Paris, London & Oxford

Dear Friends,

Over our spring break from school we went to France and England. We spent the first weekend in Paris. On Saturday we took a walking tour. At the end of the tour we could look in a 360° angle and see 5 important landmarks and buildings which included the Eiffel Tower, Place de la Concorde and the Egyptian obelisk that is in Paris. After the tour we took a boat tour on the Seine River which runs through the center of Paris. From the river we could see the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tower. The boat went under a lot of bridges. The following day we went to the most famous art museum in the world, The Louvre, where we saw the Mona Lisa, a mummy and big statues of Sphinxes. After we went to the Louvre we went to Luxembourg Park and rented toy sail boats that you could push across the small pond there.

Sailboats in Luxembourg Gardens - Travis' is on the right

The next day we went to the most famous landmark in Paris: The Eiffel Tower. When we got to The Eiffel Tower we were glad we had bought tickets online because there were at least 200 people in each of the 2 lines. From the top of The Eiffel tower we could see all of Paris. Then we went to Notre Dame, which is a cathedral that was built in 1345. In the late afternoon, we went on a high speed rail train to England that went under the English Channel in a tunnel (the Chunnel). The trip wasn’t as exciting as we had anticipated. My mom thought there was going to be an announcement that we were going down into the Chunnel (She also thought there should have been little plastic fishes on the wall like at Disneyland, but it was just dark like all tunnels).

Views from the bottom and top of the Eiffel Tower.  The most well-traveled giraffe joins us for the trip.

In London, we went to Westminster Abbey, which is a massive cathedral where kings and queens are crowned and buried. Also many famous people get buried in Westminster Abbey. I got to walk on Charles Darwin’s grave. My dad really wanted to find all the important scientists graves.  Next we saw the Changing of the Guards at Buckingham Palace. Buckingham Palace gardens were very pretty but it looked like the palace itself could use a washing.  After lunch we walked to Primrose Hill and we got a view of London.  Then we went to the British Museum. On Wednesday my dad and I did the touristy thing of riding the sightseeing bus. We got off at the bus stop for Tower Bridge. My dad and I went up 200 stairs (you could take the elevator) to the top of Tower Bridge. There was an interesting museum about some of the most famous bridges in the world, such as The Golden Gate Bridge. After my dad and I met my mum (as English people say it) and we saw Mamma Mia, which is a musical with many ABBA songs and flamboyant costumes. On Thursday we went to Kew (pronounced Q) which is the Royal Botanical Gardens. We saw cacti in the Royal Botanical Gardens and at one point a guard came by to make sure my dad was not stealing any cacti.

Beautiful flowers and lots of people at Buckingham Palace

We spent our last couple days in Oxford which is about an hour northwest of London. On Saturday we went hiking with some of my dad’s friends and I played with their kid Alex who is 7 years old.  We also saw some rocks that were placed in a circle by Neolithic people around 3,500 B.C. The rocks looked sort of like a small Stonehenge. On Sunday we met some other friends and walked around the grounds of a palace. I played with their 3-year old son Alan and we walked through a cool maze made of tall shrubs.

Alex and Travis read up on the World Cup teams

Travis catches Alan before he escapes

A few comments from Karen – One of the high points of the trip for me was meeting up with scientific colleagues at Kew.  We stayed with Bruce Pavlik, who I know from restoration work in California and is now the head of Restoration Ecology at Kew.  I spent a couple of days meeting with various scientists at Kew who are doing research on the ecology of tropical forest trees to use for reforestation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  I visited the Millenium Seed Bank where Kew has already stored seeds of 64,000 species of plants (and they continue to add species) to serve as a reserve in case the plants become extinct in the wild; it’s an impressive operation and facility.  Besides science, we were also pleased to be able to meet up with Ole Rummel, a friend from college, and David Goodman, a retired faculty colleague from UCSC.  

And the last word from Michael – I was really amazed by the amount and diversity of items in The Louvre.  I have never really considered myself a huge afficianado of sculpture, but there were some items there that were fascinating. For example, the Roman-era piece "Diana the Hunter" had this amazingly flowing quality to it.  La Jaconde (the Mona Lisa) was somewhat anticlimatic; I was much more taken with the painting The Coronation of the Emporer Napoleon I (in which he is crowing Josephine and himself in Notre Dame Cathedral) as well as The Wedding Feast at Cana. I have to admit that it was pretty cool to hear the bells of Big Ben, see the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and to cross the Tower Bridge in London. One of the personal highlights for me was being able to spend time in the cactus section of the herbarium at Kew and pouring over all the old specimens, as well as seeing the research succulent collection. 

One of Michael's MANY cactus photos (genus Melocactus for those who are wondering.  The brownish structures are their flowering stalks!)

We had a great time catching up with Andrew Smith and his family (wife Fran and son Alex) in Oxford. Andrew and I know each other from when I was a graduate student at UCLA; we spent a lot of time talking about the evolution and biochemistry of desert plants. He took us on a tour of Magdalen College, one of 38 colleges at Oxford and where Andrew is a tutor.  It has an impressive chapel (built in 1474) that rivals many European churches and a few noteworthy graduates include Oscar Wilder, Henry VIIIth, and Dudley Moore.  We were also able to meet up with my good friend and colleague Lisa (Patrick) Bentley, her husband Topher, and son Alan.  Lisa is doing a postdoc at Oxford, and we spent a perfectly relaxing Sunday at Blenheim Palace walking around, chatting, and watching the boys have a fun time. 

Cheers - Travis, Karen, and Michael