Getting Ready to Depart

Hello All,

This is the first installment of "Across the Pond," a travel blog that I will keep throughout my travels to jolly old England and beyond. Presently, I'm about 9 days away from leaving, which is fairly frightening, considering how much work and packing I have to accomplish between now and then. So that you're all familiar with my travel plans, I will be departing from Boston late on Sunday, January 31, doing a brief layover at Newark, and then heading to Bristol where I will land around 8:30 a.m. Prime Meridian time. From there, I will split cab fare with one or two other students who will doubtless be on the same flight as me, and we will head down the road to Bath.

While I'm in England I will be taking four courses (one of which will be at Oxford University), living apartment-style and cooking for myself in the beautiful city of Bath, and taking some exciting side trips on the Island and perhaps even to the mainland. You're in for many more details and specifics in posts to come, but I don't want to clutter up the first one. If anyone has any tips for packing or travel, I would love to hear them (I already have my power converter and plug adapters and my rain coat), so feel free to shoot me an email or a call.

The last thing I want to leave you all with in this post are my intentions for this blog. First of all, I suppose it is important to note that I have never kept a blog before, so this will be a work in progress. That said, I wish this to be an experience, not a hassle, not a bore, and not something that you delete from your inbox. Rather, I would like it to be one of those things that you look forward to reading, so if there's anything you want more or less of, don't hesitate to tell me! If you stay tuned, you'll receive a good dose of British history and culture, a smattering of humor, perhaps a dash of philosophy, and a dram of poetry here and there (because why else would I come all the way to England if not to write a bit of verse?). So settle in, pour yourself a cup of tea, or perhaps a tall tankard of ale, and enjoy the next four months of literary narration as I seek to make my mark on the place where all the history comes from.

Fondest wishes,

Eric Kozlik

(Henceforth to be known as "The Wandering Wordsmith")

(...because it's a cool, alliterative pen name)