I worked two shows of the Beauty and the Beast Broadway in Austin show from the Bass Concert Hall over the weekend. The show was great. My favorite number was “Be Our Guest”; great music and great choreography, including tap.
Between shows, I went up to the balcony on the 6th floor to see the post-sunset sky over the 40 Acres.
I just returned from a fun girls’ trip to Key West. The reason for the trip was to visit Dry Tortugas National Park. Mission accomplished. Here’s a peek at Key West in December.
I believe I have entered my mahjong era. Lori bravely started teaching a few of us this game. Very interesting. And challenging to learn. This is not the mahjong tile matching game you may have seen from days of the first desktop computers. It’s more like a complex version of Rummikub on steroids – LOTS of steroids.
We played two games this afternoon. I learned more each time. Very fun. I look forward to more mahjong play. Thanks, Lori!
It’s December. The Christmas decorations are starting to roll out through the house. It doesn’t all happen on one day. It’s a process.
This morning I was greeted by this lovely scene on the way to the coffee pot. 💛
I love it when Monte wants to experiment with his pizza dough recipe. It’s always excellent, but he always thinks it can be a little bit better. Lucky me.
Ann hosted a brunch today to give us our annual craft challenge. This year it is a pomander! Bonus: it smells great. Thanks to Ann for a fun afternoon. 🧡
I joined my dear girlfriends today for a delicious birthday lunch. And then spent an afternoon at Pease Park.
One of the things I’ve wanted to do since moving here is visit Lost Maples State Natural Area to see the fall foliage. Garner State Park is 30 miles away from Lost Maples. It doesn’t have the maples, but has a fair number of sycamore and cypress trees, which present beautiful fall color.
So, we took a road trip. Along the way, we discovered a nice BBQ place in Johnson City that we’ve probably driven by 20 times before without noticing: Pig Pen BBQ. We also found an adorable French patisserie on the town square in Kerrville called Pookie’s. I recommend both.
We did a double take when we drove by a roadside point of interest in Ingram, Texas. We just had to turnaround, stop and see. It was a close-to-actual-size model of Stonehenge, and, a bonus, a model of an Easter Island head monolith. Oh, the things you’ll find in Texas.
Near Hunt, we also drove along the Guadalupe River, and right by Camp Mystic, silently witnessing signs of the destruction from the July 4th 2025 devastating flood that raged right through there.
At Garner State Park, we stayed in one of their cabins for two nights. This allowed us to stargaze during the peak of the Leonid meteor shower, and we could make a visit to Lost Maples from there for a nice day trip.
Garner State Park is an amazing destination in its own right. It sits on the Frio River, has over 300 campsites, 20+ screened enclosures to camp in, and 20+ cabins like the one we stayed in, which were built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Being November, it was off-season during our visit, but still pretty busy. They have miles and miles of hiking and biking trails. During the season, their concessions are open, including kayak and tube rentals, a grill and ice cream shop, visitor center, a putt-putt golf course, sand volleyball courts, basketball courts, several park stores, and a jukebox dance every night at the pavilion. I can only imagine how busy they get in the summer.
We saw some meteors. And, we found the Fall foliage!
I do love a drive through the Texas Hill Country.
We headed to campus tonight to catch Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. And a few sights along the way.
The tower was nicely lit. It couldn’t have been for the game tonight.
The venue was Hogg Auditorium, which recently finished a renovation. Very nice.
Paul Simon was in attendance and got a shout out from Wynton during the show.
We took Nirvana out for a sail in Sunday’s beercan. We didn’t win the race, but I won the latest battle in mending the jib. My latest repair held nicely in 20+ knot winds. 👍🏼
While we were away, we left a key with our neighbors, so they could use the shop. When we got home, we found that they’d left us a bag of their home-roasted espresso beans on the counter. What a nice welcome home surprise. ☕️🤎
I thought I’d share a few takeaways from our trip on the Queen Mary 2 and our 9-day wander through British history.
October is a great month to book on the Queen Mary 2 and walk around southern England. Not too cold. Not too crowded.
Get a starboard cabin if you are on an eastbound transatlantic passage of the QM2, imho. The winds are usually blowing out of the north, so it made for more pleasant balcony experience.
