In the fall of 2000, the co-presidents spent a month in Wales and England. For Linda it was a research trip into English king Edward’s medieval castles (built to crush the Welsh), and into various Victorian museums covering everything from candy to coal. For Brad, it was time to be a tourist: once every seven years at Intel, you get a block of 8 weeks off to reacquaint yourself with the world, so Brad spent half of his 8 weeks on tour.

Here’s a very brief look at the places we visited, culled from our 2,400 photos made possible by Brad’s then-fancy digital camera and Linda’s laptop. Each night, Brad would download the hundred-or-so photos from the camera to the laptop, freeing the camera to take another couple hundred photos the next day. We have research photos of portcullis slots, murder holes, stairways, hallways, garderobes, merlons, embrasures, and many other details of the castles and houses we visited.

For some reason we really like mines. In our various tours we’ve been inside salt, slate, copper, and coal mines.

In 2000 the prehistoric Great Orme copper mine was just being opened to tourists. It was spectacular even then, and now (2021) even more of it has been excavated.

We also like “Have a Go” stuff, such as this dress-up at the Dewa Roman Experience in Chester.

Hay on Wye is an entire village of bookstores, and of course heaven for an author. I seem to recall on that trip we brought back two duffle bags full of books.

In Chester we compared Romanesque arches to Gothic arches… and McDonald’s arches.