Keeping up with this idea of unknown unknowns to the point of belaboring it (as we say in New Orleans, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing), Carol and I arrived in Oxford with no thought of signing up for any sort of walking tour of the city. After all, I had spent six weeks here in 1971 matriculating in a summer program at Oxford University’s Exeter College. So the visit to the city began very much as a known known. I simply wanted to show Carol that I was once an Oxford scholar.

There are known knowns when Carol and I travel, and there are known unknowns. There are also, I suppose, unknown knowns, although I’m not precisely sure what such things might be. But my favorite attractions in traveling are the unknown unknowns. Unknown unknowns are what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld identified when explaining why his and Cheney’s Iraq War was not the cakewalk they’d promised it would be. For me, unknown unknowns are the unique and worthwhile experiences a given destination might offer had I taken the time to consult a travel guide before arriving. Sometimes unknown unknowns turn out to be significant, such as arriving at Big Ben in London to find it fully ensconced in scaffolding, or discovering the Winston Churchill’s War Room and Downton Abbey’s real life Highclere Castle sell out well in advance of the day you had planned to attend. Then there are the unknown unknowns that turn out to be completely unexpected, but wholly enjoyable surprises. It’s for these, that I maintain a steadfast reluctance to plan ahead or try to learn anything much about where I’m going until I get there.

   I’d like to tell you that my reason for choosing York as our next destination after Scotland was because I knew it was the geographical setting for Downton Abbey. After all, I was going through the series a second time with Carol (her first), and we had seen the movie together at the start of this trip. But it was only after traipsing around York for a couple of days, and then watching Downton episodes courtesy of a Smart TV with an Amazon Prime app in our York accommodations that I said to Carol, “Hey, Mrs. Patmore is talking about going to Thirsk. We saw that road sign on the bus today!”

Haggis: (‘haɡəs’)The national dish of Scotland, a type of pudding composed of the liver, heart, and lungs of a sheep (or other animal), minced and mixed with beef or mutton suet and oatmeal and seasoned with onion, cayenne pepper, and other spices. The mixture is packed into a sheep’s stomach and boiled.

   The above will explain why our first meal in Scotland was Italian, and the closest we ever got to haggis was to quickly dry heave past it whenever it appeared on the menu. Nevertheless, our week or so in Scotland remains one of the fondest of our entire trip to the UK. The word that comes to mind to describe Scotland is: genuine.

We’d hopped aboard the #82 bus near our Liverpool accommodations for a view of the city the way the locals see it. We rode it down a leafy suburban street to the end of the line, where the bus driver told us we had to get off. When I asked where we could catch the same bus to get back, he pointed to another area of the terminal. We walked there, but then saw our driver change his bus to #86A, which I knew would get us down to Liverpool’s dockside area. We got back on his bus, which I think annoyed him. Very strange. But that’s how the magic happened.

   The first to pass us in our carriage was a potentially fractious pair of toddlers, Beanie and Cecil (not their real names). Even were we to plan future excursions not to overlap with national school breaks, I realized there’d still be no guarantee to avoiding the likes of a pair of screaming two-year-olds who believe trains were made for running up and down the aisles, depositing candy floss to armrests along the way.

   Marazion is a ten-minute bus ride south of Penzance that would be a nondescript fishing village were it not for the Mont St. Michel lookalike about a half-mile out in the tidal bay fronting the town. St. Michael’s Mount is smaller, compared to it’s more renowned cousin on the coast of France, but no less impressively salient in its lonely outpost even from as far away as Penzance. These are the kinds of sights I like to see just where they lay, perched on a horizon from a spot on a distant highway devoid of tourists. There would be nothing inside this fortress monastery that would induce me to enter its tourist-clogged arteries, carried along at the shoulders by the suffocating crowds as I was at France’s Mont St. Michel several years ago. I caught some breaks this time.

Carol and I purchased international driver’s licenses in the ill-advised expectation that would be the only way to see the British countryside up close and personal. But after careful observation of driving on the wrong side of roads that were essentially bike paths pressed into service as two-way highways, and roundabouts that were clockwise running circles of death, we decided we’d not be seeing the English countryside quite that up close and personal (as in automobile grille to grille up close and personal).

   My only reason for wanting to go from London to Penzance was for the straight five-hour train ride without changing trains. Just kick back in a first-class carriage, maybe a bottle of wine along the way, and hours of pleasant English countryside on into Cornwall. But add two squally kids and an overbearing, helicoptering mum, and it is a true…

   …nightmare.

   There’s something about code breaking that has always fascinated me. I’ve never solved Rubik’s cube or enjoyed puzzles of any kind. But I’ve always enjoyed reading about espionage and secret codes.

   So it was an easy decision to make a day trip out to the pleasant village of Milton Keynes, a short train trip out of London, and to the museum and exhibits known as Bletchley Park.