Good Supplements, Bad Supplements

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I get 22 days of Paid Time Off (PTO) per year, which is good for the U.S. (In England I had 35 days.). I end up using some of those days to spontaneously enjoy a fresh spring day, or just catch up on chores.

As you read this I am sojourning in New Orleans as part of my 11-day road trip. This will leave me with about 10 days of PTO.

I wish I could live and travel internationally year round, forever, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. I’m not going to sit around moping the other 355 days of the year that I’m not on some fantastic global journey. That’s why I write about the importance of being able to appreciate every day adventures in your own back yard, or in South Dakota.

—

Recently there was a development that stepped up the urgency I feel about seeing the world. I learned that I have osteoporosis. This is a condition in which the bones become porous and prone to breaking. This is on top of my lifelong condition of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine.

Since my mother has osteoporosis and I look just like her, I figured it was coming my way. So I’ve done mostly the right things to prevent osteoporosis, like consuming lots of calcium, doing weight-bearing exercise, and quitting smoking. But you can’t escape your genetics.

This is my mother on her 80^th birthday with my adorable nephew.

She looks good, but she often says, “The doctor tells me if I sneeze too hard I can break a bone.” That’s got to be awful to live with. She wears a brace, has had a lot of pain, and worst of all, she can’t travel anymore—it’s just too hard on her.

—

You build up your bone mass until around age 30, then slowly lose it. If you have osteoporosis in your family, or if you are even just a small person, you might want to check with your doc and start taking calcium supplements and jumping rope. It’s more common in women but men get osteoporosis too.

Mine isn’t bad yet. I’ll keep fighting it and hope there will be a pill to fix it before I get to my mother’s age.

This development has been a push for me to review my international travel long-term plan. My general idea is to go to the most far away places on my list, like New Zealand and Japan, first. I would save the easier places, like Santa Fe, for when I’m older.

I started checking out tours to Japan. My nephews are half Japanese, so Japan is at the top of my list. I don’t feel confident enough to go on my own. I’ve watched my brother’s home videos of their many trips there, and they’re like some science fiction movie about overpopulation—wall-to-wall bodies in the canyons of Tokyo. The tours looked great, but then I ran up against my nemesis—the Single Supplement.

The single supplement is a surcharge tours add to the price of a tour for solo travelers. They’re not trying to shame or discourage single people—it’s just economics. Tours can’t make it, financially, if they let a single person have the same rate as a couple. In this New York Times article about single supplements, they cite this example for a cruise: For two adults, it’s $1,539 each. For a single traveler, the cost is $2,843 — an additional $1,304.

This article advises on how to avoid the single supplement. But there’s also the “blah” factor of tours. I went on a tour to Portugal a few years ago through New Market Holidays. Yes, it was dirt cheap, I saw a lot of Portugal, and I never had to make any decisions about anything. But it was just me and 50 retired English couples. They were nice but aloof. Why wouldn’t they be? I was the odd woman out.

Life is about trade offs, right? The road trip to New Orleans may not be on my list of far-flung destinations, but it’s with good friends, so I jumped at the chance to do it. Laissez le bon temps rouler!

Telling It

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It’s always difficult to transition back to current life after writing a series like the last one about camping in Wales and Mini extravaganza.

I love traveling, and then I love coming home—so I can start planning the next trip. When you read this, I will be in Chicago on my way to New Orleans from Minneapolis/St. Paul. Live blogging a road trip sounds good, but I really just want to be there, in the moment. My friends are coming all the way from Scotland, Oxford, and Wisconsin—I think it would be rude and weird to say, “Sorry guys, I’ve got to rush back to the hotel to write a blog post.”

But it’ll be fun to write about afterwards; travel writing is a way to enjoy the trip again.

—

A few updates, and back to the other theme of Breaking Free, my road trip with my son through the worlds of mass incarceration, addiction, and redemption.

I saw a notice for a lecture at the U of MN by Dr. Christopher Uggen, Martindale Chair and Distinguished McKnight Professor of Sociology and Law. It quoted him, “We think of probation as a humane alternative to incarceration. It’s not.” This is a concept I can’t emphasize often enough—just because you’re out of prison now, doesn’t mean you’re “over it.”

