Law, Partially

While our little boy had taken ill on his long weekend in the Cotswolds, a healthy bouncing baby boy across the Atlantic was clamoring to meet him. Three best buddies hanging out at Rachel House. The London Linges have spent a good amount of time in DC over the years, making it our most visited city outside of the ancestral homeland in Cedar Rapids. Our last days in the US before moving to London were spent as guests of Gugu in DC. See last year's blog entry  and  the other . The year before, DC was the last trip of Mum and Baba before Bob was born. August is vacation time in Europe, more so on the Continent than in the UK, but August in a UK office is slow, and many London restaurants close for the month. So fourteen months after our most recent, very enjoyable stay in DC, we were packing up in London for a two week trip to DC. There we expected to find the 2018 Catalina Wine Mixer, with Linges from far and wide coming to adore the new babe, Lincoln Kevin. But we kn

The Cotswolds are an "Area of Outstanding National Beauty." Under England's (and Wale's) AONB scheme, changes to the landscape are limited by law. So in the Cotswolds we end up with these rolling, grassy hills dotted with medieval stone villages of golden limestone, looking just how you would expect the English countryside to look. Bobby dashing through the village common in  Kingham , a small Cotswolds village where we had dinner at the Kingham Plough, an upmarket pub (many, or most, of the pubs in the Cotswolds seemed to be upmarket). We had occasion to pass this fine weekend in the Cotswolds because I had a Thursday meeting in Birmingham. Birmingham is about a one and half hour train ride from London, so on Wednesday I loaded the family on the train with me. We spent two nights in Birmingham, famed for its early entrepreneurial role in the Industrial Revolution, now laced with old canals and warehouses and more recent waves of redevelopment. On Friday we