Yesterday began at 5:30 A.M. with my alarm ringing. An hour later, we were rushing for the train station to catch the 7:02 to Liverpool. It took about 3 hours and it was not a very comfortable train (although it was a Virgin train - that company is everywhere over here). A little bit of walking about in Liverpool followed. Everyone sounded like Ringo; I had to try very hard not to laugh when asking for help.

Back to the train station to catch a train to Audley End in Essex where the Van Morrison concert was being held. We arrived at 6:30 desperately needing dinner. Of course, Audley End is in the middle of the English countryside and therefore no restaurants (or any other businesses) are close by. We thought they might be selling food inside - we were wrong. They were giving away tea and ice cream samples, though. So we had a couple of those.

The show was great - completely sold out. The stage was set up in front of the mansion and people were just everywhere. I took a bunch of pictures which you will get to see later. At the end of the show, they launched fireworks for about 20 minutes and it was spectacular. I'm running out of superlatives now, so suffice it to say it was a good time.

Afterwards, everyone had a taxi except us. We called 3 or 4 places and none were available. No one was being very helpful about this, so we decided to walk the 2 miles back to the train station. Through the English countryside. In the dark. For a while there was no sidewalk and we were just trudging along the edge of the forest. (This is probably the kind of thing that American students in England are not supposed to do, but we figured we could take a bear or some thugs if we needed to.) We made it back in time to catch the last train into London, and sleep mercifully came at about 2 A.M.