in Life's name and for Life's sake

Well, I survived the night and woke up feeling much better (probably because I had actually slept, and pretty well, except for this really weird dream in which I told Mr. Brei I hated physics because of him).  Breakfast this morning was at the Harington's Hotel restaurant.  First thing I learned (or rather, was reminded of) today: the Brits have very different ideas than the Americans as to what constitutes breakfast food.  This sadly means no waffles, pancakes, or french toast -- nothing upon which I could slather peanut butter and/or syrup!  One thing I noticed is that over here, one generally has more meat as a part of breakfast, and their breakfast sausages are the sort that we'd consider eating for dinner.  I ended up just drinking milk and eating some croissants (which are wonderful anywhere and therefore are Very Good Foods).

After dinner we left for our excursion to Hay-on-Wye.  A little background on the town -- founded in 1961 by Richard Booth, it's now the place with the highest density of books per square mile.  A sign as you drive in proclaims it as "the book town" (you can understand why we went) and its population of 1200 somehow manages to run over 40 bookstores, some of which specialize in certain genres or in antiquarian books.

But before I talk about all of the fun stuff I found in town, I should perhaps relate the tale of our drive to town.  It was supposed to take an hour and a half.  It ended up taking about 3 hours.  Mom and dad had mapped out everywhere we wanted to go months before we even got here using a computer program called Microsoft Autoroute.  But we also have a small GPS device with us, just in case.  Turned out this was a good thing -- the Autoroute directions didn't have the street names for the smaller roads, and pretty much all of the roads we took were small.  We got lost several times and ended up on a few two-lane roads that seemed small enough to be one-lane.  I honestly was rather surprised that we got there, but we did, and though it took more gas than any of us would have liked (and more of my father's cursing), I think it was worth it.

There literally are bookstores everywhere you go.  I think we went into about eight or nine, probably more and I've just lost count.  My only purchases were old science fiction "pulp" magazines: two small-format copies of Analog (February 1969 and July 1979) and two large-format copies (March 1963 and February 1965).  I'm probably one of the few people I know geeky enough to recognize Analog as a big name in the sci-fi world...but trust me, they were the top of the pulp market.  They're still in business, too, I think (which is rather impressive).

We drove back to Bath by a different route than the one we took to Hay-on-Wye (though it still wasn't the one that our Autoroute directions suggested).  I tried to sleep in the car and succeeded for precious few minutes.  We're back in Bath now, and we decided against going to Oxford tomorrow.  It's apparently further out than Hay-on-Wye, and it doesn't seem as interesting as Cambridge, so I'll just have to miss it on this trip.  I was being pressured by my mom and sister to skip it anyway; they want to spend our third day in Bath actually exploring Bath.  Tomorrow we're going to see the Roman baths and the Jane Austen Center (located here because the poor old maid lived and wrote here).

I'm tired, so I think I'm going to take a short nap while listening to the sixth Harry Potter book before eating dinner.  Oh, Richard, we went to a music shop and I looked to see if they had the first Clash album, but sadly they didn't.  I have been listening to the songs you lent me, though, and they're really good!  Hope everyone's having a good start to their summer.