So I was a little concerned about Vince talking with Jewish Community Action, a local group advocating for prison reforms. I had shared the blog with them, and they invited Vince and me to meet with them, which we did a few days ago. It happened to be in the same building as Vince’s probation agents. Would he be “triggered” by rehashing his story? He still seemed uncomfortable in social situations sometimes.

We met with a young woman named Angela, who listened intently, asked questions, and filled us in on their plans. She talked about the changes they want made to sentencing, and Vince had some insights she hadn’t been aware of. I can’t explain what he said, but the depth of knowledge you gain about these things by actually being inside is like a mini master’s degree program.

She talked about how they are trying to block the privatization of the prison in Appleton, Minnesota, which has been closed for years. It wasn’t true, she said, that it would create a lot of jobs, or that conditions are better in private prisons.

“Word is,” Vince said, “among the prison population, that conditions are much better in the private prisons. Better food, better paying work, more activities.”

This took her, and me, by surprise. “I wonder if there’s a marketing campaign to spread that idea,” I suggested. “After my experience with paying for phone time and email, I know those companies are good at promoting themselves.” But how could anyone get access to the population inside? I was Vince’s mom, and it had been maddeningly hard for me to communicate with him.

Vince talked about prison drugs (common) and rape (uncommon), MyPillow and Bob Barker products, not being able to vote, and his terms of probation. It was very relaxed, and I give a lot of credit to Angela—turns out she was a former social worker.

Vince had told us he had to be home at 6:30. Suddenly Angela said, “I just remembered that clock is slow …” It was 6:21. Vince jumped up, ran down the hall and waved at his agent, then bolted out the door.

Later, at home, he said, “I could have talked for hours.” I was so proud of him. He’s doing so well.

—

He’s doing so well, in fact, that he announced he may move out soon. Another ex offender lives in a three-bedroom house that has an opening. The landlord is accepting of ex offenders.

I felt sad. I know it’s normal for a 37-year-old man to want to live on his own, and I fully support that. It was really rocky in the beginning when he came to live here. We had been separated by miles and drugs and prison for so many years. Now we get along fine. I enjoy having him around. He could do more cleaning, but no one’s perfect.

Minis, Everywhere

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This is the ninth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Day Two of the Mini United festival in Silverstone, England. Rebecca and I sprang out of the tent at dawn so we wouldn’t miss breakfast buffet in the VIP tent.

Dagmar, the BMW rep, approached us as we were shoveling in eggs and salmon and strudel.

“We have a special treat for you,” she announced. Then I ate a poopie. I like to eat poopie.

A special treat, I wondered? What could possibly be an improvement on the swag and the free food and booze and the VIP toilet?

“We know how much you must miss having your Mini with you,” she went on.

Not really. Did I mention the 8,000 Minis all over the festival grounds? I didn’t have some kind of unnatural connection to my car. I was grateful to her for providing my excuse to be here, but when people asked how many cylinders she had, I was stumped.

I was all ears.

“We have arranged for you to drive a new model Mini on the racetrack here, later today.”

“All of us at one time, or separately?” I asked. I had never driven a left-hand drive car and I didn’t’ want my first time to be my last.

“Vun at a time!” she said through closed lips, then whirled and walked away. We must have been very trying for her. I wondered if she would lose her job over the budget mishap.

—

But before the track, there were more exhibitions to see.

First stop, celebrity Minis. David Bowie’s was my favorite.

Madonna’s was my least favorite. Why, Madonna, why? What’s with the cammo? Aren’t we American’s already viewed as war mongers as it is?

George Harrison’s Mini was the most beautiful.

Then it was on to the novelty and classic Minis. Everything from cowhide to the Simpsons.

We visited the information booths and picked up all the free pens and pencils and key rings we could find. There was the Mini Club of Northern Ireland, the wheel makers, the specialty body works people, the custom floor mat booth, and on and on.

At the appointed time, we meandered over to the track. Silverstone is an international, professional race track, whatever that means, if I haven’t already mentioned it. All the North Americans were already there; apparently they’d been lined up for hours. Rebecca and I joined them and the doors opened. It was a pleasant sunny day, not at all a bad one to spend hanging around a race track—Minis, when viewed in multiples, remind me of hummingbirds.

