Found our way to the M4 and onto Oxford through fast but manageable traffic. By Oxford it was raining fairly hard and it turned out, after we got off the motorway and onto side streets, a local football game had snarled traffic to a standstill. A long, last fifteen minutes of driving, plus a couple of the inevitable wrong turns at the end, and we pull up to the guesthouse in Headington, a hilly residential area to the east of town center. The lodgings had inexplicably presented themselves as wheelchair accessible, but the reality argued strenuously against this interpretation. Lewis Carroll in a mild hallucination might have found the place accessible, but there were multiple barriers - a six inch step up into the main foyer to surmount, a doorway a good three inches too narrow for me to get to the bedroom door, and the last resort, a detour through the office that required another three inch step down and a combination 90 degree turn so I didn't crash into the wall, taking most the baseboard paint with me, before getting into the room. Squeeze into a tiny room, with just barely enough space to turn around in one corner. Lucy and I exchange exasperated looks, and she poses the question of whether this is worth it (the conference in Auckland in February a reminder of how difficult coping with a marginal room can be) or whether we should seek other accommodations. We (I) decide that being close to the conference, which is only a half mile down the road across the street, beats being a couple miles away downtown, a decision which turns out to be the right one.

Then the travelers' coupe de grace, there always is one, comes when after unloading the car, Lucy returns with an "I give up" look on her face. Apparently the driver's door won't lock. No amount of key turning, using the manual lock button or anything will get the door secured - all the other doors are fine. We are tired and grumpy and hungry, and since it is after 2 in the afternoon, we have barely slept on our "sleepover flight" and it is god knows what hour on our body clocks, we decide at the least to address the last concern and head up to Headington center to see what kinds of food we can rustle up. Nothing much at first, some bland sandwich shops and a pub or two, although we are not sure we can get into them, drizzling all the time, until we spot a Turkish café that turns out to be excellent. Lucy ordered a couple appetizers to serve as a main dish - some housemade pita and hummus and a dish of large unidentifiable white beans in a light spiced tomato sauce. My unusual aubergine dish (eggplant) with garlic and tomatoes and a draft Turkish beer are similarly excellent.

Feeling much better about life, we return back to our guesthouse and after three attempts at other phone numbers listed on our rental car brochure, plus some endless deadend phone trees, I end up calling emergency roadside service. They are polite and practical on the phone and a mechanic in a red RAC truck is out in less than the 45 minutes they said they would be. He dismantles the door, finds nothing wrong, but in reassembly, all works well. Who knows what the trouble was - something jammed or out of alignment. The chatty, energetic mechanic asked us about the state of affairs in the states. We complain fairly generically about the double curse of being from California - not only do we have an embarrassment for a national leader, but the state governor is a former bodybuilder by profession, clueless and downright scary. He made a face I wish I could have captured on film - a combination of extraordinary relief and incredulity. "You don't think much of Bush?" he asks, eyebrows arching skyward, his mouth open. We assent vigorously. He grins ear to ear and proclaims "I thought we were the only ones to think him a total idiot! We see him on the telly every night, American politics are everywhere - I cannot imagine anyone sounding stupider in public then he does." We went on to have an entirely engaging discussion, this charming mechanic was well informed on international politics, and here he was out on a rainy Saturday afternoon, making us feel welcome to his home country. We sign some papers, problem solvled, and head off on foot into downtown Oxford.

It is quite a ways, maybe two miles down a long steep hill, but the sidewalk is wide as we wend our way through a tree tunnel next to a park, one side of the walk with an ancient limestone wall. Across Magdalen bridge and our first sighting of the spires of one of the old college buildings of the university. A walk by the Bodleian, the grand holy grail of university libraries, and down Broad St. where Blackwell's bookstore and the colleges of Balliol and Trinity can be glimpsed behind their medieval gated entries. As would prove the case throughout our stay at Oxford, the town was completely intoxicating, the architecture and cobblestones were steeped in history, and we wandered around with necks craned high, noticing gargoyles and spires and interesting turrets at every turn.

Dinner on the way home at Qumin's, one of a multitude of Indian restaurants we had spied, aubergine again, with channa dhal this time and a draft Kingfisher, and thus fortified we trot up the long hill, my lungs and shoulders aching, back to lodging.

I am up well before 7am, and shifted with my laptop to the lodgings common area to fine tune my talk and let Lucy rest a little longer. Others at the house surface and it appears they are conference attendees, from Indiana, as well.

