Loreen!

I got to see Reenie today!  One of my good friends’ mums from Battle Creek was in London with her sister.  Her sister was at a conference; Loreen was just having some well-deserved fun after finishing another 1000-mile walk along the lakes of the United States.  Reen is a published author and quite the Great Lakes explorer – check out http://www.loreenniewenhuis.com/1_bio/index.html.

Anyways, we had a lovely time catching up and exploring London a bit.  Loreen knows the city much better than I do, as I’ve only been where the Marshall Orientation took me.  I will be going back to the city next week during part of my school’s Reading Week (i.e., no classes or seminars), so hopefully I’ll see a bit more then.

My favorite part of the day, though, was when my train was delayed…because there was a cow on the track.  Yes, indeed.  Welcome to the United Kingdom, where things that you mock in romantic comedies as being unrealistic actually do happen.  I was not, however, rescued from the cow delay by a Scottish lord on horseback.  Which is really more than fine with me.  For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, please ignore.  Just know that rom coms really are rather egregiously ridiculous.

Then again, perhaps a Scottish lord wouldn’t have gone amiss…unfortunately, someone took majorly ill in a train at a station ahead of us.  Because of the emergency services dispatched, our train was freakishly delayed.  At one point, they announced our train would be terminating early and we’d have to find other connections to our final destinations.  And then we proceeded to pass right through the station they’d told us we were stopping at…the poor conductor doing the announcing was as confused as the rest of us.  Turns out we did go straight to London, but we didn’t make all of the stops we’d planned, I don’t think.  In any case, Loreen and I found each other eventually, but it was not exactly the easy in-and-out of London I had been expecting!  We had a lovely day, even though we didn’t make the wonderful lunch reservation Reen had made.  Alack and alas.