I flew Virgin Atlantic from Seattle-Tacoma airport to Heathrow, outside London. I’m not a big fan of airports and commercial airlines, but Virgin Atlantic has an upgraded coach class that takes a lot of the misery out of a long trip. My nine-hour flight landed around 7am local time. I was seated close to the exit door, so one of the first people out and I set out at a fast pace for immigration and customs, to get ahead of the other passengers…not really thinking about the hundred or so other planes that had landed in the past hour. The area that all international flights led to was about the size of a football field and filled by a few thousand people shuffling slowly along a looping path toward the front of the room where uniformed men at half a dozen gates asked people to repeat the information that was written on the paperwork we handed over and questioned us about our reason for visiting the UK. I didn’t tell the truth, but they let me in anyway. I’m not sure what that says about the process.
I called Scott’s new cell number after getting to the back of the line. He was already at the airport and said he would meet me where I would come out of customs. When I got there an hour later I almost didn’t recognize him. He was totally exhausted, his face was kind of a pale gray, and barely coherent. He was also hungry, so we walked another hundred yards to a little cafe and got a tray of food. I sipped a cup of coffee while he ate and told me again about what was going on.
The night he left St Davids he was sure that people were following him, so took evasive action and small roads until he got to Newport, where he checked in with the local police and told them his story. They promised to look into it and sent him on his way. He stopped during the day to buy a new laptop and cellphone and ended up that evening at the house of a friend near Devizes. He put Scott up for the night and then located and rented a small cottage in a remote location closer to London…Scott didn’t want to use his credit card for fear it would be traced.
After finishing his food and telling me his tale we took an elevator up a few floors to the parking garage. The four dogs were in the back are of his car…which was a station wagon or SUV kind of thing. Scott introduced me to the two dogs I hadn’t met before and we moved stuff out of the passenger seat to make room for me and my backpack.
The back seat of the car was packed solidly with Scott’s stuff, from the floor up to the level of the seat back, leaving just enough room to see the road in the mirror. I learned later that he also had a car-top carrier when he left St Davids, but had dropped that off at a friend’s house near Bath.
The cottage Scott was staying in was near Shrewton, and it took a couple hours to get there, mostly on back roads and including a stop at an ATM so I could get some local money, and a stop at a grocery store to pick up more food for us and the dogs. I remember driving past Stonehenge on the way.
The cottage was probably built about the time America was discovered…back when the average person was about five and a half feet tall. This worked ok for Scott and the dogs, but the top of my head was a couple inches higher than the bottom of the ceiling beams and I was walking like a little old man by the time we left the following Friday.
It was actually pretty nice…thatched roof over a small second floor containing two bedrooms. The ground floor had a big living/dining room and a modern kitchen which I think was added on to the side of the house in the past hundred years or so. There was a small bathroom off the kitchen, and another larger one that was obviously an add-on to the back of the house, off the living room. The main feature, as far as Scott was concerned, was the enclosed back yard, so he could just leave the back door open and the dogs could go in and out as they wished. Unfortunately, they were just as happy peeing and pooping inside as out…more so if it was dark or raining. Scott loved his dogs, but hadn’t put a lot of effort into training them. Instead he bought a lot of cleaning compounds and a vacuum to suck up all the hair.
The cottage was rented through an agency that had a lot of them available…but it was the height of the tourist season and most were booked. And we were limited to ones that accepted four dogs. So we had to find another one by the following weekend. We had to leave this on Friday, and could check into the next on Saturday.
Scott slept for most of the first day or two, while I tried to keep the dogs quiet and downstairs during the day. A nice walking trail went right by the cottage, so we took the dogs for a long walk at least once a day. The dogs all tended to pull hard and cross back and forth winding up their leashes…handling two of them at a time was hard…doing all four, as Scott had done for a few days, was almost impossible.
As Scott caught up on sleep he relaxed a bit and we chatted about stuff we had done in the past and stuff we might do in the future, Over the past few years Scott had been developing an automated day trading program…that is, it could buy and sell stock during one day. This didn’t interest me a lot, but he was also working on a autonomous vessel that he thought could make its way across the Atlantic, from the UK to the US , on its own. It would also be the prototype for a shallow water survey boat that would fit into a storage container and be shipped by air to just about anyplace in the world. That did interest me a lot.