Closed Comma

We are home. Our flight Thursday afternoon was delayed at Heathrow for two hours with mechanical problems and many passengers with connecting flights were frantic. But we were calm because we knew where we would be sleeping. Ah, home. There is no place like it (click ruby slippers here).

We called our blog the Oxford Comma because we hoped that our time in Oxford would be a pause in the series that make up our lives. It has definitely been refreshing and rewarding to be in Oxford all summer, so the Comma was successful. We have traveled a lot, read a lot, seen a lot, talked to many different people, experienced another culture, and so on. Every day of the last three months brought something new: a challenge, an insight, a joke, or just an appreciation. We can't possibly sum up all that we experienced, but the blog has been a good way for our friends and family to stay in touch. That meant a lot to us, to know that many of you were reading our posts to see what we were seeing and to share it with us. Thanks for reading, thanks for your comments, and thanks for allowing us to share the experience with you.

But the Oxford Comma is only a pause and not a stop. The textbook sales conference generated a lot of excitement, both for the sales people and for Phil. But he still has work to do. The lab work gave him some new experiments to begin when he starts back at Haverford. Deb is refreshed by her summer of leisure but is very glad she still has 10 days to re-group before heading back to Newtown Library and other responsibilites. The Comma allowed us to collect a hard drive full of pictures, experience a summer of memories, and catch our breath.

Philip points out the shelf
at the Oxford University Press Bookshop
where you'll be able to find his textbook in 2009

Some final thoughts:

• Mystery thrillers by Robert Goddard are not easy to find in the US, but they are worth looking for.
• Tesco Limeade is very refreshing.
• Clarks Shoes will be forever associated with Oxford in our minds. We came back with 4 new pair between us
  
• Great Britain dominates Olympic rowing, sailing, and bicycling, which you quickly learn from the coverage on the BBC.
  
• The BBC airs a lot of documentaries that you think you would not be interested in. In general, you'd be right.

Pleasant surprises:

• the Iffley lock and the Falkirk wheel.
• the quietness of the college quads.
• Francis Collins at The Eagle and Child.
• a respite from the American presidential campaigning
• Deb's trip to Ireland with "the girls" and her Dad-- priceless memories
  
• returning to Edinburgh--one of the great cities of the world

As good or better than expected:

• Christ Church garden, cathedral, and dining room (although always crowded)
• Durham Cathedral
• The English pubs-- our favorites are the Turf Tavern, Jude the Obscure (discovered the last night), and the Fir Tree, but all of them were interesting.
• The stone walls, narrow lanes, and dreaming spires.
• Living near the Thames towpath
  
• The work Phil got done.

Disappointments: almost none.
The heavy rain prevented us from seeing the gardens at Blenheim, and the crowded Oxford streets were not much fun, but those were very minor compared to the many things that surpassed expectations.

Thanks, everyone, for traveling along with us on our Oxford summer adventure!

--Philip and Deb
August 23, 2008

Back to the Beginning

We are back in Oxford for one more night before setting out for home tomorrow (Thursday). We are in a hotel right next to the bus station surrounded by all our luggage, preparing to re-pack for the flight home. It has been an eventful summer, with new memories and images from every day we have been here.

We left Durham in the rain on Tuesday morning and took a very crowded train to Birmingham, before switching to a local train that went to Stratford upon Avon. We spent Tuesday evening wandering around Stratford, revisiting some of the things we saw earlier this summer and enjoying the stroll around town and along the river Avon. The site for the sales conference at a hotel in the nearby village of Alderminster, so we took a taxi ride there this morning. It was not just any hotel, but a lovely estate that had its own chapel ruins on the grounds!

Ettington Park Hotel

Ettington Park Hotel Chapel

Phil listened to presentations on some of the new textbooks coming out from Oxford University Press while Deb walked the grounds to take photographs of the conference site itself, which dates back to the 15th century. The audience was sales representatives, and sales and marketing directors from the UK, the USA, Europe, and East Asia, about 25 people in all. Phil and his editor Jon gave a lively description of the book, explaining how this is different from every other book (it is, actually) and why they should aggressively market it and to whom. Although Phil questioned whether having him there would increase or decrease sales, the presentation went well and the sales and marketing people showed a lot of interest.

