We’re already in Sri Lanka, but let me backtrack just a bit:

About six months ago I used American Airlines Aadvantage frequent flyer points to buy our economy class tickets from London to Colombo on Sri Lankan Air. No business class seats were available when I made the reservations. So beginning the next day, I began trying to get upgraded to business class. I checked online every morning — literally EVERY morning — to see if anything was available.

I am the son of a Dutch dairy farmer, and being cheap is one of the primary genetic traits passed down through my dad’s side of the family.

So under normal circumstances, the concept of paying hard-earned American dollars for upgrades is almost physically painful for me. But London-to-Sri Lanka is a ten-and-a-half hour flight, the longest flight on this round-the-world trip, and it’s an all-nighter, so I was willing to pay for the upgrades with points, but certainly not with $5000 in cash it would have cost.

As I said, I checked online every morning to see if business class seats were available, and for the last month or so I’ve been calling American every day — even while we’ve been traveling — and, unfortunately, got the same answer every day:

“No, sorry to tell you, sir, but no business class seats are available.”

Well, we finally found out why when we got to the airport. Sri Lankan Air has just one flight per day from London to Colombo and economy class seats are completely sold out on every flight. But this is where Sri Lankan Air got really smart. Instead of releasing any unsold business class seats to partner airline frequent flyer programs, Sri Lankan Air allows passengers who paid full price for their economy seats to bid on them. Highest bidder moves up to business class.

It’s brilliant, really. Business class seats that would otherwide have flown to Sri Lanka empty get purchased for the highest bid. Let’s say an economy class ticket holder wins a business class upgrade with a bid of $100. That’s $100 the airline wouldn’t have made without the auction. And they’re much more likely to re-sell the now-empty economy class seat than the far more expensive business class seat.

Like I said, brilliant, but it still left us sitting in the cheap seats.

A little earlier I said London-Colombo was the longest flight of this trip. That’s not quite true. Sydney-Los Angeles-Dallas is actually much longer. But we used frequent flyer points to purchase business class seats on that flight, so I didn’t count it.

Don’t feel too sorry for us. The London-Colombo flight turned out to be great. (More details in the next post.)

Wifi’s the least of what we have here at Tea Trails. It is the most beautiful, most luxurious place we’ve ever seen.

The photo above is Castlereagh “bungalow”, where we’re staying for the next three nights. Calling it a bungalow is like calling the Great Wall of China a fence.

The train ride up to the lush tea country was so much fun and so interesting.

More details to come after we get settled in.

We just landed in Colombo, Sri Lanka after a ten hour red-eye flight from London. We left London Heathrow at 9:30 p.m. and arrived in Colombo at 12:30 p.m.

Colombo is everything you might expect it to be. It’s growing like crazy with luxurious skyscrapers under construction across the downtown area. Counterbalance that with gut-wrenching poverty right next door to the construction.

We’re only here one night and in the morning we take off across Sri Lanka by train to places that are pretty far out in the country. I know the elephant safari in the national park won’t have internet. Although the resort in the tea plantation says it has internet, don’t be surprised if it doesn’t and you don’t hear from us for the next week or so.

Talk to you when we have internet again.

I didn’t know how much I didn’t know about Stonehenge. As a result, it was far cooler than I ever expected. Here are a few of my misconceptions:

I thought it would be located down 30 miles of one-lane roads. Nope. A major highway leads directly from London to the site.

I thought it would be hidden from view. Nope. You get a pretty damn good view of it from that major highway. In fact, the fact that it’s visible from the highway creates a bit of a problem because traffic slows to a crawl in both directions as people crane their necks while driving by.

I thought it would be crowded. Nope. There couldn’t have been more than a couple hundred people scattered around the circumference when we arrived at noon on Saturday.

I had heard stories from people who were angry because Stonehenge is fenced off and the barrier kept them so far away. Nope. There are a couple spots where you can get really close to it, maybe within a hundred feet or so. Maybe I’m wrong and it’s two hundred feet. Either way, you feel like you’re right on top of it.

