Julianna had to work on Wednesday, so Hugh and I went to a local place, the Barbican Cafe, for a full English breakfast. Hugh and I decided to separate and meet at John Lewis to look at knives for Julianna.

Well, that didn’t work. I’m comfortable with the Tube, but using Google Maps for walking has always been difficult for me. I keep meaning to practice, but where do I walk in Arizona? So I am always “practicing” in a foreign country.

I got off the Tube fine, found John Lewis on Google, and it said it was a three-minute walk to the store. Now that should have been easy. But after walking around for 45 minutes, I decided to text Hugh and tell him to meet me in front of the Tube station because I couldn’t find John Lewis anywhere.

While waiting for Hugh, I googled John Lewis stores. Well, there is a “branch” of John Lewis stores called Peter Jones, and I had been circling that store for the entire 45 minutes. I had forgotten that John Lewis also has Peter Jones stores. So…I wasn’t too lost.

But John Lewis doesn’t allow you to hold knives anymore. You can pick out what you want, and they will let you buy them, but you just cannot hold them. Well, that clearly wasn’t going to work.

So we wandered on to Harrods, with Julianna giving me a lesson on Google Maps. We met Julianna and wandered through Harrods to pick up a holiday gift or two and then went to the food halls to drool. I’m still not certain I have Google Maps mastered, but the food halls were worth all the walking. (I did just under 13,000 steps that day—not bad for the old knee.)

We found a lovely small kitchen store in Islington to buy knives and had wonderful service. Julianna picked out a few, and I picked up a few more Christmas gifts.

We were close to a favorite pub, so we wandered over for some dinner.