Bath and beyond

March 18, 2012, 7:53 p.m.

After we took the train out of London, we disembarked in Basingstoke, where we had a Fiat reserved at the local Budget Rent-a-Car. We'd booked the car so far out of the city on the recommendation of everyone who has ever been to London: you do not want to drive there. Ever, ever. That could not be more true. In fact, I was terrified just walking in London. The cars, they’re so fast, and they’re coming at you from the opposite direction you expect. In the States you kind of watch left and glance right, but if you do that over here you will get yourself smushed. My heart raced every time we approached an intersection, and I got into the habit of booking it across like a total spaz, even if we had a green walk signal. I found it a satisfactory way to handle things.

But now we were out of the city and had to participate in UK traffic from an actual motor vehicle. Sh*t just got real.

The first hour or two on the road was a heart attack a minute for me, but Thayer—ever as cool as a cucumber—handled the learning curve with his usual grace under pressure while I hyperventilated and squawked like a strangled chicken. These roundabouts. Only the devil could have created something so horrifying.

We made our way west through the lush green English countryside and wound up foregoing Stonehenge for Avebury, another circle of ancient megaliths, only bigger and accessible, rather than roped off. We wandered among the giant stones, some of them tipped and balanced on one corner buried in the ground, and learned how the purpose was for one central stone to cast shadows on each of the outer stones at various points in the year, kind of like a yearly sundial. The henge (circle) at Avebury is so wide, it’s the only one to have had a village built within it.

From there it was off to Bath, where we spent several hours touring an ancient Roman bath with an audio guide. The amount that was able to be uncovered and excavated is most spectacular: the bath itself with its columns and even its water, the stone staircases, the giant hunks of rock carved with ornate designs of gods and goddesses, and the curses! Ancient Romans who were cheesed off at other ancient Romans would carve their curses on a thin sheet of lead, roll it up and toss it in the fountain so that the goddess of the bath, Sulis Minerva, would take care of it for them.

Throughout the tour they have pictures and models and even 360-degree digital views of what the bath would have been like in its heyday, so you can envision it against the decrepit ruins in front of you. All told, I found the whole thing quite creepy. Thayer did not share this opinion, but I had some low sinister music playing unbidden through my mind the whole time. Something about how it used to be a bright and expansive open-air structure for worship and play, and now it’s a mass of underground ruins, its inhabitants now only whispers of ghosts. Despite being thoroughly creeped out, I was also thoroughly enthralled, and I’d happily go back to pore over all the parts I missed due to time constraints.

From Bath we continued west into Wales, so I will end this post here, as Wales will be quite a mouthful. Next post up very shortly!

London is a circus

March 17, 2012, 2:17 p.m.

I’m not sure what I expected from London, but safe to say it blew my expectations. It was far more than I’d anticipated. More, bigger, louder, prettier, scarier, busier, older, better.

We landed at Heathrow and were promptly forced to figure out the workings of the tube. A bit iffy at first, we got off a couple stops too early, planning to transfer to a different tube line there. Quickly realizing our mistake, we hopped another train, made the proper transfer, and made it to our hotel. After a couple more tube rides, we pretty much were old pros. That’s the thing about the tube. If you screw up, you can right yourself in a matter of minutes.

After mastering the tube, we fell in love with it. That thing will take you ANYWHERE. It’s so organized, so streamlined, so FAST. I know Londoners have their complaints about it—crowding, delays, lack of air conditioning—but I’m not hearing it. Coming from Seattle and our so-far sorry excuse for a mass transit system, I was pretty much ready to marry the London tube.

After checking into our tiny yet well-appointed room in the very grand Grand Royale Hyde Park, we explored our neighborhood on foot and got some Indian food at Curry Palace. From there we strolled through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, stopping to appreciate the Princess Diana Memorial fountain, a very large concrete meandering ring set into a shallow hill, the water bubbling up from the highest point and trickling down each side like a slow river.

Afterward, we walked around the Piccadilly Circus neighborhood, which was remarkably like New York’s Times Square with it’s enormous digital billboards, flashing lights, and crammed sidewalks. We visited Trafalgar Square and then confirmed the Queen was in residence at Buckingham Palace, her red, blue, and gold flag a-waving. We capped the night with dinner and brew at a pub back in Hyde Park.

