My Travel Adventures

There were still two weeks to kill before I could move back into my accommodation at Oxford, and I spent them at the house of two friends in Hampton in Arden, a quaint village just outside Birmingham. Until writing this blog post, I often wondered but never bothered to find out what exactly an Arden is and why anyone would want to build a Hampton there. It turns out Arden was once a large forest in Warwickshire that gradually gave way to settlements like Birmingham, Coventry, and Stratford-upon-Avon. It is thought the word would have meant something like “highland” in Brythonic (meanwhile, the name “Hampton” derives from the very pedestrian words “home” and “town”).

A few days in bright and hot California made my return to Britain very pleasant. No longer would I have to put on sunscreen just to go outside, nor would I have to strategise how to stay in the shade on my walks. It occurs to me, however, that for a country that constantly has to deal with rain, the UK does not do so very well. My bus to Oxford was delayed by a quarter of an hour, and it arrived at least half an hour later than it should have. It reminded me of my arrival in Oxford two months ago, when major delays had been caused by a heatwave. Clearly, the dysfunctionality of UK traffic is chronic, and the weather is just an excuse. Whether it be heat, rain, or snow, there is always some (usually only slightly) inclement weather condition that throws a wrench into theoretically perfect timetables.

There is not much to write about the final day of our road trip except that we have finally made it. At noon, we arrived in Stanford, where Kelly will soon begin her PhD program. Nevertheless, we could not begin her move-in today, as she had to undergo a test for tuberculosis at the university’s clinic. The justification for this requirement continues to baffle me, as the vaccination rate in East Asia is way higher than what America could ever dream of, and Kelly has not even left the country since taking a TB test for her last program. Coupled with some bureaucratic miscommunication, the whole episode threatened to cut our trip short, but things turned out well in the end.

The penultimate day of our journey was more chaotic than we expected. Our use of the words “cursed,” “janky,” and “unhinged” had been high from the beginning but today, it shot through the roof.

Today was a grey day and the first day – barring the morning that followed our exhausting night at the hiker’s lodge in Grand Teton – when I was woken up by my phone’s alarm. For the first time on this trip, it started to feel like autumn; some leaves were changing colour, and some were falling to the ground, while the temperature dipped into coat-wearing territory. At first, I found this change relieving for my arms, which the sun had been roasting every minute they spent extended towards the steering wheel. Throughout the day, however, we would come to ascribe our exceeding weariness to the dreary weather.

Today was our last day with Lekha, and we spent it by performing typical tourist tasks. Ingeniously, Kelly cooked up a plan to take the hotel’s free shuttle to the airport, from which we took the light rail downtown.

We took the day slowly, eating a leisurely breakfast before driving up Hurricane Ridge Road into Olympic National Park. The drive was quite narrow and steep, and the bright sun made every shadow all the more difficult to make out. Confused by the lack of signage, we parked the car short of the Hurricane Hill trailhead, and thus accidentally added a bit of distance to our 3.4-mile hike. It was on this stretch, however, that we spotted two garter snakes. Or rather, it was on this stretch that some members of our party screamed after almost stepping on a snake, which we have since identified as a harmless garter snake from my photos.