After a blessedly uneventful 8-hour direct flight from the Twin Cities to London, we breeze through customs (our letters from Wycliffe Hall explaining our mission were quite helpful in that regard)and were met by a pleasant middle-aged woman dressed in a sort of real-estate agent dress and jacket holding a "Eurospring" sign. She directed us to our coach (what Americans know as a tour bus) and before we knew it, we were on the left-hand side of the road to Oxford.
Our bus driver, Allan, gave everyone their first experience with the wonderful, hard-to-understand British accents. His was thick, broad and dramatic, as were the multiple tattoos all down his hairy arms. He'd been to America before -- Carlyle, Pennsylvania, to be exact -- to visit some relatives. Didn't have much to say about it.
He did have a bit to say about politicians ("They're all crooks!") and how to stay awake after a trans-Atlantic flight ("Drink two Red Bulls and Mars Bars"). He also told us it was his wife's birthday today. "What do you want for your birthday,my love?" he asked her. According to Allan, she replied thus: "A widow's pension would be nice!" He thought it was pretty funny.
Just as I was beginning to stereotype him, he waxed eloquent about all the gorgeous yellow daffodils blooming along the roadside. "We had to memorize a poem about them in school," he said. He then proceeded to recite the entire Wordsworth "Daffodils" poem ("I wander'd lonely as a cloud. . .")
He said he'd probably be our driver for our first field trip next week. I look forward to seeing Allan again.
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