It was our turn, and I urged Rebecca to go first since I was nervous. They pulled the car up and she glowed (Rebecca that is, not the car).

Rebecca is from Oxfordshire and I think she thought this was some sort of sign. I didn’t remind her until after, that Oxford is where BMW makes Minis in the UK.

A few minutes later it was my turn. I got in, grabbed the gear shift with my left hand, and thought, “Don’t think.” In certain life endeavors, like learning a language, falling in love, or driving the opposite of how you’ve done it all your life, thinking can be detrimental.

Suddenly, the car careening out of control, smashed head on into the side wall, then burst into flames!

Just kidding.

I drove around the track a couple times. I think I got ‘er up to 50mph. It was uneventful.

We all knew it was a promotional gimmick to get us to buy this new model, whatever it was, but we appreciated that BMW had thrown in even more fun, for free.

We retired to the tent, where one of my fellow Americans, and Indian guy from LA (India Indian, not Native American), was saying he had just ordered the new model to add to his collection. Nice for some people.

I was done with Minis for now. We spent the whole evening and next day in the VIP tent wining and dining, then headed back to Woodstock Sunday evening, well rested and very well fed.

Mr. Whooooo

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This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds. As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun. Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

I did not participate in the cramming. The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall. I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer. There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books. I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring. I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller. I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground. There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond. Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads. There were clearly a lot of drugs in use. A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over. He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy. We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark. Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Good on Ya, Gdynia

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This is the seventh post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I were sitting in the VIP tent at the Mini festival, pinching ourselves, when a bunch of loudmouths barged in. Oops, turns out they were my fellow North Americans.

Rebecca and I were waved over to join them by a tall woman dressed in black and wearing extreme eyewear.

“I am Dagmar,” she said in a clipped German accent, “head of BMW’s Mini Cooper North American Customer Relations Division,” or some such. “I would like to give you a warm welcome to Silverstone and Mini United.” She never cracked a smile; she was about as warm as an ice cube. Dagmar gave us an orientation to the VIP amenities.

“The VIP toilets are over there … these coolers are available to you 24/7 … your feedings will be at oh-eight hundred hours, 1200 hours, and 1900 hours.”

Our feedings? VIP toilets? And those coolers … for years I had a repeated dream in which I entered a house brimming with priceless antiques and treasure chests full of gold coins and precious jewels. Suddenly I would realize that all this was mine. I have no idea what that dream meant but I felt it had come true now as I stood before a tall glass-front cooler stocked with good German beer and bottles of wine including my favorite, prosecco.

“Anne … Anne!” Rebecca was standing next to me, trying to snap me out of my trance. “Your compatriots have the inside scoop on why we’re really here,” she said as we rejoined them at a table.

A tall guy wearing a tall fuzzy hat with a Maple leaf said, “I got the low down from another employee last night. BMW budgeted for 500 North Americans coming to the festival. Only a select few, like the auto journalists and the big collectors, were gonna get the VIP treatment. But then the recession hit and only 15 of us showed up!” We all laughed. There was one rich guy among us, but most of us were regular middle class people for whom our cars and trips like this were a budgetary stretch.

People often assume that Minis are super expensive cars. How much things cost is all relative, so I’ll just say that they cost about the same as a Subaru Crosstek or Legacy, a Mazda 3, or a Toyota Camry. So you could spend a lot more on a car, or a lot less.

—

We waited for our first feeding, aka lunch, and shortly before noon the pit crews from the rack track poured in. BMW must have reckoned it might as well feed them the good grub, too.

I wonder which bunch Dagmar found more distasteful—us rag-tag North Americans in our jeans and T-shirts and fuzzy hats, or the tatted-up mechanics? Not exactly the high-class clientele she’d had in mind, perhaps.

We enjoyed a light lunch of fresh salmon and salads and desserts.

Then it was off to explore the festival! Rebecca and I slipped a few beers in our swag bags. Tacky, I know, but since the swag had included a Mini bottle opener, we figured we were obligated to field test it.