On day two we saw Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, took a spin around the London Eye, and explored Leicester (LY-ster) Square, another extremely busy and fast-paced neighborhood. My favorite from the day was our tour of the Tower of London, where past kings like Henry VIII lived and beheaded various wives like Anne Boleyn and tortured and killed various trusted friends and public figures like Sir Thomas More. In Beauchamp Tower, you can see the “graffiti” that prisoners carved into the walls during their stays, some of them elaborate works of art. We also got to see the crown jewels, which was pretty trippy. You see an old painting of a queen on the wall, and there in front of you is the actual crown that's painted in the picture, in all its gleaming glory. Our yeoman tour guide Moira was from Scotland, and when we told her we were headed there, she recommended a pub in Oban where she knows the proprietor. In about a week we’ll take her advice and find Lainey at O’Donnell’s pub, bringing her Moira’s regards from the Tower of London.

We spent several hours at the Tower before meeting up with Thayer’s high school friend Rina, whom he hadn’t seen since graduating from Exeter in 1997. At the Princess Louise Pub near Covent Garden the three of us enjoyed some pints in a gorgeous alcove of ornate dark wood and frosted etched glass. Later on Thayer and I stopped at a cheap show tickets stand and scored ourselves some seats at the following night’s showing of Wicked. Surely my musical-freak friends are appalled that I’d not yet seen it.

We began our third and final day in London at Harrods department store in the ritzy Knightsbridge neighborhood. This seven-floor behemoth is shocking in its luxuriousness. The “food court” is an array of oyster bars and caviar houses in a large hall decorated in white and gray marble and pastel-colored tiles, like a beautiful, precious candy shop, or a tea party for a princess. The children’s toy store has toddler-sized luxury cars you can purchase for £10,000. That’s nearly sixteen grand. The Ford Festiva I drove in college was $600.

Harrods was owned for twenty-five years by Mohamed al Fayed, father of Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend who died with her in the 1997 crash. Al Fayed thus had two memorials erected within Harrods: one has framed pictures of Diana and Dodi and a pyramid containing the ring Dodi had bought and the wine glass from their last dinner together, still smudged with lipstick. The second is a bronze statue of the two of them releasing an albatross together. Both are fascinating, if a little creepy.

All that Diana-stalking and luxury-not-affording made us pretty hungry, so we went to Borough Market to scare up some lunch. I never imagined any market could be more impressive than Seattle’s Pike Place, but walking through Borough Market made me feel like when I think Earth is really huge and then I see a picture of it next to Jupiter.

The British Museum, which we cruised through next, also dwarfed every other museum I’d ever been to. Among the thousands of captivating ancient relics were the Lindow man—a murdered man so well preserved in an acidic peat bog that you can still see his skin and hair after nearly 2000 years—and the Rosetta Stone, whose perfect engravings of text in Greek, Demotic, and ancient hieroglyph made me nearly pull my hair out with its awesomeness.

We jetted off to St. Paul’s Cathedral just in time for the 5 o’clock Evensong service. The sounds of the church choir echoing through the domes and caverns gave me the shivers, and Thayer and I both agreed that with its ornate adornments, everything seemingly dipped in gold, it was even more spectacular than Westminster Abbey.

We capped our three days in London with Wicked, a perfect way to spend a both relaxing and exciting evening. What a show. There may have been some weeping coming from my general direction.

Then we went “home” and vegged in our hotel bed, watching a news program about overcrowding on the tube. Since we were Londoners now, this was quite concerning.

The next morning we got up early and hopped a train out of the city, and thus ends the story of Hayley and Thayer in London. I think we’ll only need a few decades there before we’ve seen everything there is to see.

(P.S. Happy St. Paddy's Day! We almost forgot about it because nobody over here is decked out in green.)

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Hello again, Reykjavik

March 16, 2012, 8:12 a.m.

True, this trip is concentrated mostly in the U.K., but first things first; we began our trip by spending twenty-four hours in Reykjavik, Iceland.

We’d taken the same Icelandair flight just two years before and had experienced the particular frantic heaven/hell of that first day in Iceland with no sleep, so thrilled and ecstatic even as our bodies shut down and we had to consider toothpicking our eyelids to stay awake. This time, we thought we’d be smart about it and have a little snooze on the plane.

The excitement had already set in, though. And no matter how disciplined we were, it seemed a feat of magic to fall asleep at 4:30 p.m. home time—magic we did not have.

Instead we stayed awake, watched movies, and chatted up our seatmate—a woman who does research for the University of Washington on women in commercial fishing. Her focus had been on Brazil for the past several years, and she’d recently moved her focus to Iceland. Since she spends months there at a time, she had plenty of advice to offer.

Before we knew it, it was 7 a.m. Iceland time, and we were still awake. Time to go. Time to go, go, go.

