So glad you have signed up to receive the For Random Learning Comes Newsletter! This is the eighty-second edition. Previous editions can be found on the blog's Newsletter page. I send it out weekly, so if you don't get my email on Saturday morning, please let me know! (Check your junk and spam folders too.) *** Now that it's been over a week since I got home, more of my travel poems have been put up on the site for your reading pleasure. My first entry is For a New Old King. This is a coronation poem. While we were in Britain, the coronation occurred, which triggered bank holidays and bunting galore. But it also found me spending the morning of one day on the Isle of Wight, glued to a projection from someone's laptop in the lobby of the Royal Hotel. Slowing down to watch this once in a lifetime (literally, for many of us) occurence, after more than 50 years of one queen in Britain, produced this poem of wonder and awe and questioning. It is voiced by a plodding, prosaic American who has never seen anything like it outside of the movies. The picture, you may recognize, is a ceiling in Brighton Pavilion, an over the top royal homage to India and the Orient (when we still called it that), by a king who never made it to either place. The next travel poem gives my first impressions of the Isle of Wight after getting off the ferry and driving to our hotel. It speculates about what it must be like to be young and confined on an island with water all around. Fortunately, I have the great good luck of living on a peninsula, with only three sides on the water! The next rhythmic poem, Ups and Downs, tries to convey driving and riding on unfamiliar, narrow, twisty-turny and sometimes clifftop roads, with no control over what is happening, or over the countrywide choice to travel on the wrong side of the road. Just joking. A fourth new poem is called Tomorrowland, and it describes flying over the patch of sky where night turns into day, and today into tomorrow.I hope you enjoy them all! As for the trip, I have yet to write any blogpposts about it. I did organize my thoughts and realize just how many places of significance we had somehow packed into less than 20 days. But I'm still too busy basking in the reverie, I think, to put it in words just yet. It is definitely true, that travel has a way of recharging your batteries and helping you see things through a new lens. That freshness is something we both needed. Just turning Life's demands off for a moment allowed us to hear the birds, enjoy the gardens, appreciate the artwork and enjoy the company of convivial strangers, who by the end of the trip weren't strangers at all. That's all for this week. See you next time around! Andrea

Unsubscribe | Manage subscription