The conference, the International Conference on the Book, begins a bit inauspiciously. The theater where registration is supposed to occur (I checked the conference website the day before our arrival to be sure) is locked, and it is not clear how I would get to it even if it were open. I finally find registration, not where it had been indicated, but no one is sure how I will get to the theater for the day's main events. In one respect I am better off than others, however, who are starting to arrive, since I have made tea back at the guesthouse and had come equipped with my thermos. I see bleary eyed-academics fruitlessly wandering the university's halls, looking like ships without sails, searching for anything resembling tea or coffee to jumpstart their vital cognitive parts.

The first speaker is a well known English novelist, who discussed the rough position that authors occupy in contemporary England, and how retail book trade policies have severely damaged both academic and trade book publishing. The following panel discussion, on writing and publishing, is fine but runs late (which would be a recurrent theme for the conference.) The run-over time will be absorbed by the lunch hour, it is announced, which was marginal to begin with.

At the last moment on the way to lunch, I discover I cannot get to the dining hall anyway, which is down a set of stairs (and in fact, I never find the accessible route to it, if there in fact was one, for the duration of the conference) and since my talk is in the first series, right after lunch, I decide to forgo food altogether and take the time to set up my talk. Good move, as the data projector has its usual quirks and I am just prepared in time for the crowd that shows up at 1pm. Full room, the talk, on early university library history, (the full paper, if you are desperate to read it, is at oxford3.doc) an evolution of my talk in New Zealand but to a vastly different audience, goes well, with good, well informed questions. Early university history is a remarkably haphazard affair, and traditions and practices evolved often without a lot of thought or planning, and took on idiosyncratic characteristics. While the need for texts for study was undeniable, libraries, which would seem the logical solution, were slow to develop, and not much happened until people starting building some serious university physical structures in the fourteenth century. Afterward I dash back to lodgings, ditch my laptop and grab a quick bite to eat before rushing back to the conference, just in time to catch the third paper of the series. The rest of the afternoon has a couple interesting papers and one complete dud.

Drizzle has abated some, but it is still a bit damp. The conference reception that night was at the university's international publishing headquarters and was one of those periodic minor nightmares that plague disabled life. Small rooms, crowds of people with wine glasses in hand, all pushing their elbows into my face, I cannot see or hear the speakers while thanks are being proffered to conference sponsors and great announcements made about all kinds of important things. I stick around until we move to the ultimate destination, a special collection of the institute, but the room is so crowded, cramped and deafening with talk and commotion I bail out and head home with neither food nor drink nor a glimpse of the collection.

We find a good local Indian restaurant up the street, and have our "potato" night. Potato appetizers, potato main dishes, draft Indian beer and wonderfully spicy condiments. Exhausted and sated, we head to sleep.

The next morning I am up at a frightfully early hour, cannot sleep longer, and so make my way to town. The sky has cleared, the stars' brilliance suggesting the day could well be stunning. I wander around town in the dark, detouring down sidestreets where cobblestones jar my spine and make the going slow. I get some wonderful photos of the spires and architecture that characterise Oxford university life, and even get quite a surprise when heading around a corner down a side street two blocks from the Bodleian - a grey fox trotting down the middle of the street halts abruptly and we each stare at each other, not sure which party was the more surprised. My guess is that if I had been walking he would have heard my footsteps and fled, but my wheels were quiet or outside his normal pattern recognition capacities. By the time I even think that I might be able to get a photo he has turned tail and headed off in the opposite direction.

I find I am getting my orientation a bit and after a morning well spent, I head back to Lucy and breakfast. I skip the conference that morning and try to find some parts for my wheelchair. The cobblestones have taken a toll on my front wheels and one of them is making increasingly alarming grinding noises as the wheelbearing starts to break down. There are hospitals and medical supply places not too far away, but I am unable to get parts. I kick myself for not bringing spares (I have spares of just about every other part of the wheelchair that could go south) and begin to get anxious as to whether my front wheels will get me through the week. [Back home I discover, to my astonishment, that hidden into one of my regular bags is a complete set of bearings, put there for just this emergency at some earlier stage of my preparations. Had I known this I could have fixed things right there. As Lucy agreed, it is somehow worse to be prepared and not to know it than to be unprepared from the beginning. Right.]

The conference late morning and afternoon is a bit disappointing, happily broken up by lunch with Lucy at the local pub the Britannia. Potato skins, a pint of Strongbow and an entirely adequate curry round out the picture. The sun is out and we chat happily in the back terrace while watching Headington traffic, foot and vehicular, go by. London road is the main drag out of town to the east, and several dozen busses go by every hour, many of them local but quite a number heading directly to Heathrow or London.

That night another conference reception is at Blackwell's bookstore, right across from the Bodleian, and we are all lured, not only by the wine and cheese, but by the prospect of a ten percent discount on purchases. I cannot resist getting some Plantagenet history (Oxford University Press) and other items. All of us leave a good hundred pounds lighter (or maybe heavier.)

