From A Distance

This would be our last day in London and we raced to squeeze in two final sights.  Burk really wanted to visit Hampton Court, as he had memories of visiting as a child.  I do not mean to keep drawing parallels between England and France, but again, this in no way could compete with the incomparable beauty of Versailles.  It was raining but I still wanted to go through the hedge maze.  It reminded me of the hay mazes they make in Texas in autumn (even better when they use tall rows of corn.)  Our little one looked very British in her tiny floral raincoat as we tried to dodge muddy puddles and make our way to the center.  Someone was good enough to take our picture so we have this as a memory.  As I have often said, my husband and I are true museum junkies.  The one exhibit he missed when we were kids and I got to see has always been my favorite:  Pompeii.  It was haunting and fascinating and has remained ingrained in my memory for almost all of my life.  My parents and I went to see it when it came to Fair Park in Dallas in the seventies.  I had always wanted to visit the Museum of London, which contains the largest urban history collection in the world.  It houses more than six million artifacts.  We already knew we could not possibly do it all and planned ahead of time what we each wanted to see most.  Choosing was exceedingly difficult.  When I discovered the Pompeii exhibit was currently on display, I told Burk we HAD to see it!  I saw the same images frozen three dimensionally in time that I remembered from so long ago plus there were new artifacts they have unearthed in the last almost thirty years.  Between the jaunt out to the palace and combing the museum, we were exhausted.  The English novelist Sarah Hall said, “You can’t see all of a place until you look at it from a distance.”  Of course we did not get to cover everything, but we gave it a good go, as they say.  Taking off on the jet the next day we looked out and got to see it all … from a distance.

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