Rushton Hall

A frantic call from Tracie said it all. Sydney felt a little warm when I left for the airport last Tuesday. By Wednesday night, Tracie reported that Sydney was running a fever and had three nosebleeds that did not want to stop. Tracie was in a panic. She was about the take the baby to the emergency room to see if they can do something about the fever and bloody nose. The Children's Motrin did not seem to be effective to keep the fever down. As it turned out, Sydney had yet another ear infection in her right ear and upper respiratory infection. Something is going around. A lot of kids and adults had been getting URI during the last several weeks. I blame the freakin' terrorists. They must have dumped something in the water supply.

I have spent the last few days in jolly ol' England on business. It was my first trip to the UK ever. I landed in London Gatwick Airport and took a long 3-hour drive from London to a town called Corby. The company had booked rooms at a gorgeous hotel called Rushton Hall for us.


The place was simply unbelievable. All of the hotel rooms are named, not numbered. Its history is rich, and each room is elegant and almost magical. We lounged around in the Great Hall, admiring the gorgeous architecture, stained glass windows, paintings, and great fireplace. After a long day of meetings, it was so nice to get lost for a few hours in English history.

It was rumored that the Hope Diamond was kept in Rushton Hall. I stayed in a room called Hope Bedchamber. I never made the connection until I was told about it. Of course, the owner of the Hope Diamond was also the owner of this place in the 1800s.
How cool was that? What was even cooler was to learn that Charles Dickens had visited Rushton many times and conceived the idea of Haversham Hall for his novel "Great Expectations" while staying at Rushton Hall.

Despite my momentary giddiness for having walked some of the same halls that the great Charles Dickens had walked, my thoughts were always on my stressed out wife and sick little girl. I need to get home. I hate it that I was not there to help my beautiful wife out with the sick baby and to hold and comfort Sydney when she was so sick. When I got back to the hotel in London tonight to wait to fly home tomorrow morning, I saw some pictures that my niece had taken during Christmas. She is a professional photographer and shared a nice black and white photo of Tracie and Sydney with the family. It made me miss them even more.

For everyone who has ever complained that I never post a picture of Tracie, now you should be satisfied. The picture just showed mother and daughter bonding for a moment while the rest of the family milled about waiting for the moment to open our presents. Sydney was napping on her mother's chest while Tracie was contemplating whatever it was a woman of her enormous intellect was contemplating. Hopefully, it wasn't the 50 different ways to kill me and making it look like an accident for nagging the entire vacation about how much we NEEDED a portable GPS navigation system.

One of the funnier pictures was of me huffing and puffing in an attempt to cool Sydney down while Tracie was frantically fanning her with a Christmas card. The house was getting pretty warm with about 20 fairly hyper people waiting for Santa Claus to screw up and actually leave us presents instead of flipping us off while flying by our house again. Sydney was soaked with sweat. So I huffed and I puffed and blew blasts of air her way. Unfortunately, she couldn't take my bad breath and turned away. Oh well, I tried.