Never leave home without a tiny tube of superglue. 🙂 On day 2 of our trip the earpiece on my eyeglasses broke off. The weld at the metal lens frame just gave way. I was on a boat for 7 days where the only stores sold expensive bags, art, and watches. Fortunately, the QM2 worker in the store who I asked was one of the jewelry designers. She whipped out her toolbox that had some flexible jewelers adhesive. A dab of that got me through the week, when they broke again. I hit the first Tesco on dry land for my own tube of superglue.
It isn’t always raining in England. For us, it only rained on two of our travel days, and one afternoon when we walked around Portsmouth Southsea along the coast. We, and our luggage, are pretty waterproof so it was fine. Ok, I just did the math, turns out it rained one third of the days we were in England. Which, in retrospect, is a lot. Oh well, it was nice to have the beautiful sunny days that we did. I remember them more vividly than the rainy days.
Be flexible.
Check closure schedules ahead of time for the places you plan to visit.
The British National Rail Two Together Railcard paid for itself several times over. A better deal than 2 Senior railcards, if you always travel together. We took the train 6 times.
Just do it.
Thanks for reading.
💙
This afternoon, we will check out of the hotel and hop on a train to Heathrow airport. I booked a room at the Sofitel at Terminal 5 for tonight so we could have a comfy last night in London, and an easy walk to our gate in the morning.
Our train leaves Greenwich at about 1pm, so we plan to spend this morning seeing a few more sights. The Painted Hall is supposed to be beautiful. It is the former dining hall of the 18th-century sailors’ hospital that the Old Royal Naval College occupies. Its ceilings and walls were painted in the 1700s with stunning scenes celebrating British history. People have compared it to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This we have to see.
After paying about $50 entrance fee for both of us, it was a bit underwhelming. There was a large art installation of sorts inside that had just opened there that day.
What visitors to the Painted Hall expect to see (this is a photo of the brochure):
Nice, isn’t it? This is what we saw:
The giant lamps are nice, but I’d really rather see the ceiling. 🙂 Oh well.
That wraps up our visit to Greenwich. We’re walking to the train station, so of course it’s raining again. We transferred to the Elizabeth Line to LHR and experienced an ominous 20-minute delay about halfway there when the overhead electric lines stopped working. But we kept the faith and eventually made it to our comfy hotel room at the airport. We celebrated Halloween with Shepherd’s pie and a bottle of wine.
Our flight home tomorrow is a 10-hour direct flight to Austin. Nice and easy.
What a great trip.
Links for the curious:
The Painted Hall website to plan your visit. They have a well-done 3D virtual tour that’s worth a look, whether or not you’ve already visited in person.
Where to stay? If you want to stay at the airport, and specifically Terminal 5, Sofitel is your best bet. The Elizabeth Line from London runs to each terminal at LHR. It’s an elevator ride and an easy walk from the railway station to the hotel reception desk.
Up on the hill, behind the Queen’s house, is a large green space called Greenwich Park. I could have spent hours just walking around this park. It’s lovely. At the top of the hill sits the Royal Observatory, commissioned by King Charles II in 1675. This morning, we headed up the hill to see it.
Ok, first, some historical context. You’re a sailor in the late 1600s. Your ship navigates close to shore by piloting using well-documented coastal landmarks, bearings, and charts. When out of sight of land, your ship navigates using dead reckoning, which uses your last known position and your speed and heading to estimate your current position, but that is fraught with potential for error. Better, you can calculate your latitude (your north/south location on the globe) by measuring the angle of the sun at solar noon at your location using a quadrant and declination tables. But accurately determining your east/west position at sea, your longitude, was not yet an easy thing to do. On dry land, one could measure the transit of moons across the face of Jupiter and use celestial tables to calculate longitude. But it’s not easy to do on a boat moving on the sea.
The Royal Observatory was established in 1675 with the express charter to “find out the so much desired Longitude of Places for perfecting the art of navigation.” Work began at the Flamsteed House, by the first Astronomer Royal and his successors, to accurately map the celestial bodies. This culminated in the publication of the first Nautical Almanac in 1767. This aided in estimating longitude based on celestial observations, but still difficult to do at sea.