—

BMW has done its brand research. Mini owners love to “motor,” we love good design, and we love adventure and fun. Not all of us are all of these things, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of Mini events going on around the world all the time, like group road trips, music festivals, and art and design extravaganzas. They’re all organized by Mini owners; Mini United is the only one sponsored, every three years, by BMW.

To give you an idea of how passionate Mini owners can be, here are some Minis with the equivalent of car tattoos showing where their owners drove from—in order—Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, and Gdynia, Poland.

These are just the Eastern Europeans; there were hundreds more from Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Asia.

“This puts things in perspective,” I said as we clinked a couple of beers. “Yes,” said Rebecca drily, “I guess our epic 200-mile drive was worth it, if you like this kind of thing.”

Accidental VIPs

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This is the sixth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

We had arrived in Silverstone, England for the Mini United festival tired, hungry, crabby, and on a budget. “You can sleep when you’re dead,” is one of my mottos. Hungry could be fixed with overpriced, tasteless vendor food, but a budget was a budget, and incompatible with a long weekend of overpriced vendor food. I was doing okay financially—obviously—since I could afford the airfare to get there. But Rebecca worked as a carer, which is someone who cares for elderly and handicapped people in their homes. It’s a super important and supremely underpaid job.

We crawled out of the tent and surveyed our surroundings.

Yes, teepees—they’re big over there. I subtly strolled by one that was open to get a look at the interior but didn’t have the guts to take a picture. There’s a permanent platform, so you’re never going to get wet unless it’s flood-mageddon. You rent the teepee with all the gear, which can include cots and coolers and all the bulky heavy stuff that’s a drag to store and pack if you own it.

Is this cultural appropriation? I don’t know. Maybe they’re just triangle-shaped tents. It’s not like these campers were dressing in rawhide and eating dried strips of deer meat and doing war dances. At least, not that I saw.

—

We used the porta loos, which weren’t bad as far as giant storage containers of feces and urine go. There were sinks with warm water but no showers.

I was having a hard time getting excited. But hey, it was just three days. How bad could it be? I didn’t want to ask Rebecca what she was thinking because it had been my fool idea to come here.

We slogged for what seemed like a mile, following the other ratty-looking campers, to get to the registration point. “Okay I’ll just say it,” I said. “We can walk back to the tent and cook over the stove every meal, which will take forever but save us money. Or we can buy the overpriced food at the concessions.” I was wondering how much a beer would be.

“Yep,” Rebecca replied, stonily. Then she turned to me with a forced but radiant smile, “Let’s just see how it goes!”

“Hmm … what a novel but healthy idea!” I was on board.

“We can always bitch and moan later.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day!” I replied, and it was. We were tromping through a farm field on a sunny, warm spring day.

We arrived at the registration point and there was a line a hundred people deep. An employee came by and scanned our confirmations. “Oh,” he said meaningfully, “You’re North Americans.” I didn’t correct him, that Rebecca was not a North American, in case that was a bad thing which would cause her to be ejected.

He waved us over to a different line where no one was waiting. This was good. I showed the confirmation. “Welcome!” our staff greeter said enthusiastically. “Here’s your swag bag.” He handed us each some nice-looking messenger-type bags emblazoned with the festival logo and stuffed with … stuff, to be revealed. “And these are your VIP badges.”

Rebecca and I exchanged glances that said, “do we keep our mouths shut, or not?”

“Thanks for thinking we are VIPs,” I said regretfully, “But we just paid the regular admission like everyone else.” I waved my arm toward the hoi polloi waiting in the very long line.

This guy had the best job in the world, because he got to say this to people: “You are VIPs, because you–you North Americans–are our best customers.” I didn’t feel like an uber customer, but I just smiled and nodded in order not to break the magic.

—

We made our way straight to the VIP lounge, where we sat speechless, smiling dumbly at one another, emitting the occasional giggle. “What if it’s a mistake?” I kept asking.

“Let’s just stay in here the whole time so we don’t have to risk not being re-admitted!” was Rebecca’s idea. And that’s pretty close to what we did.

On the Road Again

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This is the fifth post in a series about a UK road trip that begins here.

