The Pond Hopper Returns

Good morning! Today is the first day of the return of the Pond Hopper, aka what I used to call myself when I was flying back and forth across the Atlantic 3 times a year for my 3 years of college. The Atlantic Ocean is the “pond” and I am the “hopper” in case you were wondering 🙂 It was also the title of the novel I wrote my senior year of high school, before the actual hopping commenced. Of course, I’m a not-so-teenage Pond Hopper now. More like a twentysomething Pond Hopper. Anyway, I’m headed back for the first time since the end of Oxford and I couldn’t be more excited! I was on a flight leaving NYC around 10pm Tuesday evening, for an arrival at Heathrow this morning.

 

 

London on a 2010 visit

 

 

Today I will be making my way to a my friend Heather’s flat (apartment) in London, where I will be spending the night (and also the second week of my trip). She was one of my closest friends in college, and actually is a fellow American – my only American friend in the entirety of my time at Oxford, which has a big international graduate student population but very few full-time undergraduates. We’ve stayed close through Skype sessions as she decided to stay in England after graduation. I haven’t seen her in more than a year, when she came home to the US to visit family and friends, so it will be a great reunion.

 

 

Matriculation at Oxford with Elli when we were such children

 

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) I’ll be meeting up with another close friend, Elli, to take the train up to the Lake District from London. This is the part of the trip I am most pumped for! I thought I would go back to England to visit college friends as my post-bar-exam trip since my first year of law school, but I really wanted to do something new while in the UK. I came up with the idea of heading to the Lake District because I wanted to do something active and spend lots of time outdoors and see beautiful scenery. The Lakes are supposed to fit that bill. Elli and I plan to do long lake “walks” (8-10 miles) and we are hoping to climb Scafell Pike, for which I purchased a new pair of boots that I’ve been breaking in.

 

We’ll be in the Lake District for five nights, heading back to London Tuesday, where I’ll be staying for another week. I’m hoping to catch up with other college friends, although it really wasn’t possible to time a trip when everyone would be around. I’ve stayed in consistent contact with only four of my ten really good friends from Oxford (Skype is great, but the time difference and crazy schedules do make it tough) and I’m hoping that I’ll see the other two besides Heather and Elli, who were awesome about committing to my stay far in advance so I could make plans before the bar. On Sunday, August 23, all three of us are running the Hyde Park 10K, the third race in the Royal Parks Race Series. I’m excited to run a race in a foreign country and to get to run in Hyde Park, and I’m happy I have some training for Dumbo on the calendar already, because I leave for California nine days after returning from London!

 

Hyde Park Rose Garden in 2012, when I was last there

 

Now, onto the little details. I will be totally unplugging the first week as I will be in the Lake District. Our B&B has wifi but I’m not counting on it being too available – it is the mountains, after all! I’m actually really looking forward to several days without checking texts and emails and social media and just enjoying walking round amidst the beautiful scenery (fingers crossed for good weather too). I may pop in next week, but since I’ll be out and about most of the time, I’ll be recapping the trip when I return. However, I’ve got a few summer recipes and other posts scheduled to share with you while I’m here, so I won’t be totally AWOL. Look out for tomorrow’s photo tour of my Connecticut hometown 🙂

 

 

And with that, I’m off. Stay tuned for everything to come. Cheers!

 

 

 

 

How often do you get to see your college friends?

Would you rather spend time abroad exploring cities or seeing the countryside?

 

 

 

 

 

 

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