Notes From A Bear's Journey

     Who knew that "a tisket, a tasket" were simply made up words with no meaning (other than to rhyme with "basket"); and here I thought that only the Beatles brought such non-words into our vocabulary.*  But walking into a restaurant or bakery in Cornwall can seem much the same to foreign eyes: cheese & pickle sandwiches, sticky toffee pudding (think molasses flavor), hake, and salt & pepper squid rings (we never found a place that had the tentacles in their calamari, although chef and owner Aaron Janes at the  Harbour Fish & Grill  uses those squid tentacles to help flavor the sauce for what turned out to be a delicious bouillabaisse, simmering carrots, tomatoes, fennel and a host of other seafood).  Make no mistake, the food was delicious to a tee but for the most part the descriptive language in Cornish menus are universal and understood by all in England (except us on occasion).  One example was a restaurant advertising "smashed"...

      England is a land of tradition, as you've likely witnessed with the pomp and circumstance that accompanied the Queen's funeral.  Lines to simply view the coffin with the Queen lying gently in state jumped up to a nearly 24 hour wait at times, the rope barriers making people snake endlessly back and forth through dark and cold as if in a nightmare wait for a ride at Disneyland.  The new King Charles III had gone all out to both honor his mother and to preserve tradition, but also vowed to begin reducing such public outlays starting with his own upcoming coronation, something which would likely occur in the second part of the new year.  He, as a dedicated conservationist, also hinted at the downshifting of the future allocation of "royal" monies, not exactly good news for many of the Windsors used to living off taxpayer funds, cousins and cousins-of-cousins who may have a minuscule relation to royal blood from generations ago and whom many of the public...

     There's still something magical about flying a long distance in a plane, the sheer fact that you and your bag (or bags) are just two of the many "heavy" items on board; throw in a zillion other passengers, then the weight of the plane itself --not to mention the nearly 26,000+ gallons of fuel*--and one has to wonder how this massive mechanical beast even gets off of the ground?  Add in the weight of the air itself (as mentioned in one of my recent posts , thus the use of the term "air" plane) and you sometimes think that the whole thing --this flying that we so often just take for granted-- was magic.  Picture yourself in front of your 24-inch fan set at maximum speed; it is still nowhere powerful enough to tilt itself back, much left break free from its stand and fly across the room.  So double or triple the speed and maybe (if the blades don't fly off, a problem for wind turbines which have to be shut down during high winds), you'd get close to th...

      So here's how I originally started this post: It had been nearly 3 years, and as with many of you, we were more than ready to take a trip on a plane now that there were no more masks or vaccine-testing or unusually long delays due to waiting for a Covid test at the airport.  Yes, airline crews were still getting sick and causing staff-shortages and delays and all the rest; but hey that was happening everywhere.  We, like many fellow impatient Americans, were ready to just go somewhere, anywhere (just look at the record amount of travelers this summer), what the Washington Post titled "Revenge Travel" (see how American that sounds?)  We were ready to temporarily leave behind all the ups and downs back home: the plunging housing market, the rising interest rates, the plummeting stock market, the top secret documents hidden by he-who-must-not-be-named that may have compromised the lives of a few thousand agents overseas, the Russians holding-up inside a...