Lucy meets me there and we head south down Cowley Road to the south of town, where it turns out you can get food of just about every description: Afghani, Thai, Moroccan, Chinese, Pakistani, the world is represented, and our destination is Aziz, a Bengali restaurant. The eggplant and channa is fabulous, and I get a pint of Bangladeshi beer, with a label that is only half in English. Fabulous.

The next morning the conference shifts into high gear, and we are treated to talks from the Bodleian librarian himself, speaking to the massive Google digitization project, the head of Oxford University Press, who gives us a fascinating inside look into university press life with its stresses and quirks, and a sociologist from Cambridge who is studying academic publishing. Among other facts that emerge is that university presses now average a scarce 400 copies sales per title, an astonishingly low figure. Very difficult to make a living on those figures. Many are in deep trouble and the survivors will be ones who are either huge (Cambridge and Oxford dwarf the rest of the field) or who specialize in regional or subject areas (University of North Carolina, University of California and Yale). I get some important information that will be useful when pitching my completed manuscript in a year or two.

More talking by agents and publishers and I dodge the rest of the afternoon to go with Lucy downtown, where we find some excellent Cornish style pastries for an outdoor lunch.

We have a 2 pm appointment at Merton College, which I had arranged earlier, the oldest of the Oxford colleges, and are shown around by an animated music student. Founded by Walter de Merton in 1348, most of the buildings date from the 14th century. The college backs up against the river, with fields and inviting private grounds. The chapel is stunning, and an early music group is practicing for a concert up by the nave.

The library, on the second floor of a building off the "mob quad" is unfortunately inaccessible to me, but Lucy takes a look around. No photos allowed, I will have to arrange for permissions later. This is the oldest college library at Oxford.

The buildings are a step back in time, and curiously quiet just before term begins. Merton provided the world the first model of a "graduate" college, wherein only fellows (those with an arts degree, the precursor to higher study in the traditional higher faculties of the early universities: theology, law and medicine) and masters lived. Many early students had patrons, very often a monastery which sent a young promising monk for training in law or theology. Until the fourteenth century, the only European universities that offered theology degrees were Oxford, Cambridge and Paris, which lead to interest from continental scholars who came to study.

We walk back to the guesthouse one last time up the long grinding hill, my shoulders complaining with the effort. Pack and off we go.

The trip to Cambridge took a bit of nerves. Distances in Europe are always deceptive, and using American standards of the time to travel is usually a bad idea. Several clogged roundabouts, plus some uncharacteristically aggressive driving by the locals, made for some anxious moments in the car, but we made our way past rural farms, industrial towns with vast amounts of new housing, and to Cambridge by evening, our goal. The hotel we had been savoring, since it was a modern chain and bound to be an improvement over our lodgings in Oxford, and while the room was spacious, well appointed and really quite one of the most accessible hotel rooms we have ever experienced, I still couldn't get in the front entrance but had to come through the back door, traverse through the dining room, and across the hall to our room. We had a mediocre dinner at the hotel and crashed quite cheerfully to bed.

My mission the next morning was the Cambridge University Library, and we wandered our way through the center of the city to get there. Getting into the building took some doing, although everyone promised that new ramps were almost completed. Getting my "readers card" was easy enough and I spent a happy few hours browsing through the collection and finding all sorts of interesting and unique items: annals of the university, historical documents on the library and the colleges, budgets and librarian laments.

We went back into town and found a good lunch spot at the Slug and Lettuce, took a detour back to Trinity college, the largest college at Cambridge and famous for its celebrated graduates and fellows: Isaac Newton and David Hume among others. The chapel had an amazing organ and the main college courtyard was huge. We found the college library, a large second story affair, although we could not visit inside.

We began to get our bearings a bit on the way home, identifying various of the other colleges: King's, Corpus Christi, and Christ's College, whose librarian I had contacted about a visit. I stopped in there and had the warden ring her, and she promptly and cheerfully appeared to show me around. Like all the old college collections, the library was on the second floor of one of the buildings, but perhaps this college was the only one that made it relatively possible for me to visit easily. The old libraries were always housed on the second floor since there was a better chance of decent light, a major concern of course for all libraries until artificial light in the twentieth century. (I got so I could recognize the purpose-built libraries at colleges by their window patterns - the libraries always had a greater number of windows, narrowly spaced, to let more light into the room that housed the collection.) The second floor also had the advantage of improved security - a downstairs door to the stairwell could be locked and the valuable books were safer from fire or theft on the second floors.