We took the Flybus from Keflavík airport to the terminal in Reykjavik, and for the first time we saw Iceland in the dark. You might recall that during our May 2010 visit, the sun only just dipped below the horizon, leaving a 24-hour glow that our body clocks had to fight in order to sleep. Now, in the dark, it was easy to remember that it was our bedtime, but we had only one day there, and we sure weren’t going to spend it sleeping.

So we walked to Marteinn’s apartment on Laugavegur (street) in the “heart of town,” as boasted on his Airbnb website. Marteinn is an artist—a painter and music composer. We’ve heard that some very high percentage of Icelanders are artists, that field of work being strongly encouraged as opposed to mainly discouraged as in the United States.

Right smack in the middle of downtown, we unloaded our stuff in Marteinn’s guest room and followed as he showed us around his small apartment, the highlight of the tour being the combination bathroom/kitchen complete with dish drying rack and space shuttle shower.

Marteinn gave us our keys and went on his way, back to his other house outside of Reykjavik in an area that doesn’t even have a name. Sadly, we soon discovered that our key to the building’s outer door did not work. Hoofing it up and down the three flights of stairs about six more times proved that none of the room’s other keys did the job either. But no matter; we met a kindly neighbor who generously gave us her spare. The Icelanders are a trusting lot.

Hayl: Amun…dar…dalur.

Thayer: What was that?

Hayl: You heard me.

After some cream-and-sugar-stuffed pancakes and coffee at Café Loki (hello again, Swiss Mocha), we walked to Perlan, Reykjavik’s Saga Museum. Before entering, Thayer noticed some steam rising up from the ground nearby, so we went to investigate. There we found a bubbling, boiling water pot in the middle of the woods. I crept closer to snap a picture, and a nice fellow sitting at a nearby picnic table snickered and said, “That’s not Geysir.” Heheh. We felt a little silly, gawking at a regular ol’ pit of boiling water in the woods, but what can we say; we’re Yankees. Gaui first took us for Canadians, having met Canadians at each and every stop on his recent European tour. We were happy to represent North America’s midsection.

Gaui didn’t give us too much guff about our boiling water fascination. He chatted us up for a while, as he’d just been passing the time reading his book outside on the overcast, 32-degree-Fahrenheit day. “Good weather,” he’d said. We laughed, as we’d never find the likes of him stateside on such a day. Gaui is pronounced “Gwee,” and it’s short for Guðjón, pronounced “GOOTH-yown.” Gaui, if you’re reading this, I apologize if I’ve just butchered the phonetics. I’ve got to make sure we’re on good terms, because we’re taking him out for coffee when we get back to Reykjavik in a few weeks.

Inside Perlan is the Saga Museum, where they have wax figures telling all the stories of the Icelandic Sagas. The museum did much to outline Iceland’s founding history, but we both found some of the stories confusing and difficult to relate to one another, as far as chronology goes. Clearly we need more lessons. My favorite story is of Ingólfur Arnarson, who threw three pillars from his ship overboard, planning to settle wherever the pillars came ashore. After a time, he sent two men around the island to find them, and when they returned, they were all, “Dude, no, you can’t settle there.” But Arnarson did indeed settle there. He named it “the Smoky Bay,” or rather, Reykjavik.

After Perlan we followed a trail down to a beach where a map told us there was a warm water inlet and, in the middle of that, a hot pot. We found the inlet, but it was not warm, and the hot pot in the middle was bone dry; still, any Icelandic beach is lovely to us.

[during the long walk from the beach back to downtown]

Hayl: Hmmm, maybe I’ll lose a couple pounds on this trip.

Thayer: Maybe if you watch the Swiss mochas.

Hayl: Watch them go down my gullet?

Thayer: Right.

On we went to Tjörnin, a manmade lake in the middle of downtown where people like to feed giant geese and where a webcam is set up, which I like to check often when I am at home in the States. Being the super sleuth I am, I spotted the camera and took a picture of it, which will be ridiculously boring to everyone but me. When we get back to Reykjavik, I plan to locate all the other webcams I check obsessively and take pictures of them, too.

Next was dinner at Hressingarskálinn, where I had something non-scary like a pizza and Thayer had a towering mountain of fish stew. At about 9 p.m. it was time for bed, or rather, for lying awake all night long while the very loud sounds of downtown Reykjavik echoed up to our third-floor window and our fears of missing our early morning bus kept us in a near-constant state of frantic readiness. We think we finally succumbed to sleep around 2 a.m.

Up we jumped at 5:45 a.m. and walked the kilometer back to the bus terminal, tiptoeing through the sleeping city and cringing whilst our suitcases thundered along the uneven sidewalks and cobblestones.

I slept the entire flight to London.

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Bound for the UK!

