PaperWork: Home at last … with lasting memories of where we’ve been

Perhaps the best way to begin is to just turn on the spigot.

Turn it to a slow stream of thoughts and observations while I can still remember them.

Today, Thursday, is day one of getting back to the normalcy we had before my wife and I flew off to Paris on Oct. 10.

By normal I mean letting my body refigure what time of day it is and enjoy a good, old American version of coffee.

The trip involved 21 days of travel: three plane flights, two train trips, one touring bus, one mini-touring bus and many various and some colorful Uber drivers.

And mostly ... walking. Lots of walking. The drill sergeant around my wife's wrist informed her daily of the thousands of steps she (thus we) had taken. Grand total: 184,486 steps.

Please note those were not just walking steps. They were also many climbing up and down stair steps.

Books, friends and Facebook chatter warned us about having comfortable shoes. They also should have noted I would discover leg and related muscles that preferred to remain dormant.

Our trip started in Paris and then flowed into London with a side trip to Oxford to visit a college friend I had not seen in 55 years. He also drove us to the smaller market town of Thame where he and his wife live.

It was a great connection with my friend and England.

Next we rode the rails to Edinburgh where we tried very hard to pronounce the name correctly. (It's ED'n-burrah, said travel guru Rick Steves.)

We stopped at the home of Ottawa native (and paleontologist-author) Steve Brusatte and his wife Anne and their son Anthony.

OK. Let me adjust the spigot flow a big from travelogue to more observations:

Paris ... Yes, we saw the Eiffel Tower. It's hard not to see. We did not tackle its heights. The Arc de Triomphe satisfied that need with a breathtaking panorama.

My advice: Never ever drive in Paris. And be alert when walking. Every street has a busy bike path along the sidewalks. I was inches away from collisions at least three times.

Driving is a competition for position and apparently a race against time. I noticed the white line separating lanes is also a lane ... for anything on two wheels, especially motorcycles.

Every street is full of them. They dodge and weave through traffic and work their way to the front of the line at stop lights. I imagined someone trying that in Illinois, and it didn't end well.

Oh, I foolishly worried about the language barrier but "bonjour" and "merci" covered most of the bases.

London ... I was but a few blocks walking into London and fell in love with the buildings and the feel of the city. I was surrounded by visible history.

Walking through the house where author Charles Dickens wrote and lived was memorable. Even more so was standing among the graves of great writers buried under Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Edinburgh ... Again ... we walked up and down and through and around touchable history.

We saw the "Coos" or as we like to say it, cows. The shaggy red-haired cuties were in The Highlands where we also made a surprising discovery on our Loch Ness boat tour. (More on that later.)

Overall ... Often the best parts of any trip, however, are not the monuments or tours but the stories attached and the people you meet.

And the overwhelming sense of world history when you walk through it.

Those are memories I will share in more detail. Next week: Normandy.

• Lonny Cain, retired managing editor of The Times in Ottawa, also was a reporter for The Herald-News in Joliet in the 1970s. His PaperWork email is Or mail The Times, 110 W. Jefferson St., Ottawa, IL 61350.