Since a new, more modern, wing had been added at Christ's College, I was able to squeeze through a narrow hallway, rubbing wheels on both sides, up a lift and down a added ingenious passageway to the old library. Entering was a reverent moment, for there were dozens of dark wooden stalls holding hundreds of old, rare and valuable books. Christ's College originally had been called God's House, and had as its main benefactor Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, who donated money and supplies and provided handsomely for the college's growth. Unique among the Cambridge colleges, its mission was to educate grammar school teachers at a time when the major areas of study among the university and colleges in the 13th-16th centuries were law and theology.

The librarian (technically the "sub librarian" which meant she was the one who basically ran the place) was extraordinarily well informed about the college collection and history (her MA thesis had been on the good Lady Beaufort) and I was able to take some wonderful photographs, which I cannot display in this venue but only in educational talks and presentations.

I got back to the hotel late, after a supremely productive day. We trotted down a side street for dinner, but the restaurant Lucy had located had vanished, or rather morphed into a different establishment. We settled on an asian noodle house, a delightful surprise, and retired tired and happily to bed.

The next morning I was up early again, and went off to town, where I got some early morning photos (a good thing, since it started to drizzle by 8am) and made my way over to the university library again for another morning of reconnoitering . It is very easy for me to visualize mining the collection for material in a year, if my sabbatical comes through.

I met Lucy back at the hotel, each of us having gotten some takeout food. I had the first and only difficulty with the local accent at the sandwich place where I got provisions. The woman behind the counter would say something to me and I would miss maybe a quarter of what she said. I still cannot quite identify why I found it so hard to catch her words, but the sound was different from London or Oxford. As a side note, I was completely and totally impressed with the level of service we got everywhere in England. No matter what the station, ethnic background, or overall status of the person providing service, from the lunch counter to the doorman at the Cambridge university library, people were polite, civil, accommodating, efficient and respectful. The rest of the world, especially America, could learn a thing or two from the English example.

We puttered around town in the afternoon in drizzle, looking behind the college gates for glimpses of Cambridge student life. Also, we were trying Cambridge on for size for a place to live for six months while I conduct my research. We will probably need to explore some of the outer regions. Downtown would be both too expensive and not so good a place for the kids. I was a little distressed to hear the Christ College librarian say that although she lived in a little village only ten miles distant, it took an hour for her to get to work via bus - driving being out of the question.

We split up and I lingered at the Cambridge University Press bookstore for awhile, stopping at a pub close to the hotel for a pint and a sample of local pub life. Dinner was at a nearby pizza chain, Pizza Express, not the same as the similarly named US chain, which was quite good and considerably more varied and vegetarian friendly than most American pizza places.

We packed up the next day and drove off to London, where we meet our London hosts Dick and Catherine for lunch and vast family news trading. We drove into London for the evening (I said we - I think I would have died an early death if Dick had not done the driving) weaving through neighborhoods and whizzing past cyclists and pedestrians with only centimeters to spare and dodging fast taxis, past the Regency neighborhood with its embassies (Dick noted that he had never, ever seen a sentry in front of the American embassy with a submachine gun in hand before, a testament to fear and the unpopularity of US foreign policy.)

The performance (Mamma Mia, a pop musical) was wonderful - my first experience and Lucy's fourth, and then we wove our way through late evening traffic to a vegetarian restaurant, Manna, Dick had located to the north. An absolutely wonderful dinner, extraordinary artichoke heart dishes and lots of choices, with conversation that ran all over the map. We heard stories about wartime England, when Dick as a boy in Southampton had been vacated to the country, but then American troops subsequently set up camp in a field right next to his dwelling, simultaneously increasing security on one level (nearby protection) and decreasing the likelihood of safety (the search lights would inevitably draw hostile aircraft attention.)

Up early the next morning, the morning paper and more political discussion along with analysis of education systems and England-US comparisons. Drive to Heathrow went very well and we were on our way effortlessly. (I think this is the fastest we sped through security since pre 9/11 times.)

So what I have learned this trip? University history is complicated, the colleges are puzzling entities with their own idiosyncracies, and both Oxford and Cambridge are wonderful cities, old and inviting and thoroughly captivating. I learned what "sleeping policemen" are (speedbumps), to watch out for "rising bollards" (first thought was a heresy breakout, but they are in car parks and in the US might be labeled "severe tire damage" or the like), to be careful at the newstand not to buy a newspaper titled "Sport" despite its name -- it is not about cricket or soccer or rugby, but rather "sex as a sport." Whew. I learned that the English are law abiding, able to stay democratic and orderly for anything, from bus queues to lunch lines, and invariably charming and civil. An amazing island of civilisation, a place to return to over and over again.

Home to happy kids and Tack, with news all around. We will be back, as soon as I can wrangle it.