London in eight hours - or less!

Step One: Arrive at Heathrow with an eight-hour layover and wisely decide not to drive yourself crazy by spending all eight of those hours in the airport.

Step Two: Go through customs and pay through the nose to ride the underground (mind the gap) to Covent Garden.

Step Three: Walk around a bit. (Pictured here is genuine Church of England, Tony! St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden, a house of worship for the past 375 years. Smelled of incense inside & the whole deal. Could’ve celebrated the Eucharist at 1:00pm if we hadn’t had a plane to catch.)

Step Four: British Museum. Free, and chock full of good stuff that the Brits plundered from all sorts of civilizations over the years. Best relic - the Rosetta Stone, which Meggan deciphered in approximately twelve minutes, leaving plenty of time for shenanigans like getting scared by a scarab beetle. (Hey, it’s not like you can really appreciate it all the way it deserves to be when you’ve been up since 3:30am local time, but we did our best.)

Step Five: Grab a tasty lunch, then back on the tube to the airport.

Step Six: Back through security with plenty of time to spare, compose a lovely blog post, then find the lack of free WiFi disturbing. Wait to publish the post until later.

We’re back in Denver - woohoo!! It really does feel great to be home, seeing good friends, sleeping in our own bed (for two nights, at least). We’ve also had a good time lately naming our “bests” and “favorites” from these two months (“best meal,” “favorite tourist site,” etc.).

Another snippet of God’s leading from our summer: We’re thinking about working with high school youth in the greater Madrid area. It feels right to have our focus narrowing like that. At the moment, we think this would be primarily my ministry involvement, while Meggan would be in a supportive role, perhaps mentoring young women and (*gasp*) raising a kid.

Caution - shameless tourist...