We had a great first day in Ericira. We started by walking  over to the Casa Paço De Ilhas where Brit and Bran are getting married. It was an easy mile walk… It’s a sweet place… part centuries old ruin and part modern hobbit house hotel.. We took a look around, said hi to soem friends.. then started walking back to our place by the back road.. On the way we coincidentally ran in to Bran… and then a few minutes later Brit..

A bit later, DIane and I took a run up the coast a short bit to the town of Ribomar… we then walked out to the point of an old fort.. then ran back along the cliffs towards home. Such pretty country !

 

We actually rean into our friend Olivier on the road.. he’d  just biked in from Porto for the wedding (Brit is his sister in law) .. totally coincident timing 

That afternoon  there  was a sweet gathering at the Casa Paco to kick off the week. Great gatherign with spectacular food.. Fresh Chimichura !

 

Its gonna be a fun week !

nite all. nite sam 

-me

Today woudl be Sam’s 31st birthday. I woke today (and many days) wondering what he’d be up to by now.   

Our custom is to climb a mountain like Bolton  on Sam’s birthday and the day he died. We go up to the fire tower there and put a samstone  there.. soemtimes we light a firework. SOemtime we go with others.. soemtimes by ourselves. When we’re not in Vermont, we ask folks to mark Sams birthday in whatever way they’d like… Today we’re in London and heading to Portugal. We’re in the middle of a great trip, we’ll all be together.. and that always brings us even closer to Sam.. 

Happy birthday my son. We love you and miss you and think about you  all the time ! 

We woke early finished packing , closed up the very nice airbnb and headed to the airport.. We got there early and used the extra time at the airport to try out all of the lounges we could get in to.. Kinda fun if you like crowded noisy places.. at least we found coffee !

THe flight to Portugal was quick.. and we had no trouble meeting up with Max and Becky who’d gotten there an hour earlier.. We picked up the car and headed to Ericera.

We checked out our excellent AirBnB.. checked out the hotel where Brit and Brans wedding is happening then went in to check out the town of Ericera.. It’s a really sweet surfing town about an hour west of lisbon.. Super 

 

We placed a samstone together out in a hole on the stone wharf  which felt good !

 

 

we went back to the hopuse and made a ‘cake’ for sam out of the stuff we had around, cookies, dulce de leche , and sour patch rope 🙂 

 

 

It felt so good having the family together …   

We love you Sam !

-me

Today was our last full day around London. We’d talked about checking out some science venues either in Cambridge or Oxford.. but the logistics of getting out of town sounded like too much to take on.. and we still had much we wanted to see in London. We specifically wanted to see the natural history museum.. which turned out to be a very good choice !

We got there around 10 AM and began exploring. The museum building  itself is amazing… every nook and corner had things to see. 

We started by looking at all the animal stuff.. including the evidence that Darwin used to arrive at his theories on evolution.

 

Then we headed to the minerals.. they had rooms and rooms (and rooms) of mineral displays, including a ‘herkimer diamond’.. a kind of quarts that diane has on her necklace. 

then some dinosaurs !.. an amazing collection !

 

We spent about a half a day at the Museum of Natural History.. we took off from there to check out the Welcomme (yes … two ‘M’s” ) across town..we ran into a guy playing a flaming tuba !

 

The Welcomme collection was quite different than we expected. It was an eclectic collection of human health exhibits.. it was very political.. most of the displays had to do with inequity.. .. it was cool.. but more politicalized than I liked.   It was very well thought out.. there was a big display about the inequities of Milk.. including the false health claims over the years… and  even how milk was used in some antisemitic and racists protests.. because many folks like Ashkenazi jews (like me) and Blacks cant drink milk comfortably.. Pretty unsettling stuff.. but well curated !

Upstairs there was a reading room with more interesting and disturbing stuff. Like the story of thalidomide babies and the way England tried to ‘normalize’ their deformities.. and the story of Henrietta Lacks

It was getting late.. and we were hungry at that point.. Luckily a good friend of ours from the US , Sam Brehm, had seen Gabe’s Instagram and new we were in town. Sam was in our Sam’s grade and had bene a frequent visitor to our house.. She’s in London teaching at am international school after getting a masters in language education from Oxford. She’s about to go back for her PhD in the same topic.  Sam lives in South London. .> We met her at a really nice pub and ate soem great Pub food.. which was on our list to eat !

From the pub.. we took a really great walk down the southbank of the THames.. and over towards where we were staying. Sam was a great tour guide. It was SO great to see her !

