St. Albans

We are staying in a private hotel about a half hour by train out of London, in the large town, or perhaps small city, called St. Albans. They have a very good cook here, so we are eating things like fresh tartar sauce on our fish and chips, which is apparently about as hard to make as fresh Hollandaise sauce, so kudos to the chef. Our first day here was spent wandering around literally smelling the roses, which included a big bank of my favourite orange ones. I have only ever seen them before in the form of one or two bushes in the grounds of the Empress Hotel in Victoria. I also managed to find someone to sell me a soft ice cream cone. Susan’s crazy for Victorian homes, which means she’s in seventh heaven. We thought we might venture into the city at the end of the day, only to find there’d been some kind of mishap and the trains weren’t running.