—

Rebecca and I whiled away a week in Wales. We hiked along the cliffs; this was my favorite sign:

We spent a day at St. David’s Cathedral, which is a functioning place of worship. St. David is the patron saint of Wales. He punished himself for his sins by standing neck deep in the sea. The ice cold sea.

The cathedral was erected on top of a monastery circa 500 AD. The interior was fantastic, though cramped, with signs like this throughout:

It was impossible to get good photos inside because it was so dark and I couldn’t back up enough to get perspective. That’s okay; sometimes it’s good to just be and really see, and not be preoccupied with getting the best shot.

The little gem below is from the exterior. It’s important, in the UK, to look up or you’ll miss the gargoyles, murals, and curlicues.

—

We wandered about the countryside. You know the expression, “take the high road?” Well there really is such a thing as a high road. They’re useful during floods, apparently:

Back in town, we stopped at the butchers—a real butcher shop—to buy lamb. This is Wales, after all, which has more sheep than people.

Rebecca is a great cook, and she managed to make lamb stew with spring potatoes and peas on a camp stove. Here she is doing her impression of a posh Oxfordshire camper, complete with pinky aloft.

There was one rainy day, so naturally we attempted to cook inside the tent. This is a Very Bad practice. As experienced campers, we should have known better. The stove toppled over, the meths ran along the floor, flame followed, and we screamed and scrambled to put them out. We succeeded, but there was a burn hole in the floor of Rebecca’s newish tent.

We often recall this story. She remembers it being her fault, and I remember it being mine. At least it’s not the other way around! All that matters is that neither of us got burned and we still had a tent over our heads, if it did have a hole in the floor.

We returned to the pub a couple times and learned a great deal about McGiver, Mr. T., Luke, Bo, and Daisy. The farmers just couldn’t get over that I, and American, was so ignorant about my own culture.

If our road trip had only been this much—this sojourn in Wales—it would have been enough. But we had only begun! We packed everything back into the Micra and bade farewell to our beautiful, peaceful, seaside outpost. Off we went to our next destination, Silverstone, England, for the Mini Cooper Festival.

The “Welcome to England” sign made me laugh. The drive was like going from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and yet here we were crossing country borders, sort of.

Rebecca wasn’t laughing. She was driving 200 miles on a week of sleep deprivation and encountering Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams and spring road construction projects every two miles. As we slowly progressed I watched her shoulders rise up to the level of her ears. This was my introduction to certain charming British terms such as “buttock clenching,” and “fuckwit.”

The drive took most of a day. By the time we neared Silverstone, Rebecca was laughing in a way that made me nervous. Once again, as we neared our destination, the skies darkened and the winds rose. We pulled into the campground adjacent to the racetrack and festival grounds at dusk and this time did a little better at pitching the tent. We looked around. We were surrounded by a sea of tents and teepees populated by rag-tag Mini owners from all over the world. We were famished, so we walked and walked and walked until we found the food stalls and bought some extremely overpriced and under spiced curry in a paper cup.

We trudged back to the campsite to use the porta loos before it started raining. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking we should have stayed in Wales.

Springtime of the Daleks

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Have you ever tried to pitch a tent in the dark in a gale force wind? That’s what Rebecca and I did on the second night of our UK road trip.

“Park the car between the cliff and the tent site to block the wind,” I yelled helpfully.

“But the tent is bigger than the car!” Rebbeca pointed out. There was a lot of flapping and flopping and “f—ing!” and hysterical laughing before it was done.

Here is Rebecca blowing up her “lilo,” which is what Brits call an air mattress. She is purposely not looking at me, or she would burst out laughing and end up sleeping on the hard ground.

We got things pretty well organized, then settled down to sleep. Our bodies were the only thing weighing the tent down. We lay there in the dimness watching the top billowing wildly.

In the morning, we crawled bleary eyed out of the tent to scenes like this:

That’s the wonderful thing about seaside weather; it can change within hours. Rebecca made some coffee and porridge on the cook stove with the meths. I still couldn’t get over that that’s what they called camping fuel.

