Blog Entry: Home again
Whew! We got back home from London yesterday...and the whole trip was amazing. I’ve only been to London a few times (usually for only a few hours at a time), and I always forget, in-between visits, how amazing that city really is. (And yes, I do know I'm late to the party on this one - people have been raving about how much fun London is for centuries!)
This time, we decided to splurge and have an amazing overnight stay there, so we stayed at the Club Quarters hotel just off Trafalgar Square, which was absolutely wonderful. As we walked on Wednesday night from Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden (where the publishing party was being held), we passed fountains and world-famous museums, cafés and theaters and cinemas and opera houses, lights and crowds...oh, it felt fabulous.
Since MrD was waiting at the hotel with his aunt, we didn’t stay out too late, but on our way back from the party, we kept poking each other in amazement like the country yokels we are: "Look! The coffeeshops are STILL OPEN, even though it’s after eight o'clock!"
So in other words, it’s obviously been too long since we’ve lived in a big city... ;)
I loved, loved, loved the party - it was really and truly one of the best nights of my life - but I’m going to wait to talk about that until I can finally share a piece of publishing news that’s been bursting inside me for about a month now. Very soon, I hope! But even apart from the party, it was just so great to be able to get dressed up and go out with Patrick in an exciting city, and then to spend the next morning being happy tourists with MrD, ogling the lions in Trafalgar Square (his favorite attraction) and spending an hour in the National Gallery before we had to leave to catch our train.
Of course, since the National Gallery is Britain’s national art museum, an hour was only enough to see the tiniest fraction of the paintings there - but it was still absolutely wonderful. It had been way too long since I’d been to an art museum, and although I felt embarrassingly uncultured pointing out stuff to MrD to grab his interest ("Look, sweetheart, there’s a big cow!") at the same time that art students Seriously Studied the paintings beside us...well, uncultured or not, it was still incredibly fun.
Besides that constant click of recognition as we passed Very Famous Paintings, there was the awesome writing inspiration of seeing history come to life in street scenes of eighteenth-century Rome and Venice, portraits of Regency families...and then my absolute favorite painting that I saw yesterday, Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), which was extremely disturbing but also incredibly powerful and dramatic in person.
What’s really cool is that the National Gallery has images of ALL of its paintings online, so you can browse the collection on their site - something I will definitely be doing a lot from now on.
Now we’re back in Wales, in our quiet little town surrounded by our beautiful mountains on every side, and I’m happy to be back...but I’m still glowing with the excitement of the last couple of days. And we definitely have to go back to London again soon!
(You can see the rest of our London photos - and a couple from our day out in Hay-on-Wye - on my flickr account.)