Extraordinary minus the extra=ordinary

And ordinary can be really good. I have to admit that "normalcy" is one of my favorite words here and usually is preceded by "I am craving...". Well, be careful what you wish for. I have had a string of regular days which has been beautiful, but doesn't give me much to work with when it comes to the old blog. But alas, there have been some painfully "normal" (ish) adventures.

Saturday night, a friend of mine decided that it would be a good time to walk to The Trout (a nice-ish restaurant) with great food, but a better pre-dinner walk. Apparently, you walk through a field (which is ok, because there are no trespassing laws in the UK) for about 50 minutes to get to the restaurant and then take the taxi back. You may have been tipped off by my use of the word "apparently". Yes, we did try to go, but no, we didn't make it.

For starters, the directions were less than clear. They instructed us to walk towards this field and then to walk north along the river for 50 minutes until arriving at the restaurant. But let's just say that "walking north" in a large field, in a foreign country, without a compass, is not always easy. (After all, this is why orienteering was the Sports Club of the Year at Oxford for 2009). We decided to turn around when the moon (which was originally on our right) ended up on our left. It only took two Rhodes Scholars to figure out that this meant that we were not going in a straight line. So then, we got to make our way back with the flashlights--the only cool feature on our $15 phones. Take that iPhone.

I am not sure where we went wrong. For starters, we might have been walking next to a lake instead of a river, though that is unclear since all of the waterways are flooded. We might have walked into the Chronicles of Narnia and lost traditional time/space dimensions. Or maybe The Trout was just around the corner. We may never know.

Rather than a nice seafood restaurant we ended up at Wok and Roll (because both French restaurants and the Spanish tapas place were booked--who knew you had to make reservations on a Saturday night?) where we were served warm cabbage coated in gravy by a grouchy waitress who seems like she would have preferred to stare at the wall rather than have to deal with us. Now that is what I call a normal night.