We went to London to see the Queen and I am hoping she was warmly ensconced on the Costa Brava

T'was brillig in the slimey trove where gyre and gimbel...ok I'm sure I've wildly misquoted the only part of Jabberwocky that I pretend to know...but that's how I felt it was in London.

We arrived with snow coming down and for the next two days it snowed, rain and was damn cold and uncomfortable....We had a good flight out on Friday and on Saturday morning we whizzed through the Heathrow essentials so quickly that we had to kill some time when all of us wanted nothing as much as a warm place to park our gear and a nap. We got to our airbnb apartment at the appointed time. Actually the owners were incredibly flexible and enabled us to get into the flat by 10 when they could have made us wait until 3. Impossible thought.

The flat was right off the Marylebone High Street which is a neighborhood that was a total cipher to me. Very twee and upscale with some ok restaurants and a really good Waitrose supermarket. All in walking distance of the Wallace collection. And the flat was enormous. A split layout with a large living room with lumpy furniture covered in bedspreads...it's like being in grad student digs. But it was super warm -- you can easily tell my obsession -- and very light and airy. The kitchen was also doable. Not filled with such high tech gadgets that I was paralyzed.

I would say that the trip was an enormous success with the requisite ups and downs. Too cold...learning curve for Arnie and for me about how to use our phones to reach the states...the oyster card for the Tube which kept running out of money at the most inconvenient time...and I returned home with my trophy hot water bottle. I just wanted one.

We saw a little bit of everything. I made everybody take the Big Bus Hop on Hop off tour which would be wonderful in warm weather but I didn't care. Oh, the warm downstairs is full, well let's go up stairs and sit outside in the snow. It will be good for you. Well it was certainly cold...

We went to Oxford one day and saw the Bodelian library which was one of my goals for this trip. It was a great success and Kate and Lydia both loved Oxford. They also saw a small Science Museum which Arnie had picked to see and it was an incredible cabinet of curiosities. My other goals went right out the window...Stone Henge and Stratford on Avon. We didn't even get to the Globe Theatre. Too cold. Even though we did go on the London Eye which was pretty swell.

Additionally I had told Kate that there would be some great shopping in London. I lied. What we saw was mostly fusty and old fashioned. And, of course, I was trying to keep her out of Agnes B which does have some great shopping and clothes that actually fit her!

We saw Billy Elliott, ate at a Turkish restaurant, a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown where I had never ever been during the time I was living in London, sammpled an inferior Italian restaurant, and then a wildly spicy Indian restaurant. All good.

In the end Kate didn't like London. but who cares. She absorbed more of it than I think she realized.

And this weekend we took a mini trip to see Princeton and the first thing the student tour leader said was that it was modeled on Oxford!

Very satisfying to me.