I thought it was surrounded by an ugly chainlink fence. Nope. Turns out the one-strand barrier (it can’t even really be called a fence) came about knee-high. I’ve seen photos of a chainlink fence, so maybe that’s what used to be there. But now you get a completely unobstructed view.

They don’t know when Stonehenge was built. They don’t know who built it. They don’t know why. They don’t know how. Sure, they have all kinds of theories, but they’re really just wild-assed guesses.

Did you know there are a bunch of similar structures in the same area? They just announced day before yesterday that they have discovered a new one that’s many, many times larger than Stonehenge. But it’s completely buried, which explains why it took so long to discover it.

Strange as can be. And cool as can be, too.

We rented a car from Hertz at Heathrow airport. There were no other customers in line and we got to laughing and scratching with the hilarious Scottish rental agent behind the counter. Next thing we knew she looked conspiratorially over each shoulder, leaned in toward us, and quietly said, “I’m giving you a really good car. I think it has GPS.”

We thanked her, took the keys, and walked out to Space 56 to find our car. It was a beautiful new Audi with almost no miles on the odometer, but when we climbed in Jamie said, “Hey, where’s the GPS?”

“There’s no screen on the dashboard,” I weighed in, “so she must have been wrong about the GPS. Oh, well, at least we got a brand new car.”

To make a long story short, we’ve been unintentionally exploring every nook and cranny of Southwest England for the last ten days. We’ve seen enough one-lane dirt roads to last us a lifetime.

Today, our last day in the United Kingdom, we were driving from Cardiff, Wales to Stonehenge, a drive that covers a lot of twisting and turning backroads that intersect at strange angles and suffer from a distinct lack of signage.

We were on the day’s one short stretch of major highway when Jamie said, “I wonder what this button does” and pushed a big knob in the middle of the center console.

As if by magic a slot opened on top of the dashboard, just below the rearview mirror, and a GPS screen rose as if by magic.

Sure wish one of us had pushed that button ten days ago.

When I was a kid, I loved Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. I devoured every one of the paperback books and couldn’t wait for the weekly Sunday comic strip version of Ripley’s.

The only thing I knew about Wales — literally the only thing — is that the Welsh have their own language. I learned that from a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not comic. The brain’s a funny thing — I have no idea why I remember the two following Ripley items, but I do:

“Ed Ek has the shortest name in the United States” and “The longest place name in the world is a town in Wales named Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.”

We’re in Cardiff, Wales today and, oddly enough, a local weatherman made news around the world when he announced that the town was a relatively balmy 70 degrees farenheit yesterday.

The English translation of the 58-letter Welsh name is “St. Mary’s Church in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio of the red cave.”

Just for fun, and to demonstrate how different the Welsh language really is, I used Google Translate to translate a common phrase into Welsh.

In English it was, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”

In Welsh, it reads, “Nawr yw’r amser i bob dyn da i ddod i chymorth eu gwlad.”

That’s a real language? It looks like random letters throw together for an eye chart. It’s no wonder we’ve been lost ever since we got to town. Good luck reading the street signs.

We both swear we’re going to start eating healthily and working out when we get to the Barossa Valley in South Australia. But until then, do not stand between us and the scones, clotted cream and jam.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Jamie insists that I announce that I ran our photos through an online “fat photo generator” and that we don’t really look like this. But we soon will if our diets of the last couple weeks continue.

As soon as Europe showed up on the radar of this trip, Jamie started babbling about castles.

“Can we stay in a castle? Let’s stay in a castle. I’ve always wanted to stay in a castle. Wouldn’t it be exciting to stay in a castle? Castle…castle…castle….” I kind of tuned out.

Nevertheless, I started searching for castles in which we could spend the night. I found Thornbury Castle, which was just a short drive from the Cotswolds. (Well, a short drive for most people, but we got lost four times and it turned into an all day excursion in which we visited most of southern England.)

I have to admit that Thornbury is pretty cool. It was originally founded more than a thousand yeards ago by King Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great. This despite the fact that Americans have trouble thinking of anyone named Alfred as great.

