Sept 10
Flight to London is duck soup. When you’re accustomed to flying upwards of 20 hours, 7 1/2 hours seems like a shuttle.
What evil person invented the Sudoko? No matter how carefully I do them, I always get a faulty one that has a mistake in design that prevents my finishing it. You’d think I’d do something more productive with my flight, so, after encountering one faulty Soduku, I switch to blogging, emailing, not sleeping and other activities.
Here is London at dawn, as we arrive.
 
Arriving in London, and after checking to find that the Cubs had reduced their magic number to seven by beating the Astros, we take the Piccadilly Line, as suggested by our friend, Tom, to the Caledonian Road station (a rather long ride) from which we call Tom, who comes to fetch us.
We are staying with Tom Handler, one of our close friends from back in the 60s. Tom was a solicitor, a partner in the large international law firm of Baker and MacKenzie. Born in Hungary and raised in Australia to which he and his family emigrated from Hungary in 1948, Tom is quite simply a lovely human being. While in London, we spent time with Tom and got to know his brother, Leslie, and his mother Lilly, both of whom were still in Australia. Later, we got to know Tom’s late wife, Adrienne, and to meet his daughters, Rebecca and Sophie. We have stayed in touch with Tom and in recent years have met and gotten to know his friend, Judith. Tom and Judith stayed with us last November in Chicago and it is their invitation that prompted us to make this trip. Happily, we will spend a good deal of time with Tom and Judith on this trip. Because of our close friendship with Tom, he is also connected to some of the other folks we will see, and also is a good friend of Steve Sugarman’s, dating back to 1967-68.
Below is a picnic with Tom, Steve Sugarman, Carol and a friend named Maureen. The other photo is of Tom, with his mother, Lilly, on the right.
 
Here are other photos from a visit in 1985 of another large picnic (we were pretty big on picnics) that include Tom, Adrienne, his daughters, Rebecca and Sophie, as well as his brother Leslie, who was in from Australia, as well as Carol and our daughters. Following are pictures of the Handler and Kanter daughters and of Tom and his girls.
  
Though this is cheating a bit for this post, because it doesn’t involve Tom, here are a few photos of us with Jodi and Wendy on our 1985 trip.
  
Back to Tom. Among his many other talents, Tom is the absolute best letter writer that either Carol or I have ever encountered. Because we stayed in touch largely through letters for many years, we had many occasions to revel in Tom’s letters. I can say, without exaggeration, that the arrival of a letter from Tom was cause for joy and celebration for Carol and me, and we savored and devoured each letter (if one can do both of those things at once). Though I miss his distinctive handwriting on thin, blue paper, Tom managed to retain his wonderful letter writing quality even in emails.
As well as letter writing, though, Tom is a great conversationalist and we spend most of the day and evening talking about a very wide range of topics, from our days together in London to our families and friends to politics. Tom’s Hungarian heritage remains very important to him. He speaks Hungarian to his daughters and grandchildren, as he did at home with Adrienne, who he met on a trip to Budapest in 1969 and asked to join him in London after four meetings. Adrienne died approximately ten years ago. Tom and his daughters each travel back to Hungary, primarily to see members of Adrienne’s family.
Carol and I are delighted to spend these many hours talking with Tom, broken up by lunch at a decidedly uphill restaurant in Highgate, where Tom lives, a 4-hour nap back at his house and dinner, again uphill to a restaurant in Highgate. We return home and retire soon, hoping to be fully on London time when we awake tomorrow.
September 9-10
Crossing the pond, to London. I debated whether to blog. After all, my followers are used to exotic trips in which I need to start with a map of where the hell I’m off to now. Would they be interested in something as, well, mundane as England?
And then, I remembered that I write these as much (or more) for me as for others, and I wanted a record of this trip. So, if this doesn’t interest you, please skim and I promise you something exotic next May.
To be honest, I’m at least as excited about this trip as the more unusual trips we take. Those other trips explore new horizons for us. This one explores old horizons. In a real sense, it’s like time travel.
In1967, I graduated from law school. The Vietnam War was raging and my classmates and I were subject to being called up, dependent on the vagaries of the draft lottery. I explored taking a year “off,” studying at either Oxford or The London School of Economics. Carol wrote to Anna Freud’s clinic in London and was told that they were not at all sure they would be doing anything this year for people who wanted to spend only a year there. Ultimately, I decided that I wanted to be In London, so I turned down Oxford to go to LSE. After meeting with my draft board and disabusing them of the mistaken view they held that I needed their permission to go to London, Carol and I took off for England, both of us for the first time.
Carol wound up having a terrific year at the Anna Freud Clinic, which, after interviewing her and reviewing something she wrote at their request, decided they’d offer her a tuition-free program designed by them specifically to fit her interest. One of the highlights for her was the intimidating experience of delivering a paper to a large audience that was critiqued by Anna Freud herself (Miss Freud liked the paper).
I had not gone to London to improve my mind, and I succeeded in that objective. My masters of law (LLM) program consisted of four unrelated classes that consumed five hours a week. By far my favorite was a class in 16th Century English Legal History in which my four classmates and I with our terrific professor, returned weekly to the world and language of 16th century England. One other class, British Antitrust Law gave me some background for an article that I wrote with my good friend and Northwestern Law School classmate, Steve Sugarman, who was also in England that year. Our piece was published a year later in the Stanford Law Review on the British antitrust response to the American business invasion. Despite the embarrassingly little effort I put forth, I did receive an LLM degree, which may or may not still be around in a closet someplace.
What the year in London gave Carol and me most importantly was a year, free of responsibilities, to soak in life in a foreign country, to overdose on theater, music, opera and ballet, to make some of the friends you’ll hear about on this trip and to foster a lifelong passion for travel that had been whetted on an 11-week honeymoon in Europe and Israel two years earlier. In short, our time in London was life changing, an experience I would not have traded for anything. Going back now affords an opportunity to recall, if not to relive, that magical year.
I am going to sprinkle the blog with some photos from back then. The photos are old, were not very good to begin with and are reproduced here by photographing them in our album with my iPad. So, don’t expect much.
Here I am, leaning against the door of our flat at 69 Canfield Gardens, followed by photos of Carol in our very narrow kitchen and me sitting rather imperiously in a living room chair. Carol is seated on a bench by the Thames, engaged in a book, rather than paying attention to the photographer. And I’m blowing bubbles and sitting above a river.
 
