Walking amongst the ghosts of academic greatness..

Family,

And a good evening to you from across the Pond. First off (and I did have it written down to tell you guys yesterday, for the record) – Saturday was mine and Jenny’s SIX YEAR dating anniversary. Can you believe that? Hard to believe how time has flown, but we were laying down on Friday night, and it suddenly hit us that 6 years ago was our first date (A Knight’s Game to see the band Avalon, in case anyone’s curious). Absolutely amazing.

So, today was another great one. Today we hopped the bus to London Victoria (no Vic Line service due to planned engineering works – C-Web, I did sing a few notes of the song…) and then hopped the express to Britain’s oldest university and truly one of the most revered and reknowned centers of academia on earth – that’s right, today we fulfilled a long time goal and visited Oxford.

The city is absolutely stunning, and I would recommend it to anyone. While Bath remains our favorite day trip, Oxford is now second (Carter – if you’re reading this, don’t think me a traitor because I haven’t hit Cambridge yet).
We hit Carfax Tower first for a look at the city, which was AWESOME. Oxford University is comprised of 39 individual colleges, each of them very beautiful (and charging a fee to get inside). It adds up in a hurry, so you need to pick the ones that you want to see. Some of the highlights of the trip:

1. We saw the original pulpit that John Wesley preached at during his first mission.

2. We saw a blackboard that Einstein used whilst giving a lecture at Oxford. His writing is still on there, and they tried to explain to me how the formula represented general and special relativity when compared to the red shifts of the oscillating universe. I promptly punched the guy and told him if I wanted to hear a foreign language spoken I would have taken a day trip to Moscow.

3. We saw the house where Sir Edmund Halley set up his original observatory between 1711 and 1715 (covered in construction and indicated only only by a VERY small wooden plaque).

4. We saw the first building ever designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

5. We saw the Oldest Library in Europe (the Bodlean), complete with Oxford’s first ever lecture hall.
6. We saw the oldest school at Oxford (FREE!) – Merton College, founded in 1264. THAT’S RIGHT – 1264, two hundred and 28 years before Columbus crashed into the Dominican Republic.

But the highlight was this REALLY cute dive called the Turf Tavern, complete with FANTASTIC fish & chips and 11 cask ales I’d never tried before. So we tried the Turf Tavern Ale, the Hopback Summer Lightning, and the St. Edmunds Golden, all fantastic (and Jenny’s cauliflower and cheese tart will be served in Heaven).
And now we’re back at the flat, where I’m about to put Twilight Book 1 to bed. Jenny is blistering through Book 2, so I expect to start on that one tomorrow. No one give away any secrets!

Okay, that’s all the news that’s fit to print. Tomorrow’s back to work – have a great rest of the weekend!

Love,

Sam and Jenny