JULY 11, FRIDAY

ENGLAND

On Wednesday morning at 6 a.m. inexpensive flights to London appeared on Going.com, not from Asheville but from nearby Greenville, South Carolina and Knoxville, Tennessee, each about two hours drive away. I’ve been wanting to visit Lincoln, England for the past few years and let Tina, my English niece, who lives there twice know that I was on my way to Germany and then on to England. But the first time fear of Covid kept me away and the second time an irate neighbor and the possibility that Tina and her husband, Martin, were moving made the visit inconvenient. This time, within 15 minutes of seeing the $535 round trip flight I wrote to Tina asking if I could come, but then didn’t hear back for a couple of days and thought the window for the cheap flights had passed and had given up. But then Tina, who was having trouble with her internet connection discovered my letter and said it would be fine to come. I looked up the flights on Google, and Knoxville was still a possibility, so I bought a ticket from August 12 to 28. Then I phoned Susie to see if she was interested. She was reluctant. So I bought her a ticket, refundable within 24 hours, just in case, while she made up her mind. Todd, her husband was enthusiastic about her going, saying that she hadn’t seen her three English cousins for years and the tie was necessary to maintain. Susie has English cousins because Kathe, her mother’s older sister, Linde, had moved to England after the Second World War, to get nurses training, not available in devastated Germany, and had met a German citizen, Ali, who had been an English prisoner of war and married him and had remained to become a British citizen. So Susie decided to go with me.

So we leave for London and then England on August 12 for ten days in Lincoln followed by two days in London in about a month.