Though we were residents more than tourists, that didn’t stop our engaging occasionally in tourist activities.
Carol’s parents came to visit. Here we are having a picnic and, in another photo, her dad and I are dressed for our outing to the Royal Ascot races. At my request, Carol’s parents purchased and brought with them my first “real” camera, a Nikormat. You can see that I’m totally engrossed in photographing a rock, oblivious to the beautiful Cornwall coast in the background
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So, apologies if this is more nostalgia and old photos than you need. But it does give you a taste of what life looked like to us long ago, when I was much younger and thinner, and had hair in a couple places I no longer do.
May 20-21
(Note: there’s a post from yesterday called “A Final Lazy Day”. Though it’s up on the website, I’m not sure followers were notified. So, if you were not notified and want to see it, you can do that by clicking the “Previous” link at the top of this post.)
As we take what even for us is a very long trek back (34 hours from the time we leave our lodge in Malawi to landing in Chicago–small plane to Lilongwe, 2 1/2 hour flight to Joburg, on to Dulles, with a stop in Accra, Ghana and then fly to Chicago, where Carol and I will attend a wedding five hours after we land), it’s time for some reflections. Here’s one member of our party as we landed in Accra.
This trip was for and about Zoe. And, quite simply, we could not have hoped for a better trip.
Carol and I were in heaven, having this time alone with Zoe. She’s just, well, neat. I can even forgive her failure always to appreciate my offbeat insights, especially because there’s often a smile lurking beneath the eye rolling. She’s good company–curious, witty, self-possessed and very clever. She can hold her own in any irreverent banter, and she had ample opportunity to test that on the trip.
For the most part, the three of us hung out together, but Carol and I each also managed some alone time with Zoe, which I know was special for both of us. And one never has to worry about Zoe in the company of contemporaries of ours, she’s charming and comfortable with them.
The trip was very well balanced, between safaris, Capetown and relaxation, and Zoe enjoyed all of it. We’ve just begun discussing the trip and Zoe, Carol and I all agreed on our ranking of the overall experiences we had in our four stops, the Sabi Sabi lodge in South Africa, Cape Town, Majete National Park in Malawi and our relaxing time on Lake Malawi. We ranked them one to four in the order above, which happened to be the order in which we experienced them, though we all liked each of the spots we visited. Of course, we have a whole lot more debriefing to do on the trip.
I think (and hope) that the trip was a great growth and mind-expanding experience for Zoe, and a wonderful introduction for her to the joys of travel. This was one of our principle goals, and I think it was fully achieved. Clearly, Zoe found the safari experience as magical as we do, which pleased us greatly. I was tickled that Zoe was very into taking photographs, and I see this as a possible area for us to relate to one another in the future.
The trip was well-planned and went extremely smoothly. Kudos again to Jean and Ahdina Zunkel, whom we highly recommend. Carol and I have done some fabulous safaris, so this would not rank as our top game viewing experience. But it was plenty good, and more than sufficient to give Zoe a taste of the thrill of safaris.
For me, photography is a part of travel. But photography clearly was not what this trip was about. I hope I got a few worthwhile photos–and I am intrigued with the out-of-focus night safari shots, which I think may be the photographic highlight of the trip for me. Part of my aim was to document the trip by including photos of Zoe and Carol. So, whatever comes of the photographs will be quite fine with me. And, as I said, I love the fact that Zoe enjoyed the photography as much as she did.
I’ll end where I began this blog, by recognizing how incredibly fortunate Carol and I are to be able to have this experience with Zoe. And Phoebe, who’s two years behind, is already reading and thinking about where she wants to go for her 13th birthday trip. We can’t wait for what we know will be a different, but equally exciting, experience; so, bring it on, Phoebz.
May 19
Our last full day. A bit sad, but it’s been a wonderful run, and it’s probably time to end. At dinner last night, Zoe said that it has been great fun, but she’s looking forward to getting home and seeing everyone. Fair enough.
Breakfast (eggs Benedict) by the beach, then email checking. Zoe finds that she now has nine children signed up for her week-long drama camp that starts June 6. Since the theater piece she’s written to be performed by the campers has only seven characters, she needs to rewrite to add people. I tell her that she can now send a “reminder” to those who have not registered, telling them that there are now only a few spots left. She says that she’s already sent a reminder a few days ago (from Africa!) and that’s what has generated the recent registrations. Zoe has hired Phoebe as her assistant for the camp and is paying her 20% of the take. The kid is pretty amazing.
Zoe and I make a rather unsuccessful snorkeling try. The rocks at the first spot are too slippery and the waves too strong. The second place we try is better and we make it into the water, but Zoe does not feel comfortable, so we give it up and go swimming off the beach for awhile instead.We rest, read, nap and lunch, then Zoe and I are driven into town to see the local life and to take some photos. It’s tough to convince our driver that what I really want to see are the perfectly ordinary scenes of town life. In the end, he sorta buys in, so here are some of the resulting photos.
 
