us in London, 1999 (what a terrible scan!)
In a few hours I’m getting on a plane, but this isn’t going to be a couchsurfing trip, or anything like my birthday trips where I meet tons of new people, sightsee, and zoom around on trains, planes, and automobiles from one city to another. I don’t even care what the weather will be like, or what we’ll eat. I’m going to visit my best friend of nearly 19 years, in England, hang out with her family, and it’s going to be a homecoming of sorts.
I was thinking all day today of our long, storied history filled with adventures, highs and lows and everything in-between. It’s enough to fill a book or two, and we’re not yet 40. We met in Edinburgh shortly after I arrived in London from Bangkok in February 1993. I was 20 and Lucy had just turned 18. I was looking all over my Flickr albums for photos of us back then, in those days when we wore mini-skirts and smoked cigarettes and watched way too much Beavis and Butthead on MTV Europe, but I have none scanned… they’re all still on film, and maybe that’s a good thing!
Lucy knows me better than anyone. She is the only person to have attended both of my weddings in Scotland (1993) and the USA (2005). I was in England for her wedding in 2004, drinking with the groom’s Belfast crew and videotaping them pranking the Best Man, who was fast asleep in his chair.
Amsterdam balcony
Lucy’s put up with all kinds of wackiness from me over the years, like the time we met up in Amsterdam in 1999 (above), after we’d been out all night and I decided to go roaming the streets in search of food at 4am and returning at dawn while she was sleeping. Or the time we met up in London a few months later when, after a full evening of dinner and wine, I decided to go to the hotel lobby for cigarettes and a friend of one of the hotel staff offered to take me to the petrol station to buy some… he then took me on an impromptu tour of the entire city for the next six or seven hours, showing me each of the nine (?) bridges that cross the Thames and I arrived back at the hotel at dawn, when Lucy woke up. I don’t think much surprises her anymore when it comes to me and my randomosity.
Over the years, our other reunion spots have included Brighton, Bergamo (Italy), Vancouver (we also did a side trip to Las Vegas), Glasgow, and Pennsylvania, with lots of reunions in London.
I moved back to Canada in 1995 after two years in the UK and we’ve had reunions in 1997, 1998, 1999, then a gap until 2002, where there was a reunion followed by an Almost Reunion. I was in Switzerland in 2002 and Lucy had a ticket to meet me in Geneva (we’d met up in London the week before), but she lost her passport the night before the flight. I had rented a car to tour around Switzerland and drove all the way from where I was staying with a friend in Neuchatel to pick up Lucy and my German friend Berit at Geneva Airport. Instead, Lucy couldn’t fly and I had to drive up to Zurich, where Berit decided to meet me at the last minute by train from her company function in Munich instead of flying to Geneva. What a malarkey!
2003 was Italy, 2004 was Lucy’s wedding in England, 2005 was my wedding in Pennsylvania, and 2006 was a really heartbreaking reunion in England, after David’s passing. The purpose of that trip was to help Berit put together her son’s memorial at Hamburg Airport. It was a tough trip. November 2007 was our last reunion, also in London, when I was enroute to Morocco.
It’s now four years later and this is the longest I’ve ever gone without a reunion with Lucy since we first met in 1993, when we were inseparable. Since then I’ve started a photography business that keeps me very busy and she’s had two babies I have yet to meet, so this trip will be happily filled with playtime and catching up on each other’s life. And in the meantime this blog will be inundated with baby and toddler faces… it’ll also be my first time-out from work since September 5 and I can’t wait!
