Merry Christmas to all

It is hard to believe that the holiday season is here, but alas it is. My parents arrived yesterday afternoon, let me tell you a short story of their arrival. Rebecca and I were sitting in Harvey's coffee shop waiting for the X80 bus from Gatwick, it finally arrived and two people slowly waddled off the bus, but they were not my parents. So like transplanted Americans we decided to go to McDonalds for lunch, and after waiting for a table we finally sat down with our meager meal, meant to satisfy and burn an hour until the next X80 bus arrival. Rebecca pulled out our mobile to see that we had missed two calls through all of the buzz of the city centre, and both of the calls were unidentfied numbers. In my mind this could only mean bad news, and as she listened to the message she said "Oh no", this is not what you want to hear when you are expecting your parents from an ocean crossing flight, customs and a two hour bus ride. All that we could understand from my Mom's confusing message was "We are not sure what to do, we don't know where we are, we don't know where to go, but I do see that we are near Queensway" This was enough for us to quickly set off from McDonalds with my milkshake in hand (the coldest day since being in Oxford) and we went out to Queens St. and started walking toward somewhere, not sure if that somewhere was where my parents would be standing by themselves with their luggage. We knew we had two messages on the mobile but we could only access one of them, so in a brilliant move we memorized as much of the first message as possible before deleting it, then we could access the second one, this one said the street intersection they were at. Within 10 minutes there they were looking somewhat lost, somewhat happy, and quite cold as they stood on High St. across from All Souls College and next to University College. It was a nice place to be dropped off if that was the plan, they and we thought that they would be deposited at the bus station, but alas that didn't happen. Anyway they are here, and we have some great plans planned, going to the North, Edinburgh, back to Oxford, London along with some great people to meet while here. So merry Christmas to all, we are enjoying the sites here for the holidays, even this morning there was a hard frost that resembled snow. later
earl