 
  
        Back to the lodge, where a group of about twenty young folks from a local Anglican Church performs some songs and dances. Energetic and rhythmic, but not close in quality to what we heard the other day at St Peter’s.
Zoe, Carol and I enjoy a very good last dinner on the beach, then retire to our cottage, where Zoe and Carol play cards, and I blog and read.
May 18
Well, today was definitely a day off. And we deserved it, as we’ve been keeping a pretty torrid pace, not burning the candle at both ends, as we’ve gotten to bed at a very decent hour, but our (sometimes ridiculously) early starts have made for tiring days. I felt a particular need for the day off, because I didn’t sleep well due to constant itching. Not exactly sure the cause, but it seems to have gone away.
The idea of the place we’re staying at is terrific. The setting is beautiful, it’s decorated with great flair with items made largely at the women’s workshop we visited yesterday, the staff is friendly and the food is very good. The reality of the place, though, is not quite so good. The sand is hard on your feet, the rooms, while large enough (and we have a two-bedroom cottage), do not really provide a place to put stuff. A railing on a small flight of steps would make the room safer. While water sports are available, there’s nobody with a real presence to make use of them easy. The bumpy roads are just the way it is, but you’d be more likely to use them to travel around the island if the suspension in the vehicles were better, less bone jarring.
Anyway, I’m sounding like the ugly American, and I don’t mean to. It’s very lovely here, but not perfect. It’s actually quite a good spot to do what we did today. Nothing. We lazed around, Zoe and I swam some and used the very slow (there I go again) internet. Folks around the world are having whole lot worse days than we are, that’s for sure. It’s sorta nice just to have a day off in a lovely spot.
My camera got a deserved day off, too. I did get photos of a beautiful, green bee eater in the tree outside our cottage, but I’d have to download several hundred photos to get that for you, and you really didn’t want to see the damn bee eater that badly, did you? If you did, let me know, and I’ll send it to you when I get home. For now, how about making do with these iPad photos of our environs, which will give you a pretty good idea of our day.
And, okay, here’s the damn bee eater, too.
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