We left Lisbon on August 3 and flew to London.
Our luggage apparently had other plans.
It took nearly two hours to arrive, but eventually it did. We made our way to 1 Hotel Mayfair, had something to eat at the hotel and went to bed.
There was a time when two hours waiting for luggage might have colored the entire evening.
It didn't.
That was becoming a pattern.
London
London is one of those cities where centuries seem stacked on top of one another—royal palaces, churches, government buildings and monuments surrounded by the energy of a modern global city. I'd been to England before for work, but this was our first opportunity to spend a couple of days exploring central London.
We only had two full days.
Not nearly enough.
Our first morning began as many of our mornings now did: coffee in the room, breakfast around 10, then eventually out the door.
We walked to Buckingham Palace, visited the Churchill War Rooms, tried unsuccessfully to get tickets to Westminster Abbey, saw Big Ben and rode the London Eye.
I'm glad we did the Eye.
I don't need to do it again.
We walked a lot, found an easy dinner at Farmer J, then returned to the hotel in time for my mastermind call. Afterward, Shirley and I shared a bottle of wine and went to bed.
The following day we took a hop-on-hop-off bus.
We sat on the open upper deck and happened to be at Tower Bridge when the bridge opened to let a ship through. We got off near the Tower of London, walked to the river, took a boat cruise and then simply wandered streets we hadn't seen the previous day.
We ended up back at Farmer J for dinner.
London was packed with tourists.
There was plenty we didn't see.
And that was fine.
We'd stopped feeling the need to see everything simply because we were somewhere.
Two days in London did tell us one thing:
We need to come back.
Not for another two-day sightseeing blitz.
For a longer stay.
Heckfield Place
Heckfield Place is a restored Georgian country estate in rural Hampshire, surrounded by gardens, farmland, woods and open countryside. It isn't really a hotel you use as a base to see other things. Staying there is the experience.
We left London late in the morning on August 6 and headed into the Hampshire countryside for Heckfield Place.
I had mentioned to Shirley several times by then that there was absolutely no way I wanted to drive in England. I understood intellectually that everyone drove on the left. My brain, however, seemed unwilling to participate. Even as a passenger, intersections and roundabouts kept looking wrong.
Having someone else do the driving was just fine with me.
We arrived in the early afternoon and joined an estate tour before settling into our room.
Then we went to dinner.
And apparently ruined food for ourselves.
We started with a peach and burrata salad with San Daniele ham.
When the server initially offered us bread, we declined.
Then the salad arrived.
We took one look at the dressing and immediately called the bread back.
There was no chance we were leaving that dressing on the plate.
The salad was extraordinary.
We shared a main course of pork with figs, celery and capers, along with crispy potatoes and a salad.
Everything was wonderful.
We shared dessert too.
I remember thinking there was absolutely no way I could eat like this every night.
We proceeded to try.
This Is Perfect
The next morning, the blackout curtains performed their primary function, and we slept until nearly 8.
We made pour-over coffee in the room.
It was delicious.
We lounged around and didn't shower until around 9.
Eventually we made our way to breakfast.
Shirley looked around and said:
"This is perfect."
I laughed.
By then I had started invoking The Lego Movie.
Everything is awesome.
And apparently it was.
We'd developed a completely different daily rhythm.
Dinner later than we used to eat at home.
Read or relax afterward.
Lights out around 10 or 11.
Nine or ten hours in bed.
Wake around 8.
Coffee.
Talk.
Eventually shower.
Scramble to make breakfast around 10.
Return to the room.
Maybe head out around noon.
There was almost nothing in the schedule that required us to be anywhere.
And we seemed to be settling into it remarkably well.
Tea and Cake
Then we discovered afternoon tea and cake.
We had it one afternoon around 3:30.
The next morning Shirley was already reminding me that whatever walk we took that day needed to get us back in time for tea.
At one point I looked at the clock.
12:30.
I joked that we only had three hours until tea and cake.
This was becoming a very demanding lifestyle.
The New Shirley
But something more interesting than tea and cake was happening at Heckfield.
Shirley was changing.
Or perhaps shedding things.
She wasn't ironing her shirt every day.
She wasn't wearing makeup every day.
She was walking around in her hiking shoes.
On our final morning she plugged in her curlers.
Then decided:
Never mind.
At breakfast she said her friend Cari wouldn't recognize her.
Neither, she thought, would some of the people we see every year in Maui.
Food was changing too.
One night we ordered flatbread with eggplant and another peach salad, this one with puréed almond and garlic underneath it.
Both were amazing.
Shirley announced:
"I like eggplant."
Add it to the increasingly unreliable list of things Shirley supposedly doesn't eat:
Ceviche.
Calamari.
Octopus.
Beets.
Eggplant.
At Sunday Supper, the chefs served another eggplant dish.
This one was sliced and charred, then allowed to steam with olive oil, herbs, lemon, lemon zest and salt before being served over tahini.
We asked the chef why their vegetables tasted so good.
Part of the answer was that much of what we were eating had been grown right there on the estate.
Whatever the reason, Shirley ate the eggplant.