A second, more desirable method to determine longitude would be based on timekeeping. The Earth is divided into 360 degrees of longitude. The Earth turns 360 degrees in a 24-hour day. 360 degrees / 24 hours = 15 degrees of longitude per elapsed hour. The British Navy arbitrarily established Greenwich as its 0 degrees longitude, for the purposes of maritime navigation and charting. If you know the time at Greenwich when you observe local solar noon where you are, you can calculate your longitude. For example, if it is solar noon where you are (12:00pm), and you know that it is also 2:00pm in Greenwich, you can calculate your longitude as 2 hours x 15 degrees per hour, or 30 degrees earlier than (or west of) Greenwich. In the 17th century, though, to know the time in Greenwich required a timepiece that you set to Greenwich time when you left England, and which kept time accurately while at sea months later. In 1675, such a clock did not exist. That was the longitude problem.
In 1714, the British Parliament introduced the Parliament Act, which put up a prize of 20,000 pounds (about $2M today) to whoever could create a timepiece that met specific criteria of accuracy at sea.
In 1730, a woodworker named John Harrison attempted to build a timepiece to meet the criteria of the challenge. It took him 5 years and required learning the principles of metallurgy, but he did it. His first prototype was called “H1.”
Time trials proved it worked. However, he was paid only 500 pounds of the 20,000-pound prize. Harrison thought he could improve upon it, so he created three more prototypes over the next 25 years.
After H3, he changed his design altogether, from a clock to a watch. The result was H4.
Time trials on the H4 proved its accuracy, and work began on making additional copies, to prove how replicable the design was. Only after entreaties to the king was John Harrison eventually paid the full 20,000-pound prize, when he was in his eighties.
It’s all history now, but the next time you pull out a GPS to find your lat/long position on your boat, think about the work of John Harrison.
So, let’s discuss time a little bit more. By the 1800s, Britain’s nautical charts, which all used Greenwich as the 0 degree meridian, were becoming the global norm, though there were numerous other meridians used by other countries. In 1884, there was a global conference to declare what would become the Prime Meridian going forward. At the end, Greenwich’s meridian was declared as the Prime Meridian, to be used not only for navigation, but to establish a global basis (Greenwich Mean Time) for the 24 global time zones going forward. The location of the Prime Meridian is marked at the Royal Observatory by a metal line that intersects the observatory where the equatorial telescope sat that was used to create all the celestial tables, and proceeds out through the courtyard, and across the globe.
Greenwich Mean Time impacted everyday life beyond navigation at sea. After the Meridian Conference of 1884, the Prime Meridian at Greenwich was used as a global zero degrees longitude for navigation. Prior to that, individual towns maintained their own local times based on local solar noon, with some amount of error, obviously. But the trains must run on time! By 1847, the expanding railways had adopted GMT as their standard for timekeeping as well. By 1855, most public clocks were using GMT as well. To facilitate this, the Royal Observatory established a clock that kept official GMT time, and which emitted electrical impulses that went out on wires, to sync clocks across the country.
A red Time Ball was added to the top of the Royal Observatory that would raise to the top of a mast at 12:55pm each day, and fall at 1:00 pm GMT. It was observed by ships in the Thames below to synchronize their timepieces on board before setting out to sea – so they could reliably calculate their longitude on their journey.
Pretty damn cool.
I have often thought out loud that I have lived during one of the most exciting times – with the evolution of technology, computing, and the internet, and whatever else is happening these days. But as I think about the history I’ve absorbed over the last week, there has been no shortage of innovation across the centuries brought to life by meticulous and hard-working people that just wanted to solve the problem at hand.
By the end of a full day, the clouds were gathering again with rain, so we headed back down the hill to our hotel.
Links for the curious:
Royal Observatory Greenwich website, to plan your visit.
About 10 years ago I read a book by Dava Sobel, called “Longitude.” It tells the story of John Harrison and his quest to solve the longitude problem. Check it out if you’re interested in more information. I enjoy her books, which I would classify as scientific non-fiction (?). She delves into historical figures and science topics. “Galileo’s Daughter” was the first of her books that I read, and I try to read the rest of them as I find them.
Sheila365 