So that was our last official responsibility of the summer and it ended with where it began-- with Advanced Genetic Analysis.

After lunch, Jon drove us back to Oxford where we picked up the luggage we had stored at the lab. We then took a (fully loaded) taxi to our hotel. We now have to find our return plane tickets, our bus tickets back to Heathrow, our American cell phones, and the other things to return to our everyday life. We promise more reflections on the Comma in our final post yet to come after we get home.

Durham

These two days are our "found" days. At the beginning of the summer, Phil was told to hold open August 18-20 for a meeting in Stratford-upon-Avon with the sales representatives who will be selling his book. As time neared, it turns out that he is only needed for an hour on Wednesday morning, so we had some time open. When we traveled from London to Edinburgh 16 years ago, we remembered seeing Durham's cathedral and castle from the train, so we decided to stop here and check them out. We left Edinburgh Sunday and arrived here in time to get to the cathedral to enjoy Evensong and the organ concert following in the cathedral.

Durham Castle (left) and Cathedral (right)

It was magnificent-- both the cathedral and the service. The cathedral is huge, towering over the river and valley below. It was built before 1100, with impressive stone walls and the highest bell tower from any Norman cathedral in Britain, maybe in Europe. It also houses the body of St Cuthbart and the Venerable Bede,and it was the site of many pilgrimages in the Middle Ages.

Durham Market Square

Durham is also the home of the third oldest university in England, which includes the castle. Unfortunately, the castle was closed today for a wedding reception, so we walked around the medieval town, with narrow passages, high bridges, and a stone-paved central market arena. This was a coal-mining area so there are many signs of the old mining economy. So it was a good free day, with an impressive cathedral, an excellent and inspirational Evensong service, and an interesting town.

Falkirk Wheel

On Saturday we took the train out of Edinburgh to the town of Falkirk to see the world's only boat lift, the Falkirk Wheel. Like everything else, this probably requires a bit of a history lesson.

Scotland used to have a series of canals that connected its rivers and cities. Two of these were the Clyde-Forth (the rivers of Glasgow and Edinburgh) and the Union Canals. The Union Canal was built about 80 feet higher than the Clyde-Forth Canal, so in order to connect them, the engineers constructed an elaborate series of 11 locks. When the trains came in the 1830s, the canals were not used so much, and eventually were closed. Now, fast forward to the celebration of the millenium. One of the millenial celebrations involved rebuilding Britain's waterways, which we have taken advantage of with our walks along the Thams towpath and Thames canal in and around Oxford. The Clyde-Forth and the Union Canals were also reopened, but most of the locks connecting them were not rebuilt.

Instead, the engineers built the Falkirk wheel, a huge rotating boat lift. A boat-- mostly pleasure craft and tour boats-- sails into the gondola at one level. The gondola, full of water and the boat,is raised or lower to the other level by a roating wheel more than 100 feet high. The ride takes four minutes and uses the same amount of electricity that is used to boil an electric tea kettle eight times, less than 10 kilowatts. We got on the tourboat (named the Archimedes-- if you remember him, you will get a chuckle) and made our way to the gondola. The wheel rotated, raising our gondola up 75 feet to the Union Canal while at the same time lowering the gondola on the other side. The ride was amazingly smooth, and if not the ground giving way on the horizon, we were not even aware that we were moving. The tour boat chugged along on the Union Canal for awhile, then we moved into the upper gondola and were lowered back down. OK, it is not exactly Splash Mountain but it is an amazing feat of engineering that replaces eight of the 11 locks.

So on this trip we have seen locks that dated from the early 17th century, and ones that date from the 21st century. And in one 24 hour period, we saw amazing architecture and engineering that spanned more than 600 years, from the Rosslyn Chapel to the Falkirk Wheel. (And, as we will tell you tomorrow, we went back a thousand years of engineering in the next 24 hours.)

Thanks to Sue Fairman who saw the Falkirk Wheel featured on tv and mentioned it to Deb in an email. We appreciate your comments, and we even respond to them! It was a great part of the Scottish phase of our Oxford Comma. On to Durham!