Tomorrow we head to the UK and Iceland for three weeks. Life certainly has its ups and downs, and we are beyond grateful for this big, big up.

And it hurts with every heartbeat.

Today marks 3 weeks since the real miscarriage. Last post was just the preliminary round. I'll start by saying we're fine now; we're okay. Emotionally, I'd say we're back to stable. Physically I'm still dealing, but it's nothing I can't handle.

As I said at the beginning of these preg posts, we didn't want to tell anybody--not even our families--until the news was definite. We'd planned to wait until 12 weeks on the dot before we let the cat out of the bag.

But we happened to have a trip to Wisconsin for a wedding at 10 weeks. It seemed silly not to tell the family, since we'd be there, with them, in person. And since we could feel the joy and the hugs and so much love, in person.

So, right before our trip, at 9 weeks, we went to the doc, got checked out, got the OK that all was well, and off we went to spill the beans in Wisconsin.

There was joy. There were hugs. There was so much love. It was a very happy weekend, filled with excited gabbing about futurebaby. Everyone we told was thrilled, and it finally felt real. Now that everybody knew.

Two weeks later we went to the doc for the big one. The big 12-week checkup. We'd planned to publicly announce the pregnancy (meaning, like, on Facebook) later that day, once we were assured that we, and Poppy, were out of the woods.

But Poppy would never get out of the woods.

Poppy's size was no bigger that it had been on our last visit 3 weeks prior. And the heart that had beat so strongly then had stopped.

So Thayer and I went home together. We cried and hugged and held my belly together. We said goodbye together. I took the miscarriage pills and we sat on the couch all day together. And the next day we did the same.

The guilt was heavy for taking the miscarriage pills. It's not anymore, and it was the best thing to do, for me. But at the time, I wondered: If Poppy had died 3 weeks before and was still just fine staying put, why should I be the one to kick it out? Why shouldn't I be fine with letting it stay? For as long as it needed to.

But ultimately, I am a modern woman, and maybe that means I'm selfish. So I cried some more and apologized for maybe being a horrible person because I wouldn't let it stay until it was ready to leave.

And pretty soon, it left.

And we had to do what we intended not to do. We had to tell everyone.

But as it turned out, it was better that way. So much better. So much better than if we'd never told our families. Because since they knew, now they could be there for us. And they were.

We got sweet daily calls, emails, and texts. Offers from moms to come visit. Edible fruit bouquets and beautiful flower arrangements.

Thanks, mom and dad.

The rally around us made us feel warm, loved, cared for, and just so lucky. We wouldn't have felt all that had we kept it from our families.

So now, we move on. Recover and work and do stuff and have good times. You know, live. It will be a bit before we try again, per doctor's orders, and per the orders of our hearts, which are rather overtaxed just now.

It will happen, though. Someday, and soon. In the meantime, on we go.

Naturally, Robyn's got the words.

Up and down and up...

So, I went to a nurse practitioner last week to see if all was going well with Poppy. We've been calling it Poppy because when we first found out we were preggos, it was the size of a poppy seed. It has a better ring to it than "rice grain" or any of the other comparable sizes it can grow to be.

Back to last week. The NP did an ultrasound and it looked like this.

WTF?

That round black spot at the bottom? Poppy's house. Or sac, rather. It was too early to see Poppy itself, but the sac was promising. It meant we weren't hallucinating and the four pregnancy tests we took were not kidding.

To be sure we were all good, they drew my blood twice, two days apart, and tested it to make sure the HCG hormone levels were increasing as expected.

The nurse practitioner called me last Friday afternoon to tell me that the HCG level had dropped, actually, which meant "the fetus hadn't thrived" and I would miscarry. She said if I didn't get my period by the following Friday, I should come back and they would give me what I call "the magic miscarriage pill" so that my body could restart and we could get on with our lives.

It was hard to digest. I went and cried in the bathroom stall at work, and then my friend Kristin came in and we cried together in the bathroom stall at work. High school styles. Then, later, I went home and hung out in bed for a few hours, alternately reading Entertainment Weekly and bawling my face off. Then Thayer cooked dinner and we watched Dirty Dancing and I felt a little better. The next day we went to the beach, because it was nice out and I was feeling melancholy like this:

Sad Girl on a Beach

But after a few hours of chilling with our friends the Bentons and jumping into the freezing cold Puget Sound, I felt like this:

Girls Alive on a Beach

I'd decided not to coffee or booze it up, because it just felt wrong while it was still in there. It felt disrespectful somehow. So I waited it out, feeling stranger every day that I was pregnant with... nothing. That I was just waiting to miscarry.