Gabe and Sam headed out for a drink.. whiel Diane and I headed back to our Airbnb to pack..

It had been a great last day of our London adventure !

nite all, nite sam 

-me

Now on to day 3 in London…  And it was  also my parents Anniversary.  Love you both.. Miss you Dad ! 

Today was our one trip out of London. Our goal was to head to Blechley Park, the home of the English secret service whose mission it was to decrypt secret German communications during the Second World War. 

We took the tube to Euston Station then took a train to Blechley Park near Milton Keynes.. The trip was only about 35 min. 

Wed misstimed our visit a bit as the museum of computing was not open on Friday.. btut the larger Bletchly park museum was open.. and that turned out to be about as miuch as we could fit into our brains.. The museum is really impressive. Wesley Park started in the 1930s as a secret outpost where English intelligence would gather wireless Morse code communications from the Germans, Japanese and Italians and decrypt them using a variety of methods… Most of them intensely manual. The place was chosen because it was a nondescript rundown manor house. It was retrofit with all sorts of offices and Barricks and canteens… And at one point employed more than 5000 people!… Day in and day out messengers came in on motorcycles carrying written transcriptions of intercepted Morse code messages.… There was a large array of scientists as well as military people there working on cracking the ever more sophisticated codes. The museum is laid out as it was left… Sprawling with a bunch of mix of architecture some of it very old some of it dating from the second world war. You really got a sense of what it was like to be there. We took a guided tour through some of the grounds… We saw the original manor house which had the first 150 people working in it.… We toured the radio center and large parts of the museum where you could see where people translated codes filed them punched cards etc. It really gave you a sense of what it was lik. There were some amazing displays of equipment and personal affects of some of the people who worked here. The most famous of which was Alan Turing .

 

I particulalry liked seeign the equipment including the German Enigma encoding engines and the first digital computers built buy the british to help decode the ciphers. I loved the stories of how the crypologists worked through the complicated moving codes.. It was often an error.. like a retransmitted message that provided the crucial clue needed to decode a secret message. 

I particularly liked learning more about Alan Turing. He was ana mazing mathematician and cryptographer a…. hich most folks know.. but he was also one of the worlds first computational biologists. He had soem very interestign theores abotu evolutionary biology.  He was a key contributer to the computation engines used on code breaking…  His contribiutions to the world were amazing .. but would have been so much more if he’d been allowed ot coninue his work. He was prosecuted asa homosexual and subject to horrible medical treatments to try to ‘fix’ him..  THe treatments made it impossible for him to work.. he chose to end  his own life at age 42.. such a sad story..!

Visiting Bletchly was both fun and exhausting.. It was very cool dropping back into the time where the fate of so many people depended on math !

We grabbed a bite and grabbed the next train back to London

We went eight from our train to the Museum of Novelty  Automation . It is a small place that shows the amazing contraptions from Artist and Inventor Tim Hunkin.. We first came to know his work from the wonderful water clock that once was in Neils Yard.. We used to visit when Diane and I lived in the UK from 1984-86 . The clock is no longer there.. but this museum had more than a dozen of Hunkins peices.. >. You baught tokens..and used them to interact with the exhibits.. they were so amazing and fun !  FOr example.. you put you hand in a cage where an animated dog luncges and growlss a, slobers and snaps at your hand.. the longer you keep your hand in there .. the more you win. Or a game you play by steering a runnign man through a forest of cell phone zombies.. people walkign while looking at the phones… Or another where you put an object into a try and an automata descides whenter its art or not.. or an eclipse booth, or nuclkear control rod insertion gamwe with a defective clw.. or … or .. or…. .. it was nuts !

We grabbed dinner at a fish and chips place that gabe had found on TikTok.. it was soooo good.. Mushy peas and all !

 

Then Gabe left to explore the city a bit on his own.. while diane and I went to have a drink with a freind of a friend Cath G> Cathy is a good friend of my Friend David. They are both many things.. including undersea explorers. tHey met while workign with Ballard on the re-discovery of the Titanic !

It was wonderful getting to know Cathy.. Her husband Tom died a year again.. and she was still working though grief. She  is back out in the world. SHe told us about some  of the cool projects shes working on.. an iron age cite that is half submerged  of the coast of greecwe.. and an undersea city off the coast of napoli..  WHat an amazing person.. and what an amazing life !

We really enjoyed hanign out with Cathy !

We caught an uber home.. what a full day !

nite all nite sam

-me