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.