is… well, boring. In a good way. You get to the station, look on a board just like at an airport for your train to see what platform it’s at, go through a little security checkpoint, then walk along the train to your car and hop in. Seats are nicer than coach on the airplane, but in the same ballpark. And… that’s it. The train starts moving. You don’t need a safety lecture, you don’t wait on the runway for clearance to take off, you just start moving. And then you get where you’re going and you just… get off.

Look, I know that reads like a pointless paragraph, but the very mundanity of the train was the story for these European neophytes. It’s still cool just how simple it is, all the way down to train stations being waaaay more centrally located than most airports, so when you arrive you’ve actually… you know, arrived at where you were going. There’s not another hour of grabbing your bags and getting a cab or whatever.

Case in point, we walked out of the train station in Oxford, took a left, and were crossing a bridge into what could only be described as “Oxford proper” within 3 minutes. That said, “proper” is an odd word choice here. John had… well, let’s call them romantic notions about the state of Oxford. Too many period dramas, too many books set in the 1700s (there have only been like 4, but that was apparently enough). In any case, John’s idea was that when we weren’t visiting the museum we could stroll the campus and just sort of enjoy the sedate, collegial atmosphere. Yeeeaaaah… not so much. The High Street in Oxford is as commercial, and as densely peopled, as any in Europe. We’re pretty sure some portion of the colleges there were graduating that weekend, adding to the mayhem. There was no atmosphere to be absorbed, unless it was the body spray of the American Eagle shopboy/models. Alas.

The exhibit, thank the heavens, was not a disappointment. Honestly, in the past month if nothing else we’ve learned loads about what good curation looks like in museum exhibits. Like the Donatello in Florence and some things to come up later, the Ashmolean did a fantastic job of placing Camille Pissarro in context with his artistic -cedents, both ante- and des-. If you’re like us and didn’t know much about him – he was older and more practiced than most of the impressionists. Several of them looked up to him and his work, and he happily collaborated with many of them. You can watch the stylistic elements flowing back and forth between them if you are educated enough or, thankfully for us, you are shown by means of skillful exhibition. There were a few particularly fascinating examples of works by e.g. Cezanne and Pissarro that were painted simultaneously and in the same location. It very much highlighted what they shared and where they differed. We also saw a comprehensive examination of Pissarro’s print-making, of which the man himself was so proud that he sought to exhibit not just the work but a step-by-step demonstration of his process for printmaking at one of the Paris Salons. Heads stuffed and feet barking a bit, we walked down… well, swam.. the High Street to a lovely restaurant that, what with me misreading the character of the town in general, I’d taken to be a charming little bistro from their website, but was in fact closer to The Cheescake Factory only with good tea. Still, it wasn’t a half-bad meal and, fat and happy, we sauntered back to the train station for our scoot back into the Smoke (people call London that right? Maybe 200 years ago?). We gave ourselves the night off in anticipation of another fine day of art and culture.

By which we mean our trip to London, natch.

When we were in the midst of planning for our move to Portugal, it could get hectic. Very, very hectic. To the point where more than once we’d ask ourselves just what the hell we were doing, and maybe let’s think this through again. So, to keep ourselves sane (by our standards, ok? no judgment), every now and then we’d revisit our reasons for wanting to move in the first place. As you might remember from our talking about our winter trip to Spain and France, we spent a lot of downtime planning out that “first trip” to other countries, and made a point of putting it early in the calendar so it would feel like something to look forward to. (In retrospect, Braga itself would have been the “something to look forward to”, but we hadn’t been here yet.) The other things we’d daydream about were the spontaneous trips that we didn’t even know about yet, but that we were certain would happen because it would be so much easier to accomplish.

(Again, foreshadowing. It can’t be over-used, can it?)

On many of our trips to cities both abroad and within the US, John would grab the local Time Out or similar publication and check out what was going on in the city that wasn’t big news. When we went to New York a few years ago, Lisa bought John a ticket to “Hamilton” while the original cast was still performing, and that was great. But John found out about a play called “The Woodsman” that is in the running for our favorite theatrical experience ever. It was something wondrous to behold, and it helped give rise to John’s working theory that amazing things are going on all the time, all over the world, and outside of their homes you hear very little about them. (It’s not much of a theory, more of a “no shit, Sherlock”, but still…) Case in point: “Hamilton” was a cultural phenomenon that managed to break through for the world’s attention, but “The Woodsman” was our favorite. On our honeymoon in 2012, we found a theatre housed behind a socialist bookstore in Dublin, a little black box with maybe 100 seats in it; but, we saw Love in the Title and haven’t forgotten about it in the 10 years since. (Although, to peek behind the curtain for a moment, we forgot the name of the play, and there’s been about two hours between those last two sentences as John went down the rabbit hole to find it. No, you probably wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t name it, but once he starts looking…) From events like these we (and John in particular) have latched on to the idea that if we had easier access to more places, and more time to go with it, we’d take advantage of interesting cultural events that would have passed us by in the past.