Again.
And again announced that she liked it.
Apparently this was official.
The Albino Deer
One afternoon we were walking around the property when Shirley spotted something moving through the woods.
It was white.
Larger than a deer, she thought.
She didn't know what it was.
I suggested a Yeti.
Shirley pointed out that it had four legs.
That seemed to weaken my theory.
Later, while sitting on the patio, we spotted deer in the fields. One of the staff told us that if we waited, they might come closer.
And perhaps the albino deer would join them.
Mystery solved.
Shirley had not discovered a Hampshire Yeti.
Everything Is Awesome
The joke about Everything Is Awesome started to feel like it was describing something real.
At Heathrow, we'd waited two hours for our bags.
I had been mildly frustrated.
Another passenger from our flight was furious.
Shirley simply found a seat.
It'll get here when it gets here.
Then she reminded me about Casablanca.
A woman restocking drinks in the airport lounge had dropped a case of Coke. One can exploded all over Shirley.
She cleaned herself up, returned to the table and calmly told me what had happened.
Years earlier, I can't help but think either incident would have registered differently.
Now?
Not particularly important.
Shirley joked that people might think she'd taken Prozac.
But I thought something more fundamental was happening.
The little problems weren't getting in the way of the good stuff anymore.
Maybe We Could Live Like This
We also spent some of our time at Heckfield imagining what our life could look like from here.
We searched for short-term rentals around England.
Then we started playing with an imaginary year.
Three cruises.
Three expeditions.
Eight hotel stays of about six days each.
Ten short-term rentals of roughly three weeks each.
International flights.
Local transportation.
Meals.
We threw rough numbers at everything.
I totaled it up.
Then sat there looking at it.
We could do this.
I was still having trouble believing that.
Not that we could afford to take a great trip.
That we could actually live this way.
And the possibilities seemed endless.
At breakfast one morning, we talked about becoming more intentional about the experiences we wanted to have rather than simply shotgunning destinations.
We had recently been talking about another solar eclipse trip that could include places like Lymington, Falmouth, the Isle of Wight, Gijón and San Sebastián.
None would have been on some master bucket list.
Then I mentioned that we hadn't even begun talking about visiting Africa again.
Shirley said:
"There's too many places I want to see."
That seemed like a pretty good problem to have.
The Last Morning
On August 10, I actually set an alarm for 7.
We had a 10:30 transfer to Southampton and, given our newly acquired morning habits, I wasn't confident we'd otherwise be ready.
I made coffee in the room.
At breakfast Shirley ordered a double espresso.
I quickly reminded her that she really wanted a double cappuccino.
Then she asked to taste my coffee.
I handed it to her.
She actually wanted to taste the carrot, apple and ginger juice I was drinking.
Apparently neither of us was fully awake.
We sat outside for breakfast.
It was cool and breezy and beautiful.
Shirley had abandoned the curlers.
She wasn't wearing makeup.
She was wearing her hiking shoes.
And she said something I wanted to remember.
She didn't know why she had needed Heckfield Place.
She only knew that she had.
It was needed. And it was perfect.
Our driver arrived.
We checked out and headed toward Southampton.
Neither of us was particularly eager to leave.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember waiting two hours for our luggage in London—and Shirley simply sitting down and waiting.
We'll remember Buckingham Palace, the Churchill War Rooms, Big Ben, the London Eye and Tower Bridge.
We'll remember realizing that two days in London wasn't nearly enough.
We'll remember arriving at Heckfield Place and immediately feeling the pace change.
We'll remember the peach salad that made us call the bread back.
We'll remember pour-over coffee and breakfasts that barely happened before breakfast ended.
We'll remember tea and cake at 3:30 becoming an important daily commitment.
We'll remember the mysterious white animal that turned out to be an albino deer.
We'll remember Shirley announcing that she likes eggplant.
Twice.
We'll remember her photographing artwork and tapestries that I wasn't entirely convinced she would have looked at twice at home.
We'll remember "Everything is awesome."
We'll remember planning imaginary years of travel and realizing they weren't imaginary at all.
We'll remember Shirley saying there were too many places she wanted to see.
And we'll remember a woman who once wouldn't leave the house without doing her hair and makeup walking around an English country estate in hiking shoes, abandoning her curlers and wondering whether her friends would recognize her.
Mostly, though, we'll remember Shirley saying:
"I don't know why I needed this place, but it was needed and it's perfect."
Would We Return?
London: Absolutely.
But next time we'd stay longer.
We wouldn't try to turn it into a sightseeing exercise. We'd find somewhere comfortable, learn a neighborhood, walk, take the Tube, visit things when we felt like it and allow London to become temporarily ordinary.
Heckfield Place: Yes.
Definitely.
But for a different reason.
Heckfield belongs on a growing list of places where we can exhale.
We don't need an itinerary there.
The point is coffee in the room.
A long breakfast.
A walk.
Maybe some exercise.
Tea and cake.
A great dinner.
Sleep.
Repeat.
There was a time when that might have seemed like not enough.
Now we're beginning to understand that sometimes it's exactly enough.
