From April 19 through April 27, I was sent by the company to visit some contract laboratories in Great Britain. That was over the Easter holiday, so I in effect had four working days in order to accomplish my mission, which was to evaluate four different laboratories scattered across the island. My travels took me from London to Southampton, to Cambridge, to Edinburgh, to Yorkshire, and to Manchester. A first-class passage on British Rail made the journey bearable, but I do not recommend anyone undertake such a schedule.

My chief regret is that I only had a little bit of time in each place to look around and see the fun things. Fortunately, I was able to work in a full day in both London and Edinburgh (not counting the first day when the London Furs kept me in a pub all afternoon), and even more fortunately, I had brought along the department's digital camera. I went quite shutter-happy with it as you will soon see.

A note about the pictures: All are in JPG format, and all are 600x800. They are meant to be viewed on a monitor that is set at 1024x768 resolution or better. If you do not know how to do that, right-click on your desktop, click [properties], then [settings], and look at "Screen area." It might also be helpful to close some of the menus at the top of the browser screen (Netscape and I.E.) so that the full picture is shown, without the need to scroll to see all of it. I've put a handy "jump list" at the bottom if things start to get too boring.

Since I had my laptop with me and had lots of downtime while riding on trains (first-class rules!) or sitting in hotel rooms before bed, I took time to caption all of the pictures and to try to adjust the brightness and contrast to make up for some of the gloomy lighting that Great Britain is known for. If any images appear washed-out or too dark or grainy -- well, I tried.

I hope you enjoy seeing what I saw. A picture is worth a thousand words, so you can start my 200,000 word essay by going to the first picture, my hotel at Gatwick Airport.