MGG - 5.47 - HWYD - 24 Sussex Drive

As mentioned, I didn't get to do much in terms of tourist stuff, since the tourist type attractions were only open during the hours that I was actually in front of a seminar.  So about the only thing that I could do in terms of seeing the sites around the different places where I was conducting seminars, was at night.  As it happened, I could not sleep properly when I was out doing the seminars.  I know, because it happened even when I was teaching in California, or Calgary, that it wasn't jet lag that made me unable to sleep.  I have always theorized that I wasn't able to sleep when I wasn't in the same bed with Gloria.  I would generally get about two hours sleep per night, while I was doing the seminars.  I do remember one particular seminar where I know that I got a total of two hours sleep for the entire *week*.  Most of the time, conducting the seminars, I was running on adrenaline.  But this did mean that I had plenty of time in the middle of the night if there was anything nearby that I could walk to.  So I would walk around things.  I could not go into museums or famous buildings, but I could look *at* the famous buildings, and sometimes parks or other natural features of beauty.  When I was teaching in Sydney, Australia, I pretty much mapped out all of the trails and roads on North Head.

I did scare the pants off the Prime Minister's security detail at 24 Sussex Drive.  I had taken a picture of the stone gate posts, illustrating the fact that they no longer had the 24 Sussex Drive address displayed on them, when I became aware of a rustling in the bushes.  I bid the officer a good morning, and he bid me a good morning back.

I had other experiences wandering around looking at famous buildings.  It was interesting, in Washington, DC, to see the number of homeless people who had semi-permanent encampments.  One of them, and seemingly one of the largest, most organized, and most prepared for the cold weather at the time when I was wondering around, was right across the street from the Treasury Building, which I found highly ironic.  I wandered around the Parliamentary precincts, in Ottawa, although I knew that the security detail for Parliament Hill had a very sophisticated video surveillance system.  This was one of the places where I set up my camera, which had a self timer on it, to catch the buildings, with myself peeking in one corner.  As noted elsewhere, this was the origin of Gloria noting that I looked very gnome-like in these pictures.  I think that was mostly because of the garden gnome that traveled around with pictures of him in various tourist locations, slightly prior to, but around the time that I was teaching doing the seminars.

Previous: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/11/mgg-546-hwyd-trivially-easy.html

Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html

Next: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2024/11/mgg-548-hwyd-norway.html