Peg Kerr's Journal

Fiona's current converter plug adapter, which she forgot to pack.

I did get an email from her this afternoon, saying she had arrived safely at Lancaster and had settled into her room. Gee, I hope she can find another current converter quickly in Lancaster. Or we may not be hearing from her again for awhile.

If I haven't told you (have I told you?) Fiona did hear (finally!) she'd been accepted to study this fall at the University of Lancaster in England. The original plan was that she would go over a month early, in mid-July, and spend a month or so running around with a backpack in Spain, France and Italy.

However.

She wouldn't buy her plane ticket. She wouldn't buy it and she wouldn't buy it, no matter how much I nagged her. Finally it dawned on me that there was just a trifle amount of uneasiness with this plan that was preventing her from putting it into action. I mean, it's rather daunting to think of going overseas to a country you've never seen before, where you don't speak the language (she does speak Spanish, but not French or Italian) and trying to travel by yourself for a month, as a young woman.

So I finally asked her whether she would be more comfortable going over just right before the semester started and skipping the month of travel. She would save a lot of money, and not have to deal with figuring out Eurail pass and hostels and foreign languages and traveling along safely and--after thinking it over for a day or two, she realized that in fact, she would. The uncertainty of Rob's health was another factor, too.

She will have opportunities to take weekend trips while studying at Lancaster, perhaps to Scotland, Wales, London, etc. There will be a 10 day break where she can perhaps take a shorter European trip, and by that point, she may have met another student who would be willing to travel with her. She gets released December 15, and she wants to be home for Christmas, but perhaps by that point she would feel much more confident and could take a few days at the end of the semester to travel, too.

The change in her plans has turned out to be a big relief. As I told her, I don't want to pour cold water on dreams, but it seemed that her back brain was telling her anyway that perhaps she was trying to bite off more than she could chew.

So: now she will be leaving in mid-August.

Fiona is applying to study at the University of Lancaster in England! She would be there next autumn. She will, of course, also take some time to do the obligatory running around Europe with a backpack. Among other things, she hopes to get to Florence to visit Mom and Dad's great friend Richard Serrin.

I am so pleased she is going to be doing this. She has been working very hard to get all her ducks in a row, which has made the last several weeks quite stressful. Her passport was renewed this week. She hasn't quite decided which courses to sign up for, but one will be differential equations (Fiona's a math major) and one will be a literature course, including some study of Jane Austen.

I studied at Cambridge University in England when I was in college, so I am feeling a lot of nostalgia. I told her how much I enjoyed my walking tour of the Lake District.

Any of my readers in the UK in that area?