Today was the day I went back to the doc. The day of the magic miscarriage pill. I've been dreading today all week. Thayer, too. We were going together. To hold each other's hand and bear it together: the confirmation, the visual proof that it was gone.

And gone it was, as the nurse practitioner searched and searched with her ultrasound wand and could find nothing. "No, it's not there anymore," she said.

And then--

Her brow furrowed and her eyes got wide and she mumbled, "Well now, of course, as soon as I say that..." Goosebumps covered my entire body, and I squinted my eyes and thought as hard as I could, Please don't say anything unless you're sure. 

"Yes, there it is. There's the sac. And there's a heartbeat."

It was hard to see with all that water in my eyes, but I saw Thayer's hand cover his mouth, and his eyes turned pretty dang red too, if I'm not mistaken. And I'm not.

"Well, I guess the roller coaster continues!" she said after we WTF'ed all up and down that clinic room.

I had another blood test, and my HCG levels are sky-high. We're on track. We are on track. I thought today was going to be the gateway to a record shitty weekend, and instead, here we are. Still pregnant. And beyond stoked about it.

Penguin house

See that penguin-shaped black thing left of center? Now see that tiny white dot in the penguin's belly? That is Poppy.


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Round 2 WIN

That title says it all, non? WE WON. We just found out that we won round 2 of the sperm shooting and the prize is a poppy-seed sized baby!

BUT FIRST! Other things happened, like the actual sperm shooting which was on July 25th. Then more other things happened, like my birthday on August 2 wherein I turned 31. Woohoo 31! Seattle bestowed one of its precious few sunny afternoons on me that day, which was very sweet of it. Thayer and I had dinner and drinks in Post Alley with the Bentons, and that Thayer -- he showed up with a pretty little blue Tiffany bag for his wife. That man is a keeper, I'm telling you. And no, not just because he's good with the gifts, although, I mean, look how shiny this is!

 It has an H engraved on it.

A few days after that, I thought I got my period, so that made me grumpy. To combat the grumps, I met my good friend Cynthia for happy hour on the deck at the super posh Edgewater, which looks like this:

and we pretended to fit in with the clientele there while drinking a few of these:

 Why yes, Mr. Belvedere, I will have another.

As far as consolation prizes go, it wasn't too shab. Add to that some deep fried asparagus spears, and the band-aid was pretty much in place! ("What?" you say. "Deep fried asparagus spears?! Surely such a delectable treat does not exist!"  Au contraire, friends. It does. At the Edgewater.)

On Friday I had some of my favorite peeps over for birthday celebrations on our patio, and it was delightful, and life went on.

Until Sunday when I realized that that period I got a few days before? Kind of a nonstarter. I was pretty sure it was the same caddywompus as I'd experienced the month before, but even so, I wanted to take a test and rule out pregnancy so I could continue moving on.

Luckily, we had just such a test lying around the house, so whilst Thayer was out buying car parts with our friend and current house guest, Michiel, I snuck off to investigate.

What I got was not the minus sign I'd expected. What I got... was this:

Am I hallucinating that plus sign?

When Thayer got home, I could not contain my inner freak-out. He was digging through a drawer looking for a tool or something, and I went and stood next to him, practically bouncing with adrenaline.

Thayer: Hi! What's up?

Me: SOMETHING.

Thayer: [looks curious] What's going on?

Me: Something CRAAAAZZZYYYYY is going on!

I proceeded to drag him into our bedroom to show him the phantom plus sign, to which he responded with bug eyes and justifiable confusion. Neither of us were satisfied with that pathetic ghostly plus, so off Thayer went to the store for more tests. He came home with what my good friend Amy later referred to as "the dummy test." 

Here is what the dummy test said.

 Come again?

That was when I texted Amy with my findings to ask her what it all meant. She is a nurse practitioner after all, and like any medical professional with a bedside manner worth her salt, she gently informed me, "It means you're pregnant, you idiot!"

Pssht, whatever. I took another test the next day. It agreed with the other tests.

Now, you're probably thinking, Oh, Hayley. It was sooooo obvious. Why would you take three tests? Tsk tsk, so foolish.

I will have you know that this particular neurotic behavior is perfectly common among women! Even Amy the nurse practitioner medical professional took multiple tests including the dummy test. And if you there, reading this, are a woman who has gotten pregnant... well, you did it too, didn't you. DIDN'T YOU?

So that brings us to today, three days after THE DISCOVERY. We are stoked, to say the least, but we're also trying to temper our excitement because we know it's so early that anything can happen. It doesn't feel quite real yet -- no symptoms or anything. It feels like it could all just go away in a moment. But we hope it stays. 

We hope the little poppy seed clings on.

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