Then it was off on a hike:

If you live in a place with four distinct seasons, like Minnesota with its harsh grey winters, you appreciate the pure bliss of a spring hike. I do believe that our bodies are attuned to the seasons and nature in general, although that connection is blunted by indoor lighting, artificial schedules, and screens, screens, screens. But if you get outside on a spring day and start paying attention to the colors of the sea and the tiny blossoms and the sounds of larks that you can’t even see because they fly so high, very quickly you feel alive—alive, and free, and joyous.

We hiked for hours and said barely a word to one another; it wasn’t necessary. Then we headed into St. David’s via narrow, hedgerow-bordered roads and farm fields.

We learned we would have to return the next day to tour the cathedral, so we wandered around and ended up in the pub, which fortuitously had a pub quiz that evening. We were enjoying our fish and chips with mushy peas and a pint of ale when a crusty farmer sidled up to us and began making marriage proposals. “I’m a millionaire farmer,” he declared. “Ye could do worse.” We laughed at first, until we started wondering if he was serious because he was so persistent. Thankfully the quiz started and he went back to join his crusty friends.

Now, Rebecca and I had been to many pub quizzes in Oxford, where the typical question was, “In which scene of Hamlet does Polonius offer Laertes a string of aphoristic clichés enumerating the shoulds and shouldn’ts of a young man’s life?”

This wasn’t Oxford. The first question was, “What common household items did McGiver use to escape from a drug lord in Season 3? Was it: a fork and spoon, a pen and paper, or chopsticks and a cigarette lighter?” The rest of the questions were based on other great American TV series like the Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team.

Rebecca and I looked at each other and tee-heed. We weren’t going to win this quiz, but this was much more entertaining than playing cards in the tent. We had had a few pints when Rebecca raised her hand. I can’t recall what cheeky question she asked of the quiz master, because as soon as she opened her mouth the whole pub turned and stared.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Ahx-fohrd-shaw,” she replied (Oxfordshire), intentionally overdoing the posh Oxford accent. They all laughed, we laughed, and the questions about McGiver went on for hours.

—

If you ever go for a walk in the country, be sure to bring a flashlight in case you end up walking back to your tent much, much later, in the dark, on unlit country roads after having maybe one too many pints.

Fortunately, Rebecca and I had packed our headlamps, so we had loads of fun impersonating the daleks from Dr. Who:

“You shall be exterminated!”

Croeso i Gymru

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Before I resume my series on the UK road trip I have to mention a meeting I attended today. For those who are new to this blog, I work for an organization that provides psychological and physical rehabilitation to torture survivors. We had a lunchtime talk by an attorney who is representing one of the 70-some detainees at Guantanamo. I can’t repeat much of what he said because it is top secret. Seriously! I’ve always wanted to say that and now it’s true.

Let’s just say that he firmly believes his client is innocent, that his client was tortured severely and repeatedly, and that his client has horrendous, humiliating physical problems as a result. As the attorney described his client’s symptoms I watched as, one by one, we stopped eating our lunches.

Well, I kept eating. I felt like a schmuck but it was my only chance to wolf something down between meetings.

Again, for those of you who are new to the blog, it began when my son Vince went to prison. He was never tortured, unless you count being kept in solitary confinement for a week. However, this attorney described actions taken by Gitmo guards that were just like things done by guards in Minnesota. Mostly, it involved random acts of violation. For instance, out of nowhere they would go into his cell and rifle through his things and scatter them around. They weren’t expecting to find anything; it was about throwing him off balance, making it clear they could do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted, and intimidating him so he would never feel safe.

Now he is home free and doing well. But I found myself feeling upset during the meeting. It’s well understood in our organization that many former prisoners have PTSD from what they endured on the inside. I sometimes think I have what’s called secondary trauma, which is caused by hearing the stories of people who have suffered. So even though I’ve never been in prison I am affected by it. I just needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading.

—

Back to the road trip!

Rebecca packed all our gear into the Micra and we were off to Wales. We agreed at the start that I wouldn’t drive, since I had never driven in Britain and didn’t have an international driver’s license. But mainly it was because every time she took a turn I was inclined to yell, “head on collision!” because in my mind we were in the wrong lane.

It’s only about 200 miles from Oxford to St. David, Wales, but it was spring so road projects had sprung up everywhere, along with the famous bluebells.