Let’s truncate the history lesson and get to the juicy stuff. In the 1500s it was owned by King Henry VIII’s cousin, the Duke of Buckingham. Henry, like Jamie, thought it would be cool to spend the night in this castle, so he beheaded his cousin and took ownership of the entire estate.

In 1535, when Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn, they stayed here on their honeymoon. How cool is that?

We have no idea why, but we’ve been upgraded to a beautiful suite here at Thornbury. Jamie’s pretty sure it’s the one that Henry and Anne stayed in on their honeymoon.

Yup, Thornbury is a real damn castle. It has everything but a moat and a dungeon. If there is a dungeon, they now charge about $300 a night to stay in it.

St James Church sits on the Thornbury Castle grounds. It’s surrounded by a graveyard filled with gravestones dated all the way back into the early 1700s. Jamie actually looked at me this morning and said, “Do you want to go to church?” I immediately jumped away from her in order to escape the lightning bolt.

Parts of the castle look as though they haven’t been cared for since Henry VIII lopped off Buckingham’s head, but most of it is still spectacular. Our room is huge and beautiful.

I may be a bit biased, but have you ever seen a woman who looked more regal than this?

The British Empire has fallen on hard times. Here I am with what’s left of its army.

In advertising, that’s what’s called weasel wording. In the rest of the world it’s called lying.

Why is it called weasel wording? Well, it’s technically true that I went to Oxford — because we got in our rental car and drove 35 miles down the road and walked around the campus for several hours — yet 100% false by any other standard.

The University of Oxford is so old that they don’t know exactly when it was founded, but they know classes were already being conducted as early as 1096, when monks were still scribing books by hand. It’s commonly ranked one of the top five universities in the world — along with Harvard, Yale, University of Oregon and San Bernardino Valley College.

(There I go weasel wording again. I feel compelled to admit to you that the final two schools on that list are rarely, if ever, found on those lists of top universities. But as a graduate of both august institutions, I’m confident that the omissions were mere oversights.)

Jamie can also say she went to Oxford, but I doubt tht she’s shallow enough to make the claim. This is the university library, one of it’s most well-known buildings. Coincidentally, this is also about as close as I ever got to the library at the University of Oregon.

It would take an Oxford math major all day to calculate the number of spires on the buildings and walls surrounding the university.

I take a few minutes off of my pursuit of the illusion of higher education to do my world famous Dr. Who impression. The bag in my hand contains my new University of Oxford T-shirt, which is sure to help me continue the ruse that “I went to University of Oxford”.

Many people say Winston Churchill was the most important man of the 20th Century. I lean more toward Sandy Koufax, but it’s pretty much a toss-up.

Oh, sure, Churchill may have rallied the British people and saved the nation during the darkest hours of World War II, but Koufax pitched four no-hitters, including a perfect game, and was the youngest man ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

But since we’re in England, let’s go with Churchill just for argument’s sake.

I knew that Churchill grew up in a wealthy family, but I didn’t have a clue that he grew up in such immense wealth. This is Blenheim Palace, where he was born, where he proposed to his wife, and where he went to seek solitude and solace during World War II’s darkest days.

Blenheim’s not a bad little place as far as palaces go.

We’re not even to the palace yet. This is just the front gate, which you get to only after driving through about half a mile of immactulately groomed grounds.

See those massive marble pillars across the courtyard to Jamie’s left? That’s the front door. They probably don’t get many Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing the bell.

The front yard is about as big as a football field, but has no grass. I’m pretty sure Sandy Koufax has a yard with grass.

I’m not sure why, but Jamie insisted on taking a photo of this Winston Churchill quote.

I’m trying to imagine what it must have been like to be little Winnie Churchill growing up amidst this kind of ostentatious wealth, but it’s beyond my ability to comprehend. I guess you end up with either a sense that the world owes you something, like so many rich kids do, or a sense that you owe something to the world, like Churchill did.

A few shots of the back yard and gardens at Blenheim Palace. In this last shot I’m attempting — and failing — to strike a haughty, regal pose. It difficult to pull off this ruse while wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon wolf.