Author Archives: momdude

No sure quite how “random,” but the truth is I wasn’t even looking for a photo necessarily, and in particular I wasn’t looking for something to use in a “random old photo” post. But I was punching buttons at random-ish on my iPhone, looking for inspiration, and at some point hit something referring to “Your Memories” and it came up with a set of photos from exactly fifteen years ago, September 28, 2006.

Antwerp. I was there with a group of my Pepperdine MBA classmates for the next to last day of our foreign tour to Prague and Brussels. We had traveled to Antwerp by bus (I remember having been up waaaaaay too late the night before and gotten up way too early that morning), had two meetings that were part of our MBA curriculum, had lunch next to the harbor, and then had about an hour to wander around town.

I walked down to the town square and the cathedral, camera in hand of course.

It’s funny what you remember. Just on the right past the crosswalk was a little pharmacy. By this point in the trip I had massive blisters and wanted to find some Band-Aids and  something to kill the pain. The very nice woman in the store spoke no English, I spoke no Dutch, but we figured it out. Curiously, I still have a couple of those Band-Aids, or at least I did the last time I looked.

Not the oddest souvenir I’ve ever brought home, but a contender for the short list.

Fifteen years. It actually turned out to be a melancholy memory. About half of the photos were of classmates, at lunch, in town, on the bus, at dinner afterwards… We’ve gone our separate ways. I still see one or two on FaceBook every now and then and there are a few Christmas cards that get swapped, but that’s it. And I have no idea when I’ll see Europe again. Or if…

The end of summer is here. The autumn equinox is tomorrow, September 22nd, at 15:21 EDT, 12:21 PDT. From there the days get shorter and the nights longer, until we get to December 21, 2021.

Out of curiosity, I looked up where I was on the autumn equinox ten years ago. I figured it would be some random picture around town or more birds, lizards, or dogs. Nope, I was out of the country!

In London, to be precise. I had gone to Southampton for three days of testing on a theoretical procedure for reducing drag on racing yachts. On the way home, the timing was off for getting straight from Southampton to Los Angeles via Heathrow, so I ended up with about twenty hours in London.

Poor, poor me how it worked out that way.

I didn’t get much sleep on that brief layover. There was plenty of time for that in steerage on the flight home.

This picture is from my first stop after a quick nap (I think I left Trafalgar Square about 3 AM according to the date stamp on the pictures.) It was raining, but I wasn’t going to let that slow me down. This was from Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, followed by a quick pass past Royal Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial, the Princess Diana Fountain, then a sprint back to the hotel for my bags and a train ride to Heathrow.

Someday I would like to get to London to visit and roam and stay for at least 24 hours, maybe even 72. It could happen.