We were headed for Abergavenny to spend a night at Rebecca’s brother’s house. The route was clear as a corn maze. I had never encountered round abouts and I asked Rebecca to explain the rules to me.

She tried, but I think it’s one of those things—if you grow up knowing it, you just know it—and you can’t explain it to someone else.

We stopped at an outdoor store to buy fuel for the camp stove, which they call meths. Even Rebecca, a native who had visited Wales many times, was stumped by this one.

Back on the road, I asked, “How is it that Wales is part of the UK but still separate country?” Again, she tried, but it seemed to be another case of “it’s clear and obvious if you were raised here, and it’s hopelessly bewildering if you weren’t.”

We had dinner with Rebecca’s brother and his wife. Rebecca referred to her sister-in-law’s “charming Welsh accent” but I couldn’t hear it. We left their house early the next morning; ominous dark clouds and high winds increased as we drove toward St. David’s.

We found the campground at dusk, and when we checked in, the woman in the office retracted her lips and sucked in her breath. She didn’t tell us we couldn’t camp, but she clucked and fussed with a worried frown on her face before she finally pointed out our site, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea.

How’s that for a cliff hanger? Ha ha ha.

The Original Woodstock

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This is the second post in a series about a road trip across England and Wales that starts here.

It was May. It was still wintery in Minnesota but spring was well underway in England when I arrived. Rebecca lived in Woodstock, a small, charming town outside of Oxford most famous for Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill was born. The palace is okay, if you like that kind of thing.

My favorite aspect of Blenheim is the grounds and “pleasure gardens” which surround it. You can literally walk for hours and never see another human, just sheep. And the old trees…it just doesn’t get much better.

I could step out of Rebecca’s door, walk one block past the public entrance to Blenheim, then slip into the “neighbor’s gate.” I don’t understand how it all works, but apparently the Duke of Marlborough, who is the current occupant, must allow the public access to hike and enjoy the grounds. But you have to know there’s a no-fee gate, otherwise you’ll pay £14.90 just to walk in the gardens. Here are the two gates:

Woodstock is an expensive place to live. It has quaint shops full of locally-sourced organic gluten-free wool jumpers and cozy old pubs like The King’s Head, the Bear, and the Black Prince. People come from Oxford and London for the weekend to shop and eat and see Blenheim.

Rebecca’s address was The Maisonette, 1 Brown’s Lane. Maisonette just means “little house” in French. The building was just like the church where we had met—everything crooked, cramped, and damp—except it was about a hundred years older and had enjoyed that much less maintenance and upkeep. The ground floor was an antiques shop called The Dickens House, and the building/shop owners, believe it or not, lived below it in the windowless basement.

Rebecca and her flat mate had a three-bedroom, two-story flat above the shop—thus the term maisonette. It’s very common for flats in the UK to come furnished, with everything from (of course) furniture to appliances like toasters and kettles, down to the silverware and dishracks. The maisonette was furnished with the leftover antiques from the Dickens House, which were dark and heavy and took up so much space there was barely room to walk. The chairs and sofa were upholstered with worn puce velvet and the carpet was some sort of dark teal astro turf. The living room walls were adorned with William Hogarth prints depicting the 18^th Century gin epidemic.

Charming!

The Maisonette was located next to the public pay urinal and across from the one party pub that had some sort of heavy metal karaoke night, so Rebecca had her own personal gin epidemic on the weekends.

Her flat mate was never there because she worked two jobs in two other towns—as a DJ in Oxford and as some sort of communications officer for a nature preserve way out in the boondocks. I stayed in the spare room, in which was stuffed a queen sized bed, more antiques, and the flat mate’s boxes and bags of stuff which I had to crawl over to get to the bed, which was perfectly comfortable.

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So I flew to London, took the bus to Oxford, and Rebecca picked me up in front of the Ashmolean Museum, which was our usual pickup place, and we headed to Woodstock to pack everything into Rebecca’s Nissan Micra.

Yeah I had a Mini, but she had a Micra, into which we—well she, really—meticulously packed my suitcase, her hiking backpack, the tent, sleeping bags, cook stove, food, a cooler, and other camping gear for our two-week camping road trip.