Friday #3

I haa choice of Thai, Indian or cafe food, and I picked the cafe.  One of the foods on my to-do list was a cheese and pickle sandwich, and it was great!  The pickle sauce was pretty strong and sweet, but didn't overwhelm the cheddar cheese and onion on the sandwich.  I had it on grainery bread (light wheat maybe?) with a Beck's beer and a cream tart which I took with me to the Park.

The grounds of the park are gorgeous.  There are several ponds (HUGE ponds)  and a wonderful assortment of exotic ducks swimming around.  A lot of mallards, but a couple that I didn't recognize that were beautiful with multi-colored heads and cute little identifying tufts of feathers sticking out here and there.  (I guess they were identifying - they meant nothing to me except unusual beauty but I'm sure a bird lover would immediately recognize them)

I didn't go into the house although I'm sure it was magnificent.  I enjoyed the park, the ponds, the ducks, and the few other tourists.
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As I was sitting under a massive Cedar (Lebanon Cedar maybe?) watchi£ ng the ducks and eating my custard tart, I was thinking "At this exact moment in time, I am absolutely, perfectly happy".

Some of the things that added to my happiness:  I had managed to figure out how to access cash funds after several unsuccessful and frustrating trials, including a panicked  call back to the US and Ron.  My talking to the BOA "partner" - Barclay's Band, and Ron's intercession with BOA were both unsuccessful, but my second appeal to Barclay's was with a bank official who told me it would work, and lo and beholld, it did!  He did nothing different, but Ron said it was the power of that bank official's positive thinking that did the trick.  Whatever it was, hooray!

The next wonderful thing was finding a great hotel in Truro (deep in Cornwall) with a beatiful setting, car park attached, and a decent price.  Prices here are very high.  We knew this beforehand, but there is always a lot of sticker shock when you see that a bottle of water costs more than twice as much as at home.  A coke is