So, back in March, John had a review cross his feed from The Guardian newspaper about an exhibition at The British Museum titled “The world of Stonehenge” that was rapturous in its descriptions. Interesting, he thought. Then, the very next day, he say a different review for an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum (and let’s not be coy here, he had no idea where that museum was until he looked it up) presenting Camille Pissarro in the context of his relationships with the Impressionists. That was very interesting, he thought. And then, no more than a couple of days later, he read about A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920-2020 at the Whitechapel Gallery and it was apparently really excellent. Once he confirmed that Whitechapel is, in fact, in England, this sealed the deal. He presented all of this to Lisa, and with no reluctance at all they decided to make a weekend out of it. And so it was that on very little notice we decided to make a quick trip to London, with a day trip to Oxford(!), to take in highlights of the artistic season. And to top it all off, we decided to add a delay for the National Gallery since we hadn’t been the last time we were there, and with no notice whatsoever we discovered an exhibition of Raphael’s work, giving us all the omen we needed, if we needed one, that this trip was a good idea. And so, coming up next, our long weekend in and around London.

The short answer is that we’re fortunate beyond words for how well it has turned out. This isn’t actually obvious at first glance. The apartment we’ve moved in to, which we were smitten with at first glance, has turned out to have a couple of almost-literally fatal flaws, to the point where we are moving out early to get to a new place. That story will probably come in more detail later, but the fact that we are packing up everything we own, again, slightly less than 4 months after we did it the last time, is certainly not optimal. Our first trip out of the country was not a resounding success. I mean let’s not kid ourselves, we saw and did some really amazing things, but we were overwhelmed at times in Barcelona and the chaos in the middle of our trip to France left us off-balance even as we tried to salvage the experience (which we did by and large). Certain goals that we set for ourselves and our health are more work-in-progress than mission-accomplished; as anybody’s therapist will tell them, the one thing you are certain to take with you wherever you go is yourself. I remember as a kid I heard “wherever you go, there you are” and thought “well that’s dumb.” Hang on, younger me, it’ll make sense one day. How exactly is it so amazing then?

Shockingly, we’ll explain by telling you a long story. Way back when we were in the planning stages of uprooting our lives and moving to a foreign country, we’d talk about why exactly we wanted to do it. For my (John’s) part, there was this hypothetical story I’d keep going back to. “Whenever we’re in a big city like New York or London or … wherever, you read the paper or Time Out Istanbul or or or … and read about all sorts of amazing cultural events that don’t even make the news. Like, when Lisa surprised me with a trip to New York to see Hamilton while the original cast was still there (<—brag), we dug around in the papers and found a little play that you never heard of outside of the city, called “The Woodsman”, and by golly if it wasn’t one of our most favorite theatrical experiences ever. These things are happening, all the time. We’re always seeing reviews of gallery exhibitions or plays or concerts that are taking place in far-flung corners of the world, and they might as well be in Narnia. How amazing would it be if we could actually go to these things?” Side note: whenever we travel to an English-speaking destination we make a point of rooting around for local theater options; we’ve had fantastic experiences in places like Dublin and London. More stories for another time. Anyway.

A couple weeks ago my news feed brought up a review of an exhibition going on at the British Museum in London, The World of Stonehenge. It sounds absolutely fascinating. Interesting. I mention it to Lisa and we both think it sounds neat. Then, a couple days later, another review pops up: A Century of the Artist’s Studio. It looks really fascinating, if maybe a little brief. The mental tea kettle starts to rattle. Then the dominoes start to teeter: in Oxford at this same time is Pissarro: Father of Impressionism. Now the kettle is whistling. We do some quick checks of the calendar, fiddle with a half-dozen websites and, just like that, we’ve got three days at the end of May where we fly to London, see a couple of amazing exhibitions, hop on the train for a day trip to Oxford to see the Pissarro and just sight-see one of the great universities of the world, then back to London to chomp on a Raphael exhibition at the National Gallery that we didn’t even know was there when we planned the trip. Do you see what I mean? Even now that we’re paying closer attention, a pretty fantastic event was going on that is aligned perfectly with our interests and we’d never have heard about it, but here we are seeing it.

Another story. Lisa likes the beach. Waaaaay more than I do, although I’m coming around. Back in the States we would occasionally try to work out a trip every couple of years to somewhere with decent beaches so we could sun ourselves and splash around a bit. This year, she says she’d like some beach time for her birthday. No problem. Plan A is to head to the Greek islands to hit the Mediterranean, but the truth is we were just there a couple years ago and that trip left a mark (another story for another time) so maybe give that a rest. So instead, right now we’re in the middle of planning a few weeks in the south of France and the Loire valley. We’ll splash around in Nice for awhile, then head up into the center of the country and take a gander at a dozen gorgeously-restored castles and their magnificent gardens.

Oh, and in October we’re taking the Orient Express to Venice to spend a week, and we’re trying to sort out which cities’ Christmas markets we want to visit this year. And when we aren’t hitting the road, we live in a charming European city complete with cobblestone streets and an easy pace to life. Whatever travails we’re going through, bumps in the road or whatever you’d like to call it, the truth of the matter is that we are living exactly the life we’d hoped to be living; we know it, and we’re so so grateful for it.