Bessie and Flora and I drove to Stratford-upon-Avon yesterday and saw As You Like It. It was fun, and the Royal Shakespeare Company is really good. The part that wasn't fun was driving on the wrong side of the road late at night in a fog that cut visibility to about four feet.

Also, the British have a very different concept of distance than we do. I told the rental car guy we were driving to Stratford and back in the same day, and he looked at us like we were crazy. Stratford is 95 miles from Cambridge, which is a distance that, in Bill Bryson's words, most Americans would happily drive to go get a hamburger. I get a similarly confused response when I tell people who don't know where Minneapolis is that it's 400 miles northwest of Chicago. Nothing in Britain is 400 miles from anything else.