Day Two: Carlisle - Street Walking

Sitting in our hotel room by the window, overlooking Greenmarket Square, praying two children take their naps sometime soon. There is a community band playing in the gazebo.

These kids are craking each other up, each in their own beds. There is also a carousel knocked up in the square, which several family members have indulgently taken them on four times each - and at £2 a pop, too. No wonder they can't get to sleep.

We are staying at the Crown and Mitre, surely the best hotel in Cumbria. The service is just excellent. I forgot, you don't tip room service here - I left a pound on each of the three beds ... and found a pound sitting neatly next to each pillow upon my return this afternoon.

We had an extremely indulgent birthday dinner here atthe hotel for Adrienne last night, each of us at different intervals struggling to keep our sanity and our lunch as we struggled to fight off jet lag. The wine didn't help in this regard, but it was an excellent meal. I thought Zelda did particularly well, she had convinced herself that she had had a full night's sleep the night before because she slept until the sun came up. But her behavior at dinner, at bit fractious at the beginning, was merely as loopy as the rest of ours by dessert.

Orson did what he usually does, which is eat everything in sight. Especially soup. He really, really loves soup.

My family was in bed by ten. We woke twelve hours later when Kelly came knocking at the door. So much for the complmentary breakfast. It was switfly decided that Toni would join the rest of the women to catch a bus to see Hadrian's Wall, and that the kids and I would skulk about Carlisle.

I am sure Toni felt guilty about my missing the wall, but there was no time to get the little ones fed and bathed and clothed and on the bus. For those who are unfamiliar, Hadrian's Wall was the outer edge of the Roman Empire, a great barrier to keep those maurauding Scots out. The greatest empire history had ever known, under attack, nearing its end, running out of ideas, decided to put up a big old wall.

Insert ironic statement here. What I said was, "Nah, I don't need to see it, I'm living in it."

I had no idea what to expect from central Carlisle, but we couldn't have picked a better day to spend time out in it. It's warm and sunny, and the place is just crowded, there's lots of shops, and as I mentioned, plenty of outdoor entertainments.

There are several arcades (I mean walk-throughs that have shops in them, not he game kind) and one featured this lovely not-fountain with bronze otters playing in it. I say not-fountain because the center circle is glass made to look like water with light beneath it.

We had lunch at the Prior's Restaurant, in the former Friary of Carlsile Cathedral. Orson wanted the "pizza" which was actually a red pepper and ricotta quiche, and lentil soup. He ate his and Zelda's. She had cheese on toast and part of my salad. Some women who were seated next to us assured me it wasn't a long walk to Carlisle Castle, but suggested it might not be too interesting for the small ones. I wasn't too sure about that, and I hope I didn't err by not going, because the cathedral was right there and we opted to look at that, and that was brief and interesting. All trips to churches are interesting when your children aren't being taught to worship anything. That and all the dead people under the floor.

Last night we met Libby, our contact for the performance at St. Cuthbert's Church, where we will be perfomring tonight. The crowd is expected to be small, so we will be in a room roughly the size of the fellowship hall I was in last year in Wandsworth. As always, I am concerned about tech. There's no screen for the projector, so we will be setting up something like an easel to cast the slides onto. Also, we haven't had to work with an integrated computer system since Nick incorporate the sound into the PowerPoint presentation, so it will be a mystery as to how acceptable the sound will be coming from